Staff Reporter

THEATRE:Suzy Bell HE whacks unsuspecting kiddies on the head with a plastic baseball bat, offers them half-eaten rotten apples as if they were champagne truffles, and munches on sticky green spaghetti worms found in old tins of dog food. “Yech!” Screech the kids, but of course they love it. They love anything gross, obscene and […]

Jacquie Golding-Duffy THE Press Council of South Africa, established in 1992 in response to pressure from former president PW Botha, will finally be dissolved next year following much debate on the future of this adjudicator. It will be replaced by an ombudsman and an appeal panel which should be up and running by March next […]

A new government approach to NGOs is needed, argues Ben Turok on the eve of NGO Week AS the non-governmental organisation (NGO) movement prepares for the celebration of NGO Week nationwide, we have to admit that the new South Africa owes the movement an apology. It has to be acknowledged that the consolidation of democratic […]

Two great names in African soccer – who have clashed with some great names in South African soccer – will meet in the final of the African Champions Cup SOCCER: Andrew Muchineripi SHOOTING STARS of Nigeria and Zamalek of Egypt, the clubs who will contest the biggest club event on the African soccer calendar, need […]

THEATRE: Andrew Wilson BEWARE – there’s a Nineties white male troopie on the loose: marginalised and misunderstood by a fickle, changing political landscape, and with no enemy left, he comes armed with insight, despair, and a kit-bag full of anecdotes. Currently on at the Civic, Greig Coetzee’s White Men With Weapons is less a play […]

recommendation Battling reduced budgets, several universities are now also embroiled in rows over staff selection and payments Andy Duffy THE University of Venda has quashed a report by independent consultants which recommends hefty salary increases for staff. The university’s council, which commissioned the report from respected Pretoria human resources consultant FSA-Contact, refused last week to […]

Amy Lawrence WHEN World Footballer of the Year George Weah considered boycotting an exhibition match in America, it was no prima donna tantrum. Weah’s motives to pull out of a game were based on global emotions. When he presses his talented feet on to a football pitch, he is as much ambassador for Liberia as […]

Madeleine Wackernagel GROSS domestic product (GDP) figures for the third quarter were in line with expectations at an annualised rate of 3,2% growth. This relative decline, after the unexpectedly strong growth in the second quarter of 3,5%, was only to be expected, says Bernie de Jager, head of the Reserve Bank’s economics unit. “Growth in […]

Mail & Guardian Reporter AN attorney who achieved his long-held ambition to appear in the supreme court has laid defamation charges against a judge who criticised him for wearing a light-grey suit. Robert Chalom, an attorney who practices in the Johannesburg suburb of Bruma, told the Mail & Guardian this week he had laid the […]

Portnet officials, ignoring orders from parent company Transnet, went on a lavish golfing weekend in June. Andy Duffy reports ONE of the final orders given by outgoing Portnet chief executive Neil Oosthuizen was that the company should ignore the budget imposed by parent Transnet on its 1996 golf charity day. The organisation instead paid R664 […]

Stephen Gray NOT WITHOUT LAUGHTER by Langston Hughes (Scribners, R44,95) WITH his Collected Poems in two volumes recently published in the United States, the work of Langston Hughes (1902-67) is set for a revival. The exhaustive biography of him by Arnold Rampersad is in paperback as well, spurring reprints of Hughes’s work, most of which […]

Jacquie Golding-Duffy After 17 years of broadcasting, Capital Radio will go off the air at exactly 6pm this Friday. Established in December 1979, Capital, based in Durban, has been an issue of debate between the telecommunications ministry and the Independent Broadcasting Authority (IBA) for eight months. Fifty employees will lose their jobs after months of […]

Shaun de Waal FROM THE ASHES OF ANGELS by Andrew Collins (Michael Joseph, R149,95) MAGI: IN SEARCH OF A SECRET TRADITION by Adrian G Gilbert (Bloomsbury, R149,95) THE TOMB OF GOD by Richard Andrews and Paul Schellenberger (Little, Brown, R139,95) A TEST OF TIME by David Rohl (Arrow, R139,95) THE kind of books that used […]

France have lost several key players to injury but they will have the weather on their side when they clash with the Springboks on Saturday RUGBY:Barney Spender HISTORY is overwhelmingly on South Africa’s side for the first Test against France in Bordeaux on Saturday, but the weather isn’t. It was always going to be a […]

hallucinatory drumming Jann Parry in London BODE LAWAL is a man possessed. In his solos for Sakoba Dance Theatre’s programme, New Moves in African Dance (at the Purcell Room), he seems in the grip of spirits, who speak to him and for him. Sometimes they are ancestral spirits, sometimes his own sense of curiosity and […]

1976 Cabinet minutes quote Jimmy Kruger urging his colleagues to back shootings. Mungo Soggot and Stuart Hess report CABINET notebooks from 1976 reveal murder was official National Party policy, with the recommendation from the then minister of justice, police and prisons, Jimmy Kruger, that the police kill more people in the wake of the Soweto […]

Max Gebhardt ANALYSTS believe Mzi Khumalo’s Capital Alliance-led African Mining Group has paid a premium for Anglo American’s mining house, JCI. The deal, announced this week with Anglo’s interim results, saw the consortium purchase a 34,9% stake in the mining house for R2,8- billion at R54,50 per share. One analyst said the fundamentals showed that […]

There are many trouble spots on a tour of India, the worst of which are cuisine, toilets, travel and practice facilities CRICKET:V Roger Prabasarkar SOUTH AFRICANS in India seem to be rather unpopular with their countrymen at present, which seems unusual. The rigours of a tour to India usually unite a nation in sympathy at […]

Colin Blane in London WHEN Ethiopia’s long civil war reached a climax in 1991, cameraman Mohamed “Mo” Amin, who died at the age of 52 in the hijacked Ethiopian airliner crash off the Comoros Islands last weekend, was filming the rebel takeover of Addis Ababa and the shelling of the imperial palace. Mo had dramatic […]

IVY MATSEPE-CASABURRI might want to ask herself whether she wants to be made premier of the Free State in the current circumstances – when she is getting the job because of the dismissal of a highly respected politician who won the post through the normal democratic procedures. But, if she still does want the job, […]

Ann Eveleth THE “mysterious” exclusion of a prominent Nigerian from the search for a new English department head has divided academic staff at the University of Zululand. African literature specialist Professor Ramanas Egudu is lauded by his supporters at Unizulu as a “world-renowned scholar and expert on African poetry and oral traditions”. He was one […]

Racism exists in Brazil as it does here, but it is not nearly as overt, argues Mungo Soggot IN a hall which could comfortably swallow three tennis courts dance hundreds of sensual Brazilians to an ear-splitting drum beat. The dazzling couples, some of whom include outrageously camp homosexuals, are products of what must be one […]

TWICE during the past 32 years Zambia has been a beacon of hope in the continent. And twice the beacon has been extinguished through selfish power-grabbing. A model democracy was promised when Kenneth Kaunda led Zambians to freedom from Britain in October 1964. On the world stage Kaunda became a moral and practical leader in […]

Jacquie Golding-Duffy DEPUTY President Thabo Mbeki’s Task Group on Government Communications (Comtask) this week tabled a hard-hitting report challenging government to revamp its internal communications departments, making them more flexible and less bureaucratic. It also recommends that the government funds the SABC and Channel Africa, the external service which carries news from across Africa in […]

Angella Johnson THE woman entrusted with heading a government agency to advise small businesses is wanted by Swaziland police for allegedly misappropriating R211 000 of foreign donated funds intended to build township houses, it was claimed this week. Nonhlahla June Mkhwanazi, who has only held the post of chief executive officer of Ntsika Enterprise Promotion […]

Matthew Krouse OPEN SPACE: SIX CONTEMPORARY PLAYS FROM AFRICA edited and with an introduction by Yvette Hutchinson and Kole Omotoso (Kagiso, R42,95) MY LIFE AND VALLEY SONG by Athol Fugard (Hodder & Stoughton/ Witwatersrand University Press R25,95) TRAITOR ON THE ICE by John Kench (Mallard, R35) IT requires a certain commitment and patience to obtain […]

Anthony Kunda in Lusaka AN alliance of seven opposition parties that boycotted the elections – led by former president Kenneth Kaunda – has vehemently vowed never to recognise or respect the new Zambian government because “it was elected fraudulently.” Dr Rodger Chongwe, chairman of the Liberal Progressive Front, said this week: “We will hold demonstrations, […]

A London office, standing empty for two years, is hardly a luxury the SABC can afford, writes Marion Edmunds THE South African Broadcasting Corporation (SABC) is paying 216 000 annually – more than R1,7-million at the current exchange rate – for its broadcasting office in London, half of which has been standing empty for about […]

Shirley Kossick YOUNG WIVES’ TALES by Susan Sussman (Headline Review, R59,99) MOLLY, one of the young wives of the title, is passionately involved with storytelling and is struggling to finish a dissertation on the subject. But the prologue – a marvellously evocative passage on the premonition experienced by Molly’s aunt – gives warning that danger […]

South Africa leads the world in automated cash dispensers, writes Mark Ashurst EVERY month, a thin line of grandparents and great-grandparents shuffles across the rural landscape of KaNgwane, clutching fresh banknotes dished out by the most sophisticated cash dispensers in the world. The machines, which are mounted on unmarked pick-up trucks and escorted by armed […]

Ann Eveleth NORTHERN KwaZulu-Natal National Investigation Task Unit head Mandlenkosi Vilikazi won his third murder conviction last week. Induna Mandlengqondo Mathonsi and his uncle, Patrick Mathonsi, were sentenced last Friday to 16 years’ and 12 years’ imprisonment respectively by the Mtubatuba Supreme Court for the murder of two people in August 1995. They also received […]

Rehana Rossouw DEPUTY Environment Affairs and Tourism Minister Peter Mokaba’s bid for the leadership of the African National Congress in the Northern Province will be discussed by a high-level ANC National Executive Committee delegation (NEC) to the province this weekend. This week Mokaba confirmed that he was available for the position of ANC Northern Province […]