Staff Reporter

New car-tracking technology may lead to more fatalities, reports Angella Johnson HAVING an anti-hijack tracking device on your vehicle may help get it returned but it could also get you killed. A Johannesburg businessman discovered this paradox after he was kidnapped and left for dead along the roadside. Ian Mirk, managing director of Panasonic Business […]

FINE ART: Hazel Friedman – PHILIP BADENHORST’s exhibition would make interesting “reading” were it not for his desire to make his mark as a neo-expressionist high-tech symbolist. Ultimately that is what one retains of his work – the mark – violent slashes of reds, blues and black. And while vibrant, colourful and certainly evocative, it […]

Mungo Soggot THE rise in international oil prices triggered by the United States missile attacks on Iraq could have important ripple effects on the South African economy, analysts warned this week. Increases in key international oil prices are expected to boot up the petrol and diesel pump prices next month, which will hit inflation and […]

Marion Edmunds SOUTH AFRICAN BROADCASTING CORPORATION journalists, along with about 250 of their colleagues from around the world, were holed up in a compound in Libya this week, unsure when they would be allowed to leave the country to return to their homes. According to Current Affairs Executive Producer Freek Robinson, a producer, Kotie van […]

Gaye Davis AFRICAN NATIONAL CONGRESS chairman Jacob Zuma is emerging as a strong contender for the position of deputy president of the organisation. President Nelson Mandela’s announcement that he would step down as ANC president at the organisation’s conference in December 1997, and as the country’s president in 1999, has paved the way for Deputy […]

David Macgregor MORE than 28 000 cattle valued at about R75-million have been stolen in the Eastern Cape this year as organised syndicates increase their supply of cut- price meat to the townships. Several farmers have thrown in the towel as the cattle-rustling figures have already doubled what they were for the whole of last […]

Minister of Welfare and Population Development Geraldine Fraser-Moleketi responds to a recent M&G article AS in other parts of the world, the issue of whether to provide social assistance to permanent residents has come to the fore in South Africa. The article entitled “No pensions for permanent residents” by Marion Edmunds (August 16 to 22) […]

Gaye Davis ON November 17 the public will be able to scrutinise a special register concerning MPs’ financial interests. MPs, senators and President Nelson Mandela himself will have to detail earnings, gifts and other benefits on special forms. This follows the adoption earlier this month of the Code of Conduct in Regard to Financial Interests. […]

Even the police in Mpumalanga are afraid to testify against local gangs, report Sharon Hammond and Justin Arenstein STATE-SPONSORED gangs, who used government patronage to build criminal business empires, featured prominently during Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) sittings in Mpumalanga this week. Although state support for the thugs officially ended with the dissolution of the […]

Catholic schools in Gauteng are outraged by a 30% retrospective subsidy cut, reports Max Gebhardt INDEPENDENT Catholic church schools which cater for thousands of disadvantaged black schoolchildren will be the first to suffer in the wake of cutbacks in their subsidies by the Gauteng Education Department. Religious and independent schools in Gauteng have been plunged […]

Crash is set to take South Africa by storm. JONATHAN ROMNEY first saw the controversial movie at the Cannes Film Festival – THROUGHOUT the Cannes press screening of Crash, someone in the row behind me muttered a refrain of “Sick … sick …” There was a whiff of scandal in the air a full week […]

Pressure to change the Usury Act is growing now that the government has called on the public to suggest improvements to the law, writes Tebello Radebe THE “David and Goliath” battle concerning overcharging by the banks, spearheaded by the Financial Research Foundation (FRF), rages on even though the principals do not seem to differ on […]

Jane Badham THE travel brochures show you pictures of the big five, stretches of pristine beaches, luxury hotels and smiling faces. The picture of peace and harmony, but allow me to paint the real picture … We have long known that we are living in the most violent country (with the exception of Bosnia) in […]

Out-of-touch white media planners are touring the townships to get in touch with black consumers, writes Jacquie Golding-Duffy TAKE a taxi to Soweto if you want to get in touch with your black market base. This is the message from Taxinet, a leading media company responsible for advertisements flagged solely in the taxi industry. As […]

A great Springbok victory over the All Blacks was the first ingredient needed in the recipe for a rugby revival RUGBY: Jon Swift SOMEONE had to say it, and All Black coach John Hart did not disappoint. One foot on the plane? A New Zealand Test team? Pull the other one. There has never been […]

Nineteen-year-old Tebogo Lerole is bringing the joyful rhythm of the pennywhistle to a new generation. KAREN DAVIS speaks to him – WHEN Elias and Aaron Lerole were small boys, they were already to be found on the streets and at Johannesburg’s Zoo Lake every Sunday earning a living as pennywhistlers. Now, Elias’s children are carrying […]

Yunus Momoniat CITIZEN AND SUBJECT: CONTEMPORARY AFRICA AND THE LEGACY OF LATE COLONIALISM by Mahmood Mamdani (James Currey/Fountain/David Philip, R79,95) – UGANDAN academic Mahmood Mamdani, who worked in South Africa for a time, has written a wide-ranging and highly theoretical book which attempts to discern a pattern in the process of colonialism in Africa. He […]

The last of SABC-TV’s big budget drama series comes to our screens this week. ANDREW WORSDALE reports – HOMELAND, the new 13-part-series on SABC3, is quite possibly the most engrossing drama series yet produced for local television. Full of well-judged performances and cinematic flair, it contains all the qualities that, up until now, one believed […]

The widespread strike in Zimbabwe may be over, but the country’s troubles aren’t, reports Julius Zava ALTHOUGH Zimbabwe’s strike by civil servants has been suspended, the threat of renewed labour unrest continues. The strikers have given the government until September 27 to address problems Plain English which lead to their strike which lasted nearly four […]

and chair of Comtask, in The Mark Gevisser Profile Author in need of healing ‘However far apart our bodies may be / Our souls are locked together in perpetual embrace.” So concludes a poem by Ben J Langa, written to his younger brothers Mandla and Bheki after they went into exile, and published in Staffrider. […]

crime wave to fight crime with corruption A policeman is shot while allegedly robbing Eastgate … the head of a car- theft unit is caught in a stolen car … Angella Johnson investigates rife police corruption EVIDENCE is mounting that corrupt police officers are at the heart of the country’s escalating crime-wave, with worrying signs […]

Old habits seem to die hard as NSL officials continue to operate with too much secrecy and too much control SOCCER: Andrew Muchineripi ONE sometimes wonders what leading South African soccer officials read during their leisure hours. Tales of Central African dictators from days gone by, perhaps? There certainly seems to be a longing for […]

Mail & Guardian Reporter SERVING judges who dotted South Africa’s law books with inane judgments in the name of apartheid might not be out of the woods as far as the truth commission is concerned. Desmond Tutu’s spokesman said this week that although the commission does not have a hit list of apartheid judges, he […]

KAREN DAVIES finds out what Yvonne Chaka Chaka has been up to between starting a limo-hire service and receiving a songstress of Africa award in Zaire SHE was chosen above Madonna to launch Pepsi in Nigeria. Flowers were strewn on the road from Entebbe Airport to Kampala in Uganda for her visit there and she […]

Larry Elliott reports on the cynical attempt to blame economic failings on the poor and unemployed ONE of the things we have had to learn over the past 17 years is that nothing is ever the British government’s fault. The Arabs and the unions were to blame for the first Thatcher recession. The Germans and […]

TWO months before his arrest for allegedly taking part in a huge vehicle fraud syndicate, the branch commander of Rustenberg’s police car-theft unit bought himself a house. Nothing out of the ordinary. Just an old family dwelling down the road from the police station for him, his wife and four children. How much of it […]

Ian Katz in New York The American rock group REM, unremarkable looking thirty-somethings whose catchy tunes are hummed by teenagers, have become the highest paid group in the world after signing a record $80-million contract with Warner Brothers. The deal could trigger a rush of “me, too” demands from other established artists, just as a […]

border Has the North American Free Trade Agreement merely ushered in looser restrictions for the drug trade? John Ward Anderson reports from San Ysidro United States customs inspector Robert Bickers — the “linebacker” who tackles drug dealers trying to run back to Mexico when their cars are nabbed in surprise inspections — pointed to a […]

Marion Edmunds The old and the crippled, the blind and the lame of Nyanga and beyond in the Western Cape are furious with Welfare Department officials, who they say make their already tough lives a nightmare. They want to tell the politicians they are not getting the grants they were promised which are all they […]

THE crime of hijacking has been fiercely denounced over the years by many governments. One should not, it is said, give in to hijackers’ demands or offer concessions which might encourage others to try the same path. Granting asylum to the Iraqi hijackers who hijacked a Sudan Air Airbus to Britain this week would reward […]

Julian Drew THE opening ceremonies of both the Olympic Games and the Paralympic Games used Martin Luther King’s “I have a dream” speech to portray the lofty ideals to which they aspire. But it is the Paralympics and their constant struggle against the stereotyping of disabled people with which King would probably have identified most. […]

Lionel Mtshali will be sailing outgoing minister Ben Ngubane’s old boat — but not rocking it. HAZEL FRIEDMAN reports FROM arts and culture to agriculture. That’s where the outgoing Minister of Arts, Culture, Science and Technology, Professor Ben Ngubane, is heading when he assumes his new post as minister of finance and agriculture in the […]