Andy Duffy A senior commander in the government’s fight against HIV and Aids is to step down. Rose Smart, the former nurse who revived the HIV/Aids and STD (sexually transmitted diseases) Directorate following the Sarafina II scandal, wants to leave in November when her contract expires. “It is a 12-hour day, seven-days-a-week job. I don’t […]
Tangeni Amupadhi reports on the Groot Marico farmwatch system Oom Leon du Plessis stops mending a fence on his Nooitgedacht farm in the Groot Marico to tell about the night he was robbed and almost killed. It is almost noon and time to stop work, have a sip of mampoer and take a rest after […]
Philippe Dagen On show in France The 200th anniversary of the birth of the French painter Eugne Delacroix (1798-1863) is being celebrated by a series of exhibitions in France, each devoted to a different aspect of his work. The bicentenary exhibitions set a challenge: since Delacroix is being served up in pieces, why not try […]
Saliem Fakir discusses the pros and cons of the proposed environmental management legislation The National Environmental Management Bill, released recently by the Department of Environmental Affairs and Tourism, is a significant contribution to the evolution of environmental management. It may well have shortcomings, particularly given the time frame in which it was drafted, but its […]
Andy Duffy Shepherd Mdladlana is duty-bound to say he will serve wherever the African National Congress deploys him. But the Ministry of Labour? Tito Mboweni, a flamboyant, popularist politician was always going to be a hard act to follow – more so for Mdladlana, who until now has preferred operating out of the limelight. Mboweni, […]
Anthony Egan SOWETO: A HISTORY by Philip Bonner and Lauren Segal (Maskew Miller Longman) THE SOWETO UPRISINGS: COUNTER-MEMORIES OF JUNE 1976 by Sifiso Mxolisi Ndlovu (Ravan) The city to the south-west of Johannesburg , Soweto, has had a short but significant history. It started largely as a settlement for migrant workers to the Witwatersrand, a […]
WEDNEDAY, 12.00NOON: CHERRYL KENNEDY, the white South African woman who has applied for political asylum in Australia on the grounds that she has been persecuted by affirmative action in South Africa, has lost her case. The Australian Refugee Review Tribunal on Wednesday upheld an Immigration Department ruling that she had no grounds for her claims […]
MONDAY, 2.00PM: DEPUTY Foreign Affairs Minister Aziz Pahad met a senior Palestinian Liberation Organisation official, executive committee member Faisal Husseini, in East Jerusalem on Sunday. The meeting followed earlier talks with Palestine’s planning and international co-operation minister Nabil Sha’ath and Palestinian legislative assembly speaker Hanan Ashrawi,as well as the Palestinian business association on Saturday. The […]
Andrew Clements CD of the week Some of the most successful American operas of the 1980s and 1990s have been documentary pieces, perhaps encouraged by the success of John Adams’s Nixon in China and The Death of Klinghoffer. Stewart Wallace’s Harvey Milk comes from very much the same stable: it was premiered in Houston in […]
Lauren Shantall To reach Heart of Darkness, one must embark on a symbolic journey into the bowels of the hulking 1820 Settlers Monument. There, one will confront an Africa of the past – that mythical place of the European imagination – and the multi-dimensional Africa of the present day. Finally, one encounters the minds of […]
Jacques Magliolo If you’re in the enviable position to have enough money to invest in unit trusts, chances are you’ve been encouraged to invest part of your portfolio in bonds. But bonds appear to be complicated, jargon-laden creatures with names like the “benchmark” R150. Actually, they are simply loans. For instance, if the South African […]
The dark genius of trip-hop grew up on mean streets. Most of his friends are still trawling them. Tricky revisits his roots with Kamal Ahmed They call me Tricky for particular reason They say I’m loud Why should I hide? The clouds that linger above Knowle West are not quite grey. If a paint company […]
Shaun de Waal It is, in my opinion, the best magazine in the country. Maybe I feel like that about SL magazine because about ten years ago I was involved in starting a magazine of South African “alternative” culture. It was short- lived. But things have changed enormously in the last decade. Rulers aside, what […]
than the mail Douglas Rushkoff Online Never, ever, respond to an e-mail advert again. You’ll be doing yourself and the rest of us trying to work or play on the Internet a big favour. I’ve made a habit, perhaps even an ethic, of shrugging off commercial advances on the Internet. Since the real estate in […]
Helen Stevenson HULLABALOO IN THE GUAVA ORCHARD by Kiran Desai (Faber &Faber) In a small town in India, a post office official yells at his slovenly staff: “You will kindly pull up your socks and begin!” There has always been a certain buffoonish comic potential in the linguistic legacy of the British in India, a […]
Bram Posthumus: FIRST PERSON In the full moonlight, a dozen young men were standing around our car, its front wheels jammed solid in the mud. One shouted the now familiar command: “Leggo! Leggo!”, Liberian English for “Heave!” The men grunted, the engine roared and the car finally sped away, leaving the small group covered in […]
Andy Duffy Truth and Reconciliation Commission chief investigator Dumisa Ntsebeza was fighting a rearguard action this week after a confidential letter he wrote to University of the Transkei (Unitra) principal Alfred Moleah swept across the troubled campus. Ntsebeza is chair of Unitra’s governing council. He says the lengthy letter – which begins “Dear Bro Alf” […]
Chris McGreal Many will remember Chief Moshood Abiola as a political martyr denied presidential power, even though he came to prominence as an opportunist businessman, prepared to do deals with Nigeria’s soldiers until the very end. In the days before he died, Abiola had been ready to forsake his presidential claims, according to the various […]
Arizona North America is home to literally dozens of active stock exchanges, from the continent’s oldest in Philadelphia to Canada’s premier market place in Toronto. If you prefer something offbeat, there are the frozen floors of the Alberta Stock Exchange in Canada’s great white north or the arid airs of the little-known Arizona Stock Exchange. […]
trenches Wonder Hlongwa Churches were asked to “return to the trenches” this week to oppose the government’s growth, employment and redistribution policy (Gear) as it does little to assist the poor. The call was made by delegates to the South African Council of Churches’ (SACC) tri-annual conference, prompting the SACC’s former secretary general, Frank Chikane, […]
Maputo It is four months since Robert McBride was arrested in Mozambique. Since then, many thousands of words have been spoken and written about it. This interview, conducted by his wife Paula McBride, represents the first time the voice of McBride himself has been heard since his arrest During the past few weeks I have […]
FRIDAY, 1.00PM: ROBERT McBRIDE, the Foreign Affairs official arrested in Mozambique three months ago on dubious gun-running charges, has released a statement explaining his side of the affair. McBride says he went to Mozambique to verify claims from Vusi Mbatha (the informer behind the Meiring report) that Alex Huambo, a former supplier of arms to […]
Nick Paul, resplendent in designer khaki, gets lost in tent town and discovers the Durban July is little more than a freak show July day sits in the middle of Durban’s social calendar like a large, clever, sharp-tongued Berea matron with a fine mind and too much time on her hands. Everyone wants to be […]
Robin McKie If there is a gene for causing uproar, Craig Venter has it. More importantly, he is also the man most likely to isolate it. In the predatory world of advanced biotechnology, Venter — head of the Institute of Genomics Research in Maryland – is regarded as a deadly member of a breed of […]
Suzy Bell Alfred Hitchcock fans will drool, and politically-sussed bhangra-babes will ditch their men for the night to watch award-winning Indian director Mani Ratnam’s film Irwar (The Duo). Yep, it’s the 19th Durban International Film Festival and there’s something for everyone among the 20 feature films and four documentaries. The films are mainly from Britain, […]
Who was . . . Moshood Abiola? Richard Synge The extraordinary life of Moshood Abiola, who has died aged 60, apparently of a heart attack, while meeting an American delegation, matches the tumultuous pageant of Nigeria’s political life in which he played such a pivotal role. Abiola first came to prominence as an accountant for […]
Anthony Egan THERE’S MORE TO LIFE THAN SURFACE by Kate Turkington (Penguin) Historians, philosophers and even a few theologians have frequently declared the death of God and the end of religion. Yet today we see a religious resurgence on almost all fronts: pentecostal and fundamentalist Christianity, often militant Islam, renewed interest in the occult, New […]
Phillip Kakaza Live music Back in the 1980s South African music made a radical turn – the locally created home-brew kwaito took the music scene by storm. Its tsotsi taal- flavoured lyrics and irrestible dance rhythms are still heard blasting in clubs, shebeens and parties. Recently, much in a similar way, BMG (South Africa) is […]
Angella Johnson: VIEW FROM A BROAD True story: a woman was so terrified when asked to address a group of 250 students some years ago that she booked into a clinic and had the twisted second toe on her right foot broken. “I had put off having the operation for years,” she told me, “but […]
Liese van der Watt On show in Johannesburg No one ever speaks of “alternative” English or “dissident” Xhosas. And yet, descriptive phrases about alternative musicians, rebel poets and dissident academics are still used wherever Afrikaners, and what is assumed to be their homogeneous culture, is a topic of review. The reasons for this are of […]
Howard Barrell: OVER A BARREL There are, I’m sure, many reasons to admire communists. One which dwarfs all others, though, is their talent for rationalisation. Their ability to explain away past failures in such a way as to be able to retain a set of ill-fitting core beliefs is quite remarkable. The origin of this […]
Swapna Prabhakaran and Mungo Soggot Court papers have implicated top KwaZulu-Natal government officials in a fraudulent conspiracy involving a businessman who allegedly exposed high- level corruption in the province. The businessman, Sateesh Isseri, is now allegedly on the state witness- protection programme. He is suing KwaZulu-Natal Premier Ben Ngubane and the province’s head of expenditure […]