Staff Reporter

Young Afrikaners swing to the right or to Roelf as racial incidents rise, writes Gustav Thiel Student leaders at Afrikaans universities across the country say the days of National Party domination of campus politics are over. Both the Freedom Front (FF) and Roelf Meyers New Movement Process (NMP) are gaining ground at Potchefstroom, Stellenbosch, Orange […]

Nkosinathi Biko has marked the 20th anniversary of his fathers death with a TV documentary. Andrew Worsdale reports Twenty years ago, when Steve Bantu Biko died at the hands of security police in Port Elizabeth, his son Nkosinathi was six years old. He says hell never forget the moment he learnt of his fathers death. […]

The Angella Johnson Interview Ben du Toit thought he had committed the perfect crime when he had his wife bludgeoned to death in 1992. He had not reckoned on the intensity of her mothers love, or her dogged five-year quest to find the killer of her favoured youngest child. Joyce Donaldson became the mother-in-law from […]

A controversial poster campaign uses sex to sell a classified newspaper, writes Swapna Prabhakaran They appeared overnight: a series of posters on lamp-posts along major roads in Gauteng, inviting people to Get laid or Swop the wife. Some were advertisements for Huge Organs and other highly suggestive products. Cars slowed down and drivers stared. The […]

Tourists are flocking to the Bolivian countryside where the charismatic revolutionary died. Anthony Faiola reports See the very place where legendary guerrilla Ernesto Che Guevara lived and died! Trudge through the mud-covered hillside he himself once climbed! Talk to the peasants who fed and clothed him and his hapless band of communists! And dont miss […]

Biko Steve Bikos tormentors protest their innocence, but if that is true they need not have applied for amnesty, argues Lizeka Mda Steve Bikos torturers came to the Truth and Reconciliation Commissions amnesty hearing in Port Elizabeth to persuade the gathering they had come to finally tell the true facts about the circumstances in which […]

Carole JL Collins and Steve Askin So he finally kicked the bucket! Zaires former despot Mobutu Sese Seko Kuku Ngbendu Wa Za Banga (the cock who goes from conquest to conquest leaving fire in his wake), one of the worlds quintessential symbols of excess and venal corruption for the past three decades, has finally departed […]

Mama has been exiled to the Transkei, but one night she wakes and exclaims, Hes dead! She means the Old President, and this is her chance to seize power. Astory by Achmat Dangor, from his new book Mama had them shot in the afternoon. They were lined up facing westwards, so that the only blindfold […]

FRIDAY, 4.00PM AUDITOR-general Henri Kluever has called for a full-scale commission of enquiry to establish whether relatives or close friends of Housing Minister Sankie Mthembi-Mahanyele improperly benefited from the Motheo housing project in Mpumalanga. An inquiry is one of the recommendations contained in a report on the auditor-general’s special investigation into the project which is […]

FRIDAY, 4.00PM THE Southern African Development Community will hold a summit in Angola on September 30 to formulate a regional approach to possible United Nations sanctions against Jonas Savimbi’s Unita rebel movement, Deputy Foreign Affairs Minister Aziz Pahad said on Friday. The UN has threatened to impose far-reaching sanctions against Unita by the end of […]

doctors Mungo Soggot The Department of Health is locked in dispute with South Africas top academic medics over controversial plans to ban public health service doctors from doing private work The department has tabled its plan with the Public Service Bargaining Chamber and held its latest round of talks with medical profession representatives this week. […]

Companies have been quick to cash in on the demand for Princess Diana memorabilia, ranging from china to T-shirts, writes James T Madore Elvis Presley and Marilyn Monroe long have topped lists of departed celebrities with high sales of collectibles. But they will be eclipsed by Diana, the Princess of Wales, for at least the […]

Sechaba kaNkosi National Union of Mineworkers (NUM) heavyweights met their counterparts in the African National Congress this week to discuss the nomination of their general secretary, Kgalema Motlanthe, for the post of ANC secretary general, the most powerful political position in the country outside Parliament. Until now, most political and labour analysts have viewed Motlanthe […]

Sechaba kaNkosi The war of words on the future of the National Economic Development and Labour Council (Nedlac) took another turn this week when it entered the fray, angrily dismissing calls for its review as naive, misdirected and one-sided. Nedlac officials argued that the debate should not be about whether it can or cannot deliver […]

Pat McDermott : Cricket South Africa faces the prospect of a Christmas and New Year with the national side away from home for the first time since our readmittance to the world game. It is a bleak prospect, fraught with the realities of television coverage from the sub-continent for the series against Pakistan and early-morning […]

From Patagonia to Peoria, from Beijing to Bronkhorstpruit, there was not a dry eye in the global village when Diana, Princess of Wales, was laid to rest last Saturday. Yet how at variance were these outpourings of sentiment with this hard-boiled, market- driven planet at the end of the millennium. Though directed primarily against the […]

Gustav Thiel African National Congress MP Abdul Ganie Mohammed was robbed of more than R70 000 in August 1995 at the Carousel entertainment complex outside Pretoria. He says it was a simple case of robbery, but the prostitute and her husband who appeared in court this week on charges of robbing him claim he tried […]

Controversial MEC proves too much for one of her top officials, writes Andy Duffy The head of education in the North West province has quit his post in protest against alleged nepotism by the provincial education MEC, who handed out plum jobs to members of her family. Gulam-Husien Mayet quietly stepped down as provincial education […]

Melvyn Minnaar : Potable pleasures It is the enfant sauvage, if not the fils terrible, of the wine-making business. Of true French nobility with deep historical roots, the Sauvignon Blanc grape has seldom been tamed by the wannabes of the New World vineyards. It either runs wild on them or terrorises them into submission. South […]

Iden Wetherell Zimbabwes public watchdog, the Catholic Commission for Justice and Peace, risks losing its bite as the countrys bishops, anxious to appease President Robert Mugabe, attempt to muzzle it. The commission built a formidable reputation snapping at the heels of Ian Smiths rebel Rhodesian regime in the 1970s. It exposed atrocities committed by security […]

Gustav Thiel The Nederduitse Gerefor-meerde Kerk (NGK) , once again under pressure from its world body to repudiate apartheid, continues to find biblical justification for the separation of races. Although the NGK apologised in 1990 at its annual synod for as its moderator Doctor Freek Swanepoel puts it those who were hurt by apartheid and […]

contaminated. Andy Duffy The base created for 32 Battalion, the notorious army unit that fought on the frontline of South Africas dirty wars in Angola and Namibia, is to be closed amid fears that it is a potential death trap. The army said this week that Pomfret military base, home to nearly 5 000 soldiers […]

culture Eddie Koch Khoekhoe languages, although thought to be on the verge of extinction, have left an indelible print on many facets of South African culture. Apart from place names, ranging from Outeniqua and Tsitsikamma in the Cape to Gudaus (now translated as Goodhouse) in the far north, many words have been imported from Khoe […]

Stephen Gray : Unspoilt places They first appear, like sentinels, on the dirt roads north of Calvinia in the Northern Cape. Then up over the salt pans, en route to the Orange River at Upington, there is the occasional specimen, linking the sky to the dry, dusty, arid landscape. Keep on the R27 surely South […]

Paul Hayward : Soccer David Beckham is a 22-year-old millionaire with a Spice Girl on his arm and a Porsche in the garage. Talk to him about Glenn Hoddle, though, and he still sounds like a youth training scheme trainee with a line of mucky boots to scrub. The first time I came to the […]

Julian Drew : Athletics The South African cross country championships take place in Amanzimtoti on Saturday looking every bit like the national championships of a sport in crisis. For a country that possesses so much latent talent in middle- and long- distance running, South Africas performance at this years world cross country championships in Turin […]

the wild South Africas khoikhoi are not extinct, as popular belief would have it, but the languages that sustain them in a harsh existence are dying Eddie Koch and Siven Maslamoney On South Africas lonely frontier with Namibia, where the Orange River meanders through stony mountains and across the ochre sands of the Kalahari, live […]

Duncan Mackay : Athletics In distance running it takes a lot to impress a Kenyan, especially if that Kenyan happens to be Moses Kiptanui, acknowledged as one of the best athletes to come out of Africa. The most articulate and thoughtful of men, Kiptanui is not given to hyperbole, but when recently asked to rate […]

Robert Kirby: Loose cannon FOR SALE OR HIRE: One slightly-used sentimental Candle in the Wind ballad for use as musical grief/tribute/time- filler. Only used twice before, but both previous deceased in whose honour it was written were very well-known and deeply loved blondes. For a reasonable extra fee, the mutton- throated composer of this poignant […]

The jurys still out on what kind of contribution Hans Jurgen Eysenck, who died last week, made to psychology, writes Joan Freeman No one could have accused Hans Eysenck, who has died aged 81, of being short of courage. All his life he had been, if not caught up in confrontation, then the instigator of […]

Carel Du Plessis Steve Morris : Rugby The demise of Carel du Plessis as national coach marks more than just the relegation of a moral and well-intentioned man to the relative obscurity he suddenly arrived from, it leaves the man who steps into the hottest seat in world rugby a task that is unenviable by […]