Sechaba ka’Nkosi Disillusionment with the African National Congress and hopes of pulling off surprises in next year’s general election made up the vision that guided the United Democratic Movement at its springboard first national congress at the weekend. It became evident that while the black leaders of the party would launch a battle to lure […]
say hemp farmers Ferial Haffajee Major South African companies, in conjunction with the government, are funding research into hemp production at the country’s first experimental cannabis farms. Among them are Mercedes Benz South Africa, PG Bison and Masonite Africa. The farms, around the country, are controlled by the Agricultural Research Council and supported by the […]
Mungo Soggot Minister of Minerals and Energy Penuell Maduna has hit back after his embarrassing concession that the auditor general was not party to the theft of R170-million worth of oil by releasing documents to help explain his attack on the finance watchdog. Maduna’s office handed out the documents at the inquiry into the Strategic […]
Newfangled appliances don’t only make our lives easier, they create thousands of jobs, writes Ian Wylie According to Garfield, the cartoon world’s laziest cat, the greatest inventions ever are labour-saving devices such as the microwave pizza and the remote control. But it could be argued that the best inventions are those which need labour and […]
Stephen Bierley Tennis The warning from Russia’s Yevgeny Kafelnikov is brutally blunt: “Tennis has a big problem and is slowly going downhill. We definitely need to make some changes.” Nobody in their right mind would ever pretend that tennis, an essentially middle- class game, could ever rival football or any other of the world’s major […]
Chris Dunton LET US PLAY edited by Zakes Mda (Vivlia, R30) Let Us Play gathers together three plays – one by the editor, Zakes Mda, and one apiece by Walter Chakela and Hilton Swemmer. Three distinctive works for the theatre, by three dramatists associated with Johannesburg’s Windybrow Centre, the first two are especially designed for […]
Jack Lundin: PERSONAL HISTORY Until a few weeks ago you could have seen him on the corner of Pretoria Street and Quartz: filthy dirty, stinking of glue, begging from cars. Twelve years old and one of the small army of Hillbrow street urchins. My notes on Elias start at 9.50 am on October 1 1996, […]
Michael Metelits Futures and options have a bad name in many circles. These financial “derivatives”, so-called because their price is derived from the price of another security, can make sensational amounts of money for the smart and lucky and lose equally spectacular amounts for the smart and unlucky. Crashes of traditional equity markets get blamed […]
Sam Taylor CD of the week Despite the grim utilitarianism of their name, the Dave Matthews Band are a very strange phenomenon. They are vastly successful – their first two albums, 1994’s Under the Table and Dreaming and 1996’s Crash, sold a combined total of 11- million copies in the United States; Before These Crowded […]
Andrew Worsdale Marleen Gorris has become a soft feminist. Or at least, softer than before. Her first two movies A Question of Silence and Broken Mirrors were savage indictments of male- dominated society. Born in Holland in 1948, Gorris studied theatre and literature before her stunning film debut with A Question of Silence. It tells […]
Brett Hilton-Barber Racial differences between people may be a more recent phenomenon than was previously believed. In a paper presented to the Dual Congress of Human Biology and Palaeontology at Sun City this week, renowned academic Dr Christopher Stringer suggested that white skin colour probably emerged only 30 000 years ago. This is some 30 […]
Brenda Atkinson On show in Pretoria Fernando Alvim speaks a language not readily associated with contemporary South African art. For one thing, it seems not to be artful. It is aware of theory, of art history, but bounces back to these only for cursory back-up of an emotional point. It is lyrical, expressionist, if you […]
Anastasia does for history what Bambi did for nature – simplifies it beyond reality, writes Nicci Gerrard I have a dream: that Karl Marx – whose Communist Manifesto was published almost exactly 150 years ago – should come with me to see Rupert Murdoch’s 20th Century Fox’s latest offering, Anastasia, which launches Fox Animation Studios, […]
Andy Duffy The daughter of a founding member of the Pan Africanist Congress has been stranded in Germany for nine years because she cannot prove she is South African. Joyce Vuyiswa Khayana’s struggle for a South African passport has been supported by sworn affidavits from high-ranking African National Congress and PAC officials. Even the president’s […]
Kirby DJ Klatzow: RIGHT TO REPLY I read with some dismay the article, “Helderberg:The search for invisible blame”, by Robert Kirby (June 26 to July 2). The article, despite its length, carries a very small intellectual component, it is factually incorrect and, unfortunately, displays the prejudices of the author rather spectacularly. It is sad to […]
Swapna Prabhakaran A quiet and mostly unseen battle has been raging for months around KwaZulu-Natal’s waste dumps. Two waste dumps were officially closed down last year and another collapsed in a disaster that left the province with a hazardous waste-disposal crisis. The chaos began after floods and mudslides last September wreaked havoc with the province’s […]
Scholar Apollon Davidson is a living link between Russia and South Africa, writes Shaun de Waal The histories of South Africa and Russia are curiously intertwined, going all the way back to Jan van Riebeeck. In his journal, the first official colonist expressed the desire for help from a Russian with experience in the exploitation […]
Andy Capostagno Rugby What do you say about South Africa 96, Wales 13? It’s difficult to get a true sense of perspective when one team has scored 15 tries and yet is disappointed about not cracking the 100 barrier. Perspective comes with distance and on Saturday I was not at Loftus Versfeld, but at the […]
Paul Martin Wimbledon The weight of Wimbledon has, literally, frustrated Wayne Ferreira’s quest for glory on what should be his best surface – grass. He is complaining not so much about the weight of his own expectations, but rather about the heaviness of the tennis balls now being used in the men’s game. This is […]
Oxford University Press (OUP)has relaunched its paperback World’s Classics series, a handsome and sturdy set of the best of Europe’s voluminous literature (with some American and Asian works thrown in, too). The titles reach back to Mesopotamia thousands of years ago and forward to James Joyce’s Ulysses. The series features sacred texts such as the […]
How was Wired magazine to have known that Godzilla would prove such a flop? With a three-month lead time, the United States’s pre-eminent futurists are bound to make a few wrong guesses. Putting Godzilla on their June cover, in anticipation that the flick would live up to its hype, probably seemed like a good bet. […]
leaders SACP Gauteng: RIGHT TO REPLY Sechaba ka’Nkosi’s article, “SACP split over who will lead” (June 19 to 25) uses the politburo meeting held on June 16 as a basis for so-called disunity. From our understanding of South African Communist Party procedures, nominations start at branch level, then go to districts and are finalised at […]
South African Airways (SAA) flights on the London route appear to be full of fun. First there was the couple copulating in business class. Now there is the strange story of the berserk poet. A court in the United Kingdom has been hearing evidence of how the poet, one John Bagwell, aged 42, erupted into […]
Leonard Doyle John Sweeney and Peter Beaumont Algeria is the winner of an alternative world cup – for the worst abuser of human rights. The garland of dishonour emerges from findings in The Observer’s Human Rights Index, launched to mark the 50th anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. With the backing of a […]
Andrew Worsdale Grey Hofmeyr is a great guy, and honestly, I’m not sucking up (I had a cameo part in Suburban Bliss). Straight and to the point with an affable and very South African manner about him, he sits behind a large desk in Henley Studios at Auckland Park, with a monitor beside him. He […]
Robert Kirby: Loose Cannon When your weekend newspaper starts to depress your spirits, don’t just reach out automatically for the brandy bottle or the Prozac, there are easier ways to shed the gloom. An excellent selection of low comedy is to be enjoyed merely by turning to the Appointments section in the paper. Reading through […]
Mercedes Sayagues A SECOND LOOK The news of Alioune Blondin Beye’s death in a plane crash found me writing in my mind an angry letter to the Mail & Guardian, prompted by its latest stories on Angola. My anger was not about the stories nor directed to Beye (although nothing bad is said about the […]
Peter Makurube You would need to be an incurable optimist to believe you’d ever see Philippe Troussier smile. But he did, when Bafana Bafana played Denmark. If you blinked you probably missed it. You’d have to be as much of an optimist to have believed that Tananas, one of South Africa’s best and most successful […]
Angella Johnson: VIEW FROM A BROAD Me, jump out of a plane at 3 000m? You must be joking. No way! Not this side of life. I could not have emphasised the point more strongly when my editor suggested, with an evil grin, that I try skydiving for this column. I gave him one of […]
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, […]
Suzy Bell On show in Durban Never has Jung been so playful, and yet so arresting. Last Tango in Heaven, produced by Durban’s pioneering Backlash Theatre Company, was written by that most underrated Pretoria playwright, Mario Scheiss. He wrote the play in four days and then, dramatically, on June 2, at the age of 64, […]
Wonder Hlongwa A former mayor of Pongola in KwaZulu-Natal has been made to pay King Goodwill Zwelithini a fine of 25 cattle to apologise for referring to him as “a certain man”. Derrick Sutherland, a Pongola businessman, delivered the cattle to the king’s Khangela palace in Nongoma this week to apologise for “not respecting the […]