Elvis Costello pays tribute to Frank Sinatra My mam tells me that one of my first words was “skin”. I was not an especially precocious child, I couldn’t say whole sentences, but I knew how to request that I’ve Got You under My Skin be played on the family record player. Then again, I might […]
Alex Brummer In an eloquent gesture, designed to underpin development in Uganda – the first of the poorest countries to receive some debt forgiveness – the World Bank advanced the government of President Yoweri Museveni a grant of $75-million this month to support universal primary education across the country. The move demonstrates just how far […]
Stefaans Brmmer Mathole Motshekga this week denied he was close to apartheid-era military intelligence frontman Abel Rudman – but the Mail & Guardian has documentary evidence of a meeting at the Gauteng premier’s house where shareholding in a resort development was discussed. The M&G published details a fortnight ago of Motshekga’s involvement in a series […]
Stewart Dalby They are not the most expensive items in their field, nor are they the best crafted, but Rolexes are the most famous watches. Virtually every month one of the four big auction houses, Sotheby’s, Christie’s, Phillips or Bonham’s, holds a watch sale and there are specialised dealers. But Rolex will have an auction […]
Shaun de Waal CD of the week The Bassline in Melville, Johannesburg, has proved itself to be one of the city’s most reliable jazz joints, perhaps even its best. Everyone who is anyone in South African jazz has played there, and this CD, Jazz at the Bassline (Sheer Sound), collects 12 works by this country’s […]
The conflict between Hutus and Tutsis in Rwanda is often characterised as mindless ethnic bloodletting. Mahmood Mamdani provides a far more complex background to the conflict No two conflicting groups in the Great Lakes region have a longer and more comprehensive history of intermarriage than do the Hutu and the Tutsi. Intermarriage between the Hutu […]
David Pallister The British salesman sank with evident relief into his club-class seat as the plane prepared to take off from Murtala Muhammed airport. Doing business in humid, chaotic Lagos, even selling defence electronic equipment to the military junta, was never the easiest of jobs. In answer to the question, “So how much commission do […]
Andrew Worsdale Movie of the week I didn’t have any hopes that Barry Levinson would ever make a good movie – or at least one I’d like. Everyone raved about Diner. I thought it was self-indulgent, adolescent crap. Rain Man won Oscars. I thought it sentimental, badly styled rubbish (why did everything, but everything, have […]
Tangeni Amupadhi Gangs have triumphed in Westbury – Johannesburg’s equivalent of the Cape Flats ganglands – after promises of big business and politicians have come to naught. In recent weeks four men have been slain in gun fights – an event familiar to this dirt-poor community which, for decades, has enjoyed the notoriety of having […]
With a clogged-up justice system, prisons are bursting at the seams with remand inmates. Angella Johnson braves ‘Sun City’ The first thing that hits you is the smell. It is the same in every prison: a rancid aroma of cleansing fluid, stale sweat, urine and more than a whiff of despair which clings to your […]
Johnny Masilela BLACK PERSPECTIVE(S) ON TERTIARY INSTITUTIONAL TRANSFORMATION edited by Sipho Seepe (Vivlia/ University of Venda, R39,90) Once upon a time a young university student lamented that as the only African (except for menial workers) he was regarded at best as a curiosity, and at worst as an interloper. The institution was Wits University, the […]
Bongani Siqoko The road to Alexandra clinic is lined with filthy industrial buildings. But the large, brightly painted clinic looks cared for and cheerful. Many visitors mistake it for a creche. Inside, however, it looks like any other state-funded health institution. Very long queues, busy nurses, crying children and wheelchairs fill the waiting room. The […]
Andy Duffy Psychiatric patients treated and released by Western Cape health authorities have killed seven people over the past 18 months, including two children, amid an apparent collapse in the system set up to monitor them. The former patients, all from the high- security forensic unit at Cape Town’s Valkenberg hospital, represent a small proportion […]
I never thought I was the type who’d join a cult. But I did. It’s not a cult of personality, but of technology. It’s the cult of the PalmPilot – a simple hand-held computer and operating system that now accounts for over 60% of the global personal digital assistant (PDA) market. Most religious cults attract […]
Marion Edmunds gets to grips with how people felt 50 years ago when the National Party came to power The National Party today is a shadow of its former self, publicly regretting the policy of apartheid which brought it to power in the highly charged national elections of May 26 1948. Fifty years ago it […]
Sarfu’s interim committee will be announced next week, with Silas Nkanunu at its head, reports Andy Capostagno Silas Nkanunu is set to become the first black president of the South African Rugby Football Union (Sarfu) as part of a dramatic shake-up of the administration of the game that has been set in motion by the […]
Wally Lambert If you’re thinking about trying your hand at the stock-market game – we’re not talking unit trusts here – you’ll be pleased to know it’s getting easier and cheaper for the man in the street to buy shares. Unlike shopping for bread in the supermarket, buying shares on the stock exchange requires the […]
FRIDAY, 6.30PM: A NATIONAL Party MP, Donald Lee, has defected to the Democratic Party, adding to the blows dealt this week and last week by by-election defeats in which the NP lost long-standing strongholds to the DP. Douglas Gibson of the DP said that Lee’s move reflects a dramatic shift of feeling in South African […]
South African art triumphed at a huge French show. Brenda Atkinson was there So there I was in Paris, filled with strawberries and red wine, mingling with a 2 000-odd crowd of the young, hip, gorgeous and powerful. If these people sweat, I thought, then they sweat pure CK-One. Let no one tell you that […]
Phillip Kakaza African music The sound of a marimba drifts out of Guguletu’s St Gabriel’s church in Cape Town where Ayanda Hollow, a budding musician, is conducting music lessons. The tinkling sound is just a hint of what is happening behind the concrete walls. Hollow’s vision of a vibrant mobile school of African music has […]
Hitler had two dreams. One, to take over the world. Two, to create the ‘people’s car’. Thankfully, the first failed, but the second lived on to escape its Nazi enslavement. Jonathan Glancey looks back on the social history of the Volkswagen Beetle When in January 1945 Adolf Hitler returned to Berlin from the Wolf’s Lair […]
WHO IS . . . TONY LEON? David Beresford An obituary on the English philosopher, Bertrand Russell, memorialised him as “a gadfly on the rump of civilisation”. The same might be said of Democratic Party leader Tony Leon as he buzzes noisily around the rump of South African society. The question facing the DP is […]
TRANSFER by Ingrid de Kok (Snailpress R42,50) One can only celebrate this triumph of delicate bleakness: One by one the small refusals add up to a life. Or this rich characterisation of complex love: Mouthing under water wetly jewelled words we are acrobatic aquanauts in a chest of swords. The first half of the book […]
of relapse hard to detect Andy Duffy Staff at the Valkenberg forensic security unit are busy retracing their steps to see what, if anything, could have been done to prevent the killing of seven people by former state psychiatric patients. There are common threads. Each patient, despite their usually violent history, seemed to have responded […]
A US-linked consultant offered to advise on the premier’s security, writes Stefaans Brmmer A private security adviser this year made a bizarre proposal to spy on be- half of Gauteng Premier Mathole Motshekga. The Mail & Guardian is in possession of a draft contract between the premier’s office and security consultant Bob Power – composed […]
Sechaba ka’Nkosi National electricity supplier Eskom and local authorities are fighting an uphill battle against the booming illegal business of “alternative” electricity supply. It’s alternative, say its practitioners, because most residents whose power has been cut by town councils for non-payment prefer to use their services rather than paying the R650 reconnection fee. The practice […]
Phillip Kakaza It wasn’t too long ago that Zolani Mkhiva, an imbongi or praise singer, became Imbongi ye Sizwe -Ethe Poet of the Nation – when he took the podium and sang the praises of Nelson Mandela at his inauguration. Four years later, after protracted negotiations with recording companies, he has graced the nation with […]
Because of its position on the equator, a space base on a converted oil rig could have the international edge, writes Tim Radford In October the first satellite launched from a pad in the open ocean is due to arrive in its orbit, 35 000km out in space. Sea Launch, a once-unimaginable business consortium from […]
FRIDAY, 6.30PM: A MARKINOR poll released on Friday has revealed that the Democratic Party, Inkatha Freedom Party and United Democratic Movement stand neck-and-neck behind a declining National Party in their current levels of support. The United Democratic Movement is the only party with the potential to usurp the National Party as official opposition to the […]
Andrew Worsdale and Phillip Kakaza Announcing at the Cannes Film Festival this week that he would begin shooting the film of Nelson Mandela’s autobiography in October, South African producer Anant Singh said he was still searching for the right man to play the lead role. He said he hoped to find an African for that […]
Lizeka Mda The challenge to South Africa’s abortion legislation being heard next week in the Pretoria High Court pays little attention to the needs and desires of South Africa’s women. On Monday, three groupings – the Christian Lawyers Association of Southern Africa, Christians for Truth in South Africa and United Christian Action – challenge the […]
Ferial Haffajee In your ear It’s good to hear South Africans holding their own among the products of one of the world’s best broadcasters. Safm’s daily joint programme with the BBC is an easy synergy providing a boost to drive-time radio around the country. It is on Safm every day from 5 to 7pm. The […]