Lauren Shantall If A Midsummer Night’s Dream focuses, in part, on the near-disastrous consequences of the generation gap, then director Jesse Knott’s version provides a streetwise, youth-based antidote to the problem facing today’s theatre: how to draw new audiences. She has dramatically revolutionised the original. Located in a dream world that is harrowingly familiar, the […]
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 […]
Chris McGreal Unwelcome uitlanders (foreigners) in the rainbow nation can now get more bang for their buck, or quid. But first they have to lay their hands on their own cash, and South African banks are practised at preventing that from happening. It’s hardly a situation to invoke much sympathy hereabouts, but the rand’s periodic […]
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 […]
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 […]
Graham Farmelo Only the most foolhardy person would try to predict the future of the World Wide Web, but that didn’t stop its inventor, Tim Berners-Lee, from trying some crystal-ball gazing last week. During Internet, Web, What Next?, a conference at the Cern atom-smasher laboratory in Geneva, Berners-Lee and others speculated on what they hoped […]
European ballet and African dance forms are connecting, writes Phillip Kakaza The sun was too bright for a winter afternoon – not for me, a son of Africa, but for the Birmingham Royal Ballet dancers currently on tour in South Africa. And the English dancers’ interaction with 20 young South African dancers in a match-box […]
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 […]
Stuart Hess Minister of Justice Dullah Omar has asked for a report into Western Cape Attorney General, Frank Khan’s decision not to prosecute a former police superintendent accused of sexually harassing a colleague for six years. Khan twice declined to prosecute Mario Laubscher, on the grounds that he was suffering from depression. Carol van der […]
Too often South Africa’s transitional government has been held up as a model for other countries undergoing profound political change. Usually wrongly. But this country does offer a good example to Nigeria as its military regime gropes its way in the wake of the deaths of former dictator Sani Abacha and the man elected president […]
Five lucky Friday readers can each win a set of five volumes in the recently relaunched Oxford World’s Classics series -Sense and Sensibility by Jane Austen, Far from the Madding Crowd by Thomas Hardy, The Portrait of a Lady by Henry James, Middlemarch by George Eliot, and The Great Gatsby by F Scott Fitzgerald. All […]
Fiona Macleod `Sustainable development” of natural and cultural resources for the benefit of current and future generations is the main thrust of the draft National Environmental Management Bill, now up for public debate. Individuals and organisations have until July 29 to submit comment on the Bill, which the Department of Environmental Affairs and Tourism is […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
Belinda Beresford The power of compounding interest is on your side when you make extra payments on your bond. Say you have a R150 000, 20-year bond at 22% interest with Standard Bank. The total cost – capital and interest – of the bond would be R668 542, and the monthly repayment would be R2 […]
Stewart Dalby Spending it The tantrums and antics of some modern chess masters are nothing new, it would seem. Histories of the game tell a story, possibly apocryphal, that the earliest recorded enthusiast in Britain was the Viking King Canute (1016 to 1035). It seems that Canute quarrelled one day when playing Earl Ulf, who […]
offs Mukoni T Ratshitanga More than 200 Northern Province pensioners have taken court action against the provincial government’s decision to freeze pension and disability grants to 92 000 people. Court papers served this week on the province’s MEC for Health and Welfare, Hunadi Mateme, say the freeze should be invalidated on the grounds that it […]
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 […]
Neil Manthorp in Amsterdam Cricket It is funny that we call ourselves a sports-crazy nation. There has never been a sports event in South Africa that has commanded, or even demanded, that the whole population sits up and takes notice. The Rugby World Cup final is an over- used example of when this was supposed […]
GAY AND AFTER by Alan Sinfield (Serpent’s Tail) Towards the end of this riveting study, Alan Sinfield evokes “an almost forgotten moment, the early 1980s – when the pop charts featured Boy George, Divine, Marc Almond, Bronski Beat, Frankie Goes to Hollywood. You couldn’t get into Lesbian and Gay Soc discos (as we called them […]
Jeremy Cronin These are the South African Communist Party’s concerns about the government’s growth, employment and redistribution strategy (Gear): l In the first place, and consistently since June 1996 (when Gear was first unveiled), the SACP has been critical of the process that led up to Gear. In contrast to the reconstruction and development programme, […]
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 […]
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” […]
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 […]
Swapna Prabhakaran Whether you are a working Mozambican mamma or a leisured Amex-wielding tourist, there’s only one way to get between KwaZulu-Natal and Maputo in style – take the brand new trans- Lubombo train. The new service was recently launched by Spoornet from Durban station, to make its way over the Lubombo mountains, through Swaziland […]
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, […]
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, […]
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 […]
WEDNESDAY, 6.30PM: FOLLOWING an urgent application by the Namibian Ministry of Lands, Resettlement and Rehabilitation the Namibian High Court has ordered the eviction of 56 families who have illegally occupied 10 Government farms in the Kunene, Omaheke and Otjozondjupa regions. The illegal settlers, who allegedly raised Cain on the farms they occupied in November last […]
Charl Blignaut On stage in Johannesburg Pieter Toerien’s Alhambra theatre is the perfect setting for a South African staging of Alan Ayckbourne’s classic Absurd Person Singular. It’s a trademark Ayckbourne nudge-nudge wink-wink; “oh-don’t-worry- about-Tom-he’s-out-there-playing-with-Dick kind of farce”, and the three couples that inhabit the three kitchens during three Christmas eve parties in the play are […]
Elaine Showalter This year a television cartoon character named Stressed Eric has been appealing to the modern psyche as the new Everyman. Hamlet had melancholy, Jimmy Porter was an angry young man and Eric has stress. From the time he gets up in the morning till he collapses in bed at night, Eric is pressured, […]