Staff Reporter

The Shobashobane massacre has come to trial, but the list of suspects is decreasing and people question whether justice will be done. Ann Eveleth reports DUMAZILE NYAWOSE watched helplessly as armed men stabbed her 17-year-old daughter Phindile to death. They propped her limp body in a sitting position in a waterhole and moved on. Amos […]

Chris Dunton SINGING AWAY THE HUNGER: STORIES OF A LIFE IN LESOTHO by Mpho M’atsepo Nthunya (University of Natal Press, R79) IN her foreword to this autobiography of a 66-year-old Mosotho woman who has ” little formal education, less privilege and almost no experience of books or w riting”, Ellen Kuzwayo comments: “One has a […]

Intelligence agent Arthur Kemp appears to have knowledge of a wider plot behind Chris Hani’s assassination, writes Stefaans Brmmer ARTHUR KEMP, the right-wing journalist who gave address details for a “hit list” to Chris Hani’s killers, had links with the old National Intelligence Service (NIS) – raising new questions about possible complicity or foreknowledge in […]

THEATRE: Andrew Wilson WHILE some of Athol Fugard’s later works, like A Place With the Pigs, are mark ed by claustrophobic symbolism and metaphor, his earlier plays like Hello and Goodbye and People Are Living There are finely textured examples of dirty real ism, where action and character are not slaves to ethereal philosophies or […]

TECHNO: Greg Bowes IN the era of massive warehouse raves and superclubs, DJs have become more tha n just folk who mix records – some have become as big as pop stars. When Boy G eorge DJ’d in Johannesburg last year a 14 000 strong crowd turned up to see hi m, surely as many […]

Fifteen years ago Roger Price witnessed an event he will never forget. Today he is seeking answers to what he saw. Eddie Koch reports ROGER PRICE arrived in our office last week loaded with guilt, and a grey plastic bag under his arm filled with the paraphernalia he uses in a quest for the truth […]

Anthony Egan STEVE BIKO: I WRITE WHAT I LIKE – A SELECTION OF HIS WRITINGS edited by Aelred Stubbs (Ravan, R49,99) HAD he not been murdered by security police in 1977, Steve Biko would be 50 no w. Where he would have stood in today’s political environment is anybody’s gue ss, but in the end […]

Krisjan Lemmer Wear shades, the future’s so bright A South African man with a dream of a=20 bright future is about as scarce as a=20 politician driving a VW nowadays. Or so we=20 thought, until someone showed us a speech=20 made by the rector and vice-chancellor of=20 the University of Zululand, Professor CRM=20 Dlamini. What […]

THE ANGELLA JOHNSON INTERVIEW PULEEZE, do not call Basil Douglas a “so- called coloured”. It pisses him off. Like the k-word does black folk. He is Coloured, with a capital C, and proud of it. Heck, he is even prepared to fight for the right to be called coloured. The man who organised last week’s […]

The medicines control bureaucracy is being accused of denying people with Aids a chance to save their lives. Jim Day reports THERE are people with Aids in South Africa who want to take Virodene now – and they want no part of what they see as bureaucratic meddling by the Medicines Control Council. Patients interviewed […]

Caitlin Davies SWEET-TOOTHED elephants are going to have a field day if a sugar plantation gets under way in northern Botswana, in what conservationists call one of the most environmentally unfriendly schemes imaginable. The sugar plantation is reportedly to be built on the sand bridge behind the Chobe River and inside the Kasane Forest Reserve […]

Shyam Bhatia in Cairo EGYPT’S only two hard rock bands have abandoned rehearsals, hidden their poste rs and locked up their CDs after a police crackdown on heavy-metal fans brande d as Satanists. A satanic fever sweeping the country has prompted some Islamic leaders to warn that “deviants” deserve the death penalty, and Egypt’s opposi […]

Charl Blignaut IT was probably a song like Jong Dames Dinamiek (referring to a young women’s cultural group established under National Party rule) that did it. So upset we re the censors in 1990 that they banned the album Die Saai Lewe (The Tedious L ife) by Randy Rambo en die Rough Riders – the […]

Jacquie Golding-Duffy THE government conceded this week that the Independent Broadcasting Authority’s (IBA) mandate for the SABC, central to plans to transform the broadcaster, is too expensive. The Telecommunications Ministry and the SABC said funding constraints and suggestions that the broadcaster become commercially self-sufficient had rendered many of the IBA’s recommendations impractical. The government has […]

John Vidal and Walter Schwarz THE Munich company Hofpfisterei Stocker is baker to the former Bavarian kings. It employs 900 people, has 700 outlets and uses 15 000 tonnes of cereal a year. Two years ago, it sniffed the winds of change, did its sums and converted its whole operation to organically grown. Competitors were […]

TRYING to find out what’s happening on Radio Metro is a bit like trying to rea d the true mind of Communist China. Forget it. A simple request to their publi c relations department for a schedule took four days to be answered, and when it came it was but a skeletal construct. Repeated attempts […]

Angella Johnson VIOLENCE in the taxi industry is being fuelled by sinister “third force” operatives who encourage the use of hitmen to kill rivals, according to a programme to be aired on the SABC next Thursday (February 20). Violence For Hire, a 30-minute documentary looking at the bloodier side of the taxi business, shows that […]

Suzy Bell DURBAN’s Joseph Manana is one of the 33 KwaZulu-Natal artists invited to exhib it in Stuttgart this month. This is the first time the African Art Centre in G ermany has collected South African artworks and this cultural exchange project sees the introduction of talented local artists like Manana, William Zulu and Benjamin […]

Stephen Gray THE BUCHAN PAPERS by JDF Jones (Harvill, R79,95) THE great pleasure of a literary hoax is external to the book itself. Did JDF Jones really recently discover the manuscript of this lost John Buchan novel, tied in a dusty pink ribbon, among the Lionel Phillips papers in the Barlow-Ra nd archives, and rig […]

Richard Thomas in Washington IT looks as if the game is finally up for=20 the tobacco industry. The anti-smoking=20 lobby is anticipating a spell of success=20 after decades of disappointment in the=20 courtrooms. For 1997 is the year when=20 government bodies finally square up to a=20 corporate lobby whose wealth and power=20 seemed to guarantee […]

Gillian Farquhar and Jacquie Golding-Duffy report on whether advertising agents are adapting their creative work in an effort to keep up to date with changes locally THE “new” South Africa born two-and-a-half years ago has brought with it a different set of social and cultural dynamics into the advertising arena. An industry which was predominantly […]

Top ANC women helped establish the country’s first private deportation camp, reports HEIN MARAIS SEVERAL prominent women members of the African National Congress are linked to a private company running South Africa’s first private deportation camp. The Lindela Accommodation Centre, in Randfontein on the far West Rand, is a central holding point for captured illegal […]

Matter of life and death: Days after abortion is legalised, an M&G reporter tries to get one and we ask health workers how they feel about performing the procedure Maria McCloy ‘HEY sister! Can you help these ladies find out about abortion?” shouted a nurse at Johannesburg General Hospital. This was after I had been […]

Debate rages about the role the media should take in reporting the truth commission, writes Claudia Braude * the run-up to the Truth and Reconciliation Commission conducting hearings on the role played by the media during the apartheid years, the debate surrounding the press playing a reconciliatory role raged among journalists at a workshop held […]

Letters must be received by Tuesday noon.The editor reserves the right to edit for clarity and space. ENDS

Shine has been called the ‘best film you’ll see in 1997’ but its dramatisat= ion of the truth has been questioned.=20 Mike Hutchinson ADELAIDE, Western Australia, May, 1986: Kerry Hicks had a memorable birthda= y t hat year. She and her husband Scott were expecting friends for dinner, to c= ele brate. The scene was […]

New York has legalised ‘extreme fighting’, an anything-goes mix of martial = art s. Ian Katz reports=20 ON March 26, Kenny Monday and John Lewis will step into a ring in an as yet= un disclosed Manhattan arena and do their level best to beat the living daylig= hts out of one another. They will […]

Mungo Soggot and Stuart Hess THE records of Cabinet meetings at which some of the most traumatic events of the period before the 1994 elections were discussed appear to have been gutted and sanitised. The records, released to the Mail & Guardian by the National Archives in Pretoria this week, are written in the style […]

Jim Day A COUPLE of hundred Mozambican children filled the sandy school playground, some lounging in the shade of a shady tree, others practising their Van Damme kickboxing moves, while a small group of student volunteers from South Africa and elsewhere put the finishing touches on their rebuilt school. While one of the volunteers painted […]

Hazel Friedman CONFUSION reigns at the Pact ballet and dance companies as members and mana= gem ent come to terms with their imminent transition from a government-supporte= d d ance company to what they hope to be an independent company – due to the dr= ast ic reduction in state funding. This week, for example, […]

SOCCER:Andrew Muchineripi AS the South African Football Association (Safa) seeks solutions to its man= y p roblems, they could do much worse than phone 643-3341 and ask for Mr Trevor= Ph illips. The chief executive officer of the Premier Soccer League (PSL) may not have= al l the answers to all the questions, but the […]

Victoria Brittain KOIGI WA WAMWERE, Kenya’s best-known opposition politician, predicts he will die in a stabbing or car crash when he returns to the country to face yet another trial, for an alleged theft of arms from a police station in November 1993. He has served a year of a four-year jail sentence, was temporarily […]