Staff Reporter

Lack of stock controls in hospitals is costing the state millions, writes Aspasia Karras A state-employed pharmacist in KwaZulu- Natal was almost killed last month by an armed gunman, in an attack that has been linked to the measures instituted by the provincial health department to curb the theft of pharmaceuticals from government stocks. As […]

Gwen Ansell A father who banned you from playing, and a childhood accident that lopped off the tips of a couple of fingers don’t sound like a promising start for a jazz musician. Bheki Mseleku in tomorrow’s (Saturday, September 6) final Joy of Jazz concert at the Pretoria State Theatre proves how remarkably you can […]

Brenda Atkinson : Performance Carfax, industrial home to Johannesburg’s edgily paranoid and elegantly pierced, was an apt venue for last week’s one-off performance by intellectual techmeisters, The Sunless Ensemble. Conceived, written and directed for Sunless by academic James Sey, the performance, titled Symphony of the Invisible City, is an epic hard-core venture into the pleasures […]

The Angella Johnson Interview Dingaan Thobela, two times boxing world champion and all-round Mr Nice Guy, has a rather unusual day job. When he’s not in the ring trying to knock people out, he’s putting them in the ground. The world-famous Rose of Soweto moonlights as a funeral director. Not that you’d think, looking at […]

Grard Sekoto belongs to that pantheon of artists who have received too little too late. Today he is regarded – whether accurately or not – as the father of South African painting. Yet his life epitomised the contradictory standards applied to black and white artists during apartheid. Although the source of his art-making was derived […]

Dance music stars Boom Shaka look set to sever ties with the label that created them. Maria McCloy asks them why Boom Shaka are arguably South Africa’s most popular dance music outfit. They emerged as stars in the stable of Kalawa records, home to the likes of Brothers of Peace, Trompies and Bongo Maffin. But […]

Janet Smith Oscar-winners Denzel Washington and Kevin Kline, musician Peter Gabriel, film-maker Richard Attenborough, novelist Ken Follett, businessman Richard Branson and crusading journalist Donald Woods are the dazzling reasons why East London will finally be able to stage a celebration fit for the life of activist Steve Biko. Rallied by Woods, this illustrious collection has […]

PRISON SHIPS ON HOLD EVEN though the correctional services department has decided against buying ships for use as jails, private companies could still be asked to tender for operating floating prisons, correctional services commissioner Khulekani Sitole said on Friday. He said after viewing two hulks for sale in Ukraine and a British floating prison, the […]

Swapna Prabhakaran A restaurant in the upmarket Johannesburg suburb of Rosebank has been accused of racism after five black men were barred at the doors by the bouncer. The men had come from Namibia and Zimbabwe to do a course in sports journalism and made their way to the Storyville resturant, accompanied by a white […]

The energy ministry proposes to stop exports to boost local employment, writes Mungo Soggot The Minister of Minerals and Energy, Penuell Maduna, wants to cut or stop altogether the export of diamonds from South Africa – a strategy that would severely threaten the survival of the De Beers diamond cartel. The minister’s special adviser on […]

View from the Gallery South Africa’s Acting President, Mangosuthu Buthelezi, could not restrain himself. He had spent two hours watching a string of politicians do the Masakhane, with speeches full of pledges and snipes. By then, most of the Cabinet ministers had skulked off, leaving a lonely Minister of Provincial Affairs and Constitutional Development Valli […]

Ferial Haffajee and Mukoni T Ratshitanga The African National Congress appears set to take a whopping loss on its Shell House headquarters, which it will vacate at the end of September. In a depressed property market, brokers suggest the 22-floor building could go for half of the R20-million the ANC paid for it in 1990. […]

The spectre of institutional racism haunts two events, the death of Sam Nolutshungu and Wits academic William Makgoba’s recounting of his `victimisation’ A sudden bout of amnesia must have gripped polemicist Jon Qwelane as he sat down last month to attack the media’s coverage of the late Professor Sam Nolutshungu. Under the headline “Once again, […]

Andrew MuchineripiSoccer The strength of South African club football will receive one of its most thorough examinations this weekend when champions Orlando Pirates and cup winners Jomo Cosmos visit North Africa. Pirates are in war-torn Algeria for a crucial African Champions League second- round fixture against Union Sportive de la Medina d’Alger (USMA) while Cosmos […]

Over 800 students share five roofed classrooms, while for 600 others school is out if it rains. Craig Bishop reports Patrick Masakala (18) walks six kilometres to school each day. When he arrives for the first lesson of the day he shares his teacher with 100 other students, and his classroom with another class. Masakala […]

High interest rates will not protect the rand long term, writes Charles Millward In his governor’s address in 1995, Chris Stals referred to certain economists who were calling for a substantial devaluation of the rand; such a devaluation would be, he said, no more than a panacea given that South Africa’s problems of competitiveness were […]

contested Gustav Thiel Three Pretoria prostitutes, Ellen Jordan, Louisa Broodryk and Christine Jacobs, plan to petition the Constitutional Court later this year to legalise their business. Opposing their application, Pretoria’s attorney general will cite a recent study that claims prostitutes spread Aids and rob their clients. Attorney Rachel van der Walt, who is assigned to […]

FRIDAY, 12.30PM A UN transit camp for refugees in the Democratic Republic of Congo was raided before dawn on Thursday by government soldiers who herded almost all the several hundred refugees to the nearby airport and flew them to Rwanda. The UN High Commisson for Refugees described the incident as: “The soldiers surrounded the UNHCR […]

Ed Vulliamy Stamp collecting has never been as sizzling a preoccupation as it is now, since drummer and Massachusetts stamp gallery owner Don Palazzo had the idea of raising revenue in Third World countries by issuing entertaining postage paraphernalia. The hobby has suddenly exploded along with the fear of the eruption of the volcano in […]

I have always considered (and still do) the Mail & Guardian to be among the best newspapers – not just in Africa, but in the world. I was thus disappointed in the manner that the newspaper handled the issue around the late Professor Sam Nolutshungu. At first, like everybody else who had read the articles […]

Glynis O’Hara reports on the return to South Africa of a huge body of Grard Sekoto’s works. Brenda Atkinson considers the state of our art heritage In an unprecedented victory for the South African art world, 2 000 works by acclaimed South African artist Grard Sekoto, who died in Paris in 1993, have been returned […]

John Ezard Frailty, the apparent brave frailty of a candle in the wind, was always Diana’s supreme public quality in life. In death it will combine with her other merits and faults – her genius for intimacy, her great persisting beauty and her turbulent spirit maimed in childhood – to perfect her legend. That legend […]

As Olympic fever hits Cape Town, residents are still divided on whether the Games will be good for them or not, writes Andy Duffy Patrick is sitting with his friends under a bird crap-encrusted statue, watching through bleary eyes as the metal skeleton of a giant podium slowly takes shape on Cape Town’s Grand Parade. […]

Barbara Ludman : Moveable feast Once, a couple of decades ago, there was a vegetarian restaurant in Hunter Street in Yeoville, Johannesburg. I thought it absolutely terrible, with an ambience that spoke of “pulses”, a non-foodie term for good stuff like chilli beans and lemon dahl. Besides, nothing was ever hot enough. Long after the […]

Cape Town’s olympic bid captured the spirit of the city but not the continent, writes Ferial Haffajee It was almost as if the the spin-doctors and mega-marketeers responsible for selling Cape Town’s Olympic bid took a late swig of Energade to boost a flagging campaign. Or it may have been the countdown to decision day […]

Lyn Gardner : Pick of Edinburgh festival As the world’s largest arts festival draws to a close and Edinburgh tidies up and returns to normal, the most memorable fringe shocker was Acrobat, an astonishing Aussie troupe that defied gravity and good taste with a show that was the antidote to all those soft-focus circuses such […]

Hazel Friedman Jazz enthusiasts in Cape Town will be forgiven for thinking they are somewhere on the west coast -America’s west coast, that is. The source of their confusion is P4 in Cape Town – a new jazz radio station that got airborne on September 1. After the 6am news bulletin, listeners would have been […]

National art collections are about visual history, memory and identity. At their best, they offer a key to the map of our past, a means of preserving roots and a document of unique and shared cultural formations. In South Africa, the politics and ethics of forming such collections are emerging from a history marked less […]

WEDNESDAY, 5.00PM: The bull trend on US markets helped spur industrial shares on the JSE on Wednesday, but the gold index fell below 1 000 points for the first time since the most recent contraction on Wall Street began in early August. At the close the all gold index had dropped 8,9 points to 992,8. […]

THURSDAY, 8.30AM FORMER policeman and Civil Co-operation Bureau operative Ferdi Barnard appeared briefly in the Pretoria Regional Court on Wednesday, where his charge sheet gave the first details of how the state has reconstructed the 1989 murder of anti-apartheid activist Dr David Webster. The state says that Barnard, who had monitored Webster’s house for some […]

THURSDAY, 4.30PM THE Speaker in Lesotho’s National Assembly, Dr Teboho Kolane, on Thursday ejected the remaining 18 Basutoland Congress Party parliamentarians from the assembly for seven days, for what he said was gross unparliamentary conduct. The MPs were dragged from the Assembly by police after refusing to budge when they were ordered to go. On […]

THURSDAY, 11.00AM: LATEST retail sales figures released by the Central Statistical Service show seasonally adjusted retail sales fell 5% in June to R11,5-billion under pressure from continued high interest rates. Clothing, textiles and footwear were particularly hard hit. The slowing retail sales figures follow recent trends in manufacturing production, leading economists to warn that the […]