Staff Reporter

ONCE again the sight of Hutu refugees forlornly tramping from conflict in central Africa is tugging at the world’s heartstrings. It is a spectacle which has popped up on television screens periodically since the great exodus from Rwanda two-and-a- half years ago. And the United Nations is once again there to ensure that it can […]

Rehana Rossouw MEMBERS of the Seventh Day Adventist Church in the Cape are reeling after white members of their church voted this week to retain its racially segregated structures. Following a two-year unity process, the church put to the vote last Sunday a resolution to abolish apartheid in its Cape structures – called conferences – […]

Glynis O’Hara QKUMBA ZOO have lost the “C” in their QCumba – but not the “Q” in their quirk. Arista Records in New York has decided the “K” makes more sense – otherwise people go round saying “QSumba Zoo”, they say. To which one can only reply – what school did these people go to? […]

LOCAL production company Penguin Films is going through the roof – what with its sit- com series Going Up beating Soul City to the top of the TV ratings with a combined adult and youth audience of 3,5-million, and a new character-based drama series Gaabo Motho, scripted by renowned author, anti-apartheid activist and medical doctor […]

REM frontman Michael Stipe’s dislike of clarity seems to grow with age. NEILSPENCER looks at his career FOR a man who has just carved himself a substantial slice of the biggest business deal in pop history, Michael Stipe sounds mightily disgruntled on his newly released album, New Adventures In Hi-Fi, and the bile flows from […]

The Beatles are back and by far the biggest buyers are teenagers, writes Lisa Buckingham in London THE Beatles are heading for the biggest record earnings in their history thanks to huge sales of the albums Anthology 1 and 2. Nearly 30 years after their peak and having seen off fashions like punk, rap, soul, […]

A SMALL shopping centre in suburban Pretoria seems an unlikely spot for a restaurant specialising in African South African cuisine. You’d expect an antique shop in such a centre, perhaps, a caf, a post office, a select bookshop. But Ntombi Msimang chose the site for Safika carefully. She opened two months ago in Maroelana, a […]

South Africa are getting the job of winning done in India, but playing is more than work for the players – it’s a way of life CRICKET:V Roger Prabasarkar INDIA is undergoing a social, economic and cultural revolution to compare with any in the last decade. In fact, the mother of all change, the French […]

PAPA WEMBA & KOFI OLOMIDE: Wake Up! (Sonodisc) KOFI OLOMIDE is back, this time pairing his smooth baritone with Wemba’s soaring falsetto for an album released last month. It sits firmly in the soukous tradition: plenty of soloing guitars, layered percussion and infectious sebene breaks on almost every track (for much of which we can […]

Stefaans Brmmer DEPUTY Defence Minister Ronnie Kasrils this week joined in condemning the South African Defence Force’s (SADF) submission to the Truth and Reconciliation Commission as “arrogant and disappointing” – but said there was very little the ministry can do to force military generals to reveal more. However, commission deputy chair Alex Boraine said if […]

Andy Duffy AROUND 8 500 Gauteng medical staff are to be redeployed or retrenched in a dramatic shake up of the province’s 35 hospitals. Three hospitals will close by February and seven – including Hillbrow -will be replaced with clinics or maternity centures. Staff at others – including Johnnesburg General and Baragwanath – will be […]

Shared concerns have persuaded South Africa’s editors to unite in one body, writes Anton Harber WHEN Tribute magazine editor S’bu Mngadi told the editors’ unity conference last weekend that the media industry was still racist, it brought a moment of rare silence from the more than 80 senior journalists present. Mngadi’s passionate outburst against those […]

Famous scientists such as Richard Dawkins offer meaning for a post-religious age, writes Tim Radford RICHARD DAWKINS is nervous. This is very surprising. After all, he has done his homework: the topic for the evening is called “Arguments by Design”, a knowing play on the twist of natural philosophy that led indirectly to Charles Darwin’s […]

Andy Duffy NEARLY 17 000 state school teachers have applied for voluntary retrenchment, most of them senior experienced staff disenchanted with government’s education shake-up. More than 13 000 of the voluntary severance applications come from teachers in Gauteng (severance requests from 9% of its teachers), the Western Cape (requests from 17% of its teachers) and […]

BORIS YELTSIN has blundered into new danger by his inept resolution of the Kremlin power struggle. Security chief General Alexander Lebed may be shrouded in darkness, but so are those who are attacking him. Lebed has at least brought a sort of peace to Chechnya. His principal opponent, Interior Minister General Anatoly Kulikov, had brought […]

They killed alongside adults; now the child fighters of Sierra Leone are experiencing childhood, writes Claudia McElroy THE classroom’s sea of faces wear expressions ranging from lively interest and bewilderment to boredom and incomprehension. Yet for most of these youngsters at a centre for ex- combatants, grappling with basic literacy is better than life at […]

Madeleine Wackernagel SUBSTANTIAL falls in formal sector employment levels are threatening to undermine the government’s Growth, Employment and Redistribution (Gear) strategy, which aims to create 400 000 jobs a year by the turn of the century, assuming economic growth of 6%. Two disturbing trends are coming to light – total employment, according to Central Statistical […]

An alarmed publishing industry is up in arms over the threat of state involvement, reports Gaye Davis A SHOWDOWN is looming between the book publishing industry and the Department of National Education over proposals for greater state involvement in producing learning materials for schools. Bodies representing publishers, printers, paper manufacturers and booksellers met last week […]

FIGHTING spread in eastern Zaire this week with new raids on villages and refugee camps north of Goma, amid growing evidence of a co- ordinated strategy to drive Hutu extremists away from Rwanda’s border. Several dozen people were reported killed and tens of thousands more added to the wave of refugees. The latest attacks were […]

Alex Sudheim SIX years ago Nadine Raal was crooning for her supper in smoky jazz clubs on Durban’s Point Road, serenading inebriated audiences with Blue Moon and Old Man River. “But,” sing Pavement, masters of slanted and subverted country music, “you gotta pay your dues before you pay the rent.” Presumably Raal doesn’t have too […]

Lesley Cowling THE Institute of Wine Biotechnology grew out of a new initiative called the Technology and Human Resources for Industry Programme (Thrip), which is administered by the Foundation for Research Development (FRD). The programme brings together industry, academic research and government in projects designed to serve national interests. The way it works is this: […]

THIS is a story about that grey area between fiction and fact. It is about the tense sexuality in the most prominent of British boys’ schools that occasionally leads teachers to abuse the trust vested in them; and it is about the impressive ability of such schools to suppress for years any wider knowledge of […]

IT is time the African National Congress provided South Africa with a fresh dose of democracy. It is time to elect a president. Despite the country’s impressive start in the democratic tradition, the ideal has been flagging recently. The abrupt expulsion of Bantu Holomisa from Parliament has underscored the weakness of the party list as […]

Mungo Soggot went to Ogies to visit the man who looks after the world’s largest oil storage facility, apartheid’s oil stash IT is difficult to believe Frikkie Cloete when he points across a bleak mielie field in the middle of Mpumalanga and says “all this is oil – for 6km that way”. But Cloete, manager […]

Hazel Friedman AFTER five years of negotiating and 11 months after a deal was struck, actors are still stranded by the South African Broadcasting Corporation’s (SABC) failure to sign a contract to protect their rights. And SABC officials don’t even know where the long-awaited Television Performers Contract is. Head of television Gill Chisholm told the […]

Bennie Bunsee THAT the Pan Africanist Congress has been going through a trying time is well known. But the M&G’s response to the PAC’s recent convention (“PAC convention achieves little,” September 27 to October 3) misunderstands a genuine attempt to correct the organisation’s problems arising from decades of leadership mismanagement. Getting the PAC right will […]

IN its ongoing search for innovative solutions to the housing crisis, the Ministry of Housing’s special task team this week proposed new approaches to break the deadlock between financial institutions and developers, which is holding up housing delivery. In a report released this week, it also urged the various arms of the government involved in […]

forever In the heart of the Karoo, three killings came out of the blue, reports our guest writer Mike Nicol THIS is about malevolence. Or killers from the veld. It’s about random, gratuitous, inexplicable violence. More specifically about what happened at Nieuwoudtville on Tuesday evening, September 24 1996. It’s about what police Captain Paul van […]

Katy Bauer PIGEON racing: boring “hobby” or mystical love story? Belgium’s national sport may fuel the first argument, but it is the second that has real substance. Johan van Deventer, a building contractor from Elandsfontein, enters one of the avaries at the smallholding of friend and fellow pigeon fancier Norman Gruar. “Kom nou. Kom nou […]

Nomboniso Gasa writes how as a child in rural South Africa she discovered what abortion was, in an open letter to ANCmembers of Parliament LIKE many of you, it was not at university or as a result of “Western influence” that I learnt of abortion. I was seven years old when I first heard the […]

Mark Tran in New York TED TURNER, the CNN mogul turned Number Two at Time Warner, is bringing his skinflint approach to a company notorious for lavishing perks – from corporate jets to holiday hideaways – on its Hollywood stars. Time Warner’s habit of coddling its artists was assiduously cultivated by Steve Ross, the company’s […]