Staff Reporter

An uproar at the Peninsula Technikon following the administration’s failure last year to discipline a student for sexual harassment has once again highlighted this hidden problem, reports Rehana Rossouw SEVERAL months after a student at the Peninsula Technikon in Cape Town reported she had been lewdly fondled by SRC president Solly Lamini, there has been […]

Rehana Rossouw LIE detector tests for top ranking policemen aimed at rooting out corruption in the force have been temporarily suspended while police examine the practicalities of implementing the search for crooked cops nationwide. Last year, in a well-publicised exercise National Police Commissioner George Fivaz took a lie detector test — which he passed. Questions […]

Rehana Rossouw MURDER-accused Allan Stokes was 369 miles from Cape Town on Wednesday aboard the monohull Sunday Star, participating in the Cape-to-Rio race after a court postponed his trial to April 5 to accommodate his racing plans. Stokes is accused of murdering trainee diplomat Nithianandan “Elvis” Govender at the Vaal Dam last November. Govender’s family […]

John 8:32: “The truth shall make you free.” It is widely recognised that liberation takes many forms and that “freedom” was not finally won with the assumption of power by Nelson Mandela on May 11 last year. The horrendous matric results signpost the long walk to freedom still demanded of millions of our children before […]

Lungile Madywabe profiles four of the top footballers who will be thrilling soccer fans in the African Nations Cup SOME of the world’s greatest players will from this weekend grace South African soccer pitches. This is despite the debacle surrounding the withdrawal of champions Nigeria have the largest contingent of players plying their trade in […]

Jacquie Golding-Duffy The Junior Rapportryersbeweeging (JRB), an Afrikaans mens-only cultural youth movement, will object against the SABC’s new proposed schedules in a bid to get the Independent Broadcasting Authority to hold a hearing. If the IBA decides that the submissions by the JRB are “serious enough” , it could stall the process for the SABC […]

South Africans are not alone in grappling with the balance between the financial pressures to boost its arms trade, and the cost to human rights. Britain this week deported Saudi dissident Mohammed al-Mas’ari to Dominica instead of considering his application for asylum. He had not breached any condition for political refugee status. It was not […]

The painful process of resolving the Wits crisis has begun. Philippa Garson reports THE first painful steps towards healing the University of the Witwatersrand’s troubled psyche are being taken: the suspension of deputy vice-chancellor William Malegapuru Makgoba is likely to be lifted at today’s Council meeting. The protagonists — academics pitted against each other –are […]

Jacquie Golding-Duffy The task team appointed by Deputy President Thabo Mbeki to look at the media will be reviewing the South African Communications Services (SACS) — government’s current communications model — in a bid to find new and more effective means of disseminating government information to the public. A brief for Friday’s meeting sent by […]

Inspector HT Moodley (50)joined the security police in Durban in early 1981. He was stationed at CR Swart Square. Although he had nothing to do with the planning, it was from here, at this security police office, where the assassination of Griffiths Mxenge was planned and executed. According to his service record in the police, […]

Brendan Martin questions who will benefit from privatisation of state assets There would have been no prizes for predicting, a year or two ago, that the fragile unity of the new South Africa would founder on government action to secure “black economic empowerment”. But how many sages foresaw that it would be the ANC’s alliance […]

NIA spying row: Police accuse Dirk Coetzee of being ordered to spy on them — Coetzee denies all and wishes he’d never exposed Police hit Gaye Davis THE stand-off between police and the National Intelligence Agency over allegations that it was spying on senior policemen has sparked fears that co-operation between police and the agency […]

Peta Thornycroft It’s been a long time coming, but Dirk Coetzee has had enough. He now regrets having spoken out in 1989 about killer squads in the South African Police. His confession six years ago about his own role in sanctioned murders and his breathtaking exposure of the rot deep in the South African security […]

Gaye Davis PARLIAMENT’S watchdog over the intelligence community faces its most crucial test as it prepares to uncover the truth behind the police spying scandal. The Joint Standing Committee on Intelligence thrashed out its terms of reference for its investigation into police claims that top members were being spied on by agents of the National […]

Rehana Rossouw HILLBROW musician Solomon Sithole appeared briefly in the Johannesburg Magistrates’ Court last week following the fatal stabbing of his wife, women’s abuse campaigner Susan Sithole, last year. The alleged murder occured on November 25, International Day of No Violence Against Women. Susan Sithole had planned to leave her husband and had returned to […]

Raymond Mhlaba, Eastern Cape Premier, in The Mark Gevisser Profile You catch the similarity first in the tone: the ponderous and spare mode of delivery, a schoolmasterish stress on each syllable. Then you catch it in the ability — perhaps borne of a half-lifetime in captivity — to control a large, even gangly, frame with […]

Vuyo Mvoko THE taxpayer is going to pay legal costs for former defence minister Magnus Malan and 10 senior officers in their murder trial which begins in early March in Durban. General Malan and his co-accused, including former SADF chief General “Kat” Liebenberg, are accused of complicity in the massacre of 13 civilians at KwaMakhuta […]

Marion Edmunds The Foundation for Equality Before the Law has spent its last penny on its first rally, to be held in Pretoria on Saturday. Chairman of the Foundation, Dr Theo de Jager said this week that the Foundation was spending R22 000 on the rally at which it hoped to make its first public […]

In his profiles of the new South African elite, Mark Gevisser has found that race is still at the core of our national identity William Makgoba and Charles van Onselen. Looking through my profiles of the year, I was struck, over and over again, by their confrontation. Not simply because they are the prime antagonists […]

Mail &Guardian Reporter KWAZULU-NATAL attorney general Tim McNally has two targets in his sights at the moment: Magnus Malan and other generals acussed of “hit squad” activity; and the Mail & Guardian, accused of defamation. McNally this week served summons on the M&G, claiming R250 000. This arises from articles published in the M&G on […]

1 Which Constitutional Court judge has not served in the court since taking office in 2 Whom did air charter company Foster-Webb sue for R50 000 in November over the non-payment of a two-year-old bill? 3 At which South African university was a lecture interrupted by a student falling through the ceiling? 4 To which […]

South Africa has 11 official languages, but we need a new language to capture the soul of the new Constitution, writes Etienne MureinikResponding to the just published working draft of the final Constitution, Bafana Khumalo regrets the lack of “phrases that roll easily off the tongue of a voice artist” (Mail & Guardian, December 1, […]

THE ARTS British novelist Kingsley Amis (73) Actor Jeremy Brett, the definitive Sherlock Novelist Bridgid Brophy (66) Science fiction author John Brunner (60), grandfather of cyberpunk, of a stroke Avant-garde jazz trumpeter and composer Don Cherry (58), of liver failure Actor Elisha Cook (91) — the trigger-happy kid in The Maltese Falcon Canadian author Robertson […]

Mail & Guardian Reporter TWO KwaZulu-Natal massacres in a week — adding to the highest weekly “political” death toll in the province in six months — contrasts sharply with a strong national trend of decreased violence. Police said 10 armed men attacked a kraal at Mvutshini on KwaZulu-Natal’s South Coast on Tuesday night, killing an […]

Wits could take a leaf from UCT’s book on managing transformation, writes Philippa THE embattled vice-chancellor of the University of the Witwatersrand must be glancing enviously from his turbulent empire to that picture of tranquillity nestling in Table Mountain’s aprons — the University of Cape Town. As Wits struggles to contain the crisis around accusations […]

Vuyo Mvoko THIS week’s two-hour work stoppages, pickets and blockades at parastatals marked for privatisation — though weak in impact — portend a difficult relationship ahead for labour and the ANC-led government. For organised labour the events “marked the beginning of a process of mobilisation against privatisation”, a policy the Congress of South African Trade […]

Etienne Mureinik, one of the 13 academics who accused Professor William Makgoba, draws some harsh lessons from the controversy of the year As the year draws to a close, it is perhaps time to step back from the detail of the Makgoba affair, and ask what larger lessons it can teach. Three stand out. The […]

THIS has been a year of reconstruction, with damaged and divided urban areas getting the lion’s share of funding to implement projects designed by brilliant architects, planners and engineers — in Berlin, Beirut, Atlanta and Sarajevo, that is. Back home, things look pretty much the same as they did 12 months ago. Nevertheless, some practitioners […]

This year, the greens have incurred the wrath of rural communities who put economic development above environmental conservation, writes Eddie Koch IT has become a truism to say that struggles to protect the environment have, in recent times, created some of the rainbows that now cross class and racial divisions in South Africa’s social landscape. […]

The Mail & Guardian and its journalists won a string of awards this year. The English Academy of Southern Africa awarded columnist Bafana Khumalo the Thomas Pringle Award for television reviews. The Kaiser Family Foundation named journalist Pat Sidley Health Writer of the Year. Literary editor Shaun de Waal (left) was runner-up in the Leserskring/Leisure […]

The indictment of the Malan 20 by Attorney General Tim McNally comes as a small victory to journalists who have fought for the expose of the Caprivi 200, write Mail & Guardian By 1995 many South Africans — force-fed over the years with a diet of reports about “third forces”, “covert operations” and “state-sponsored hit […]

‘ The Russian Federation does not need a sharp political turn … You must not turn the wheel sharply on a big ship. Nothing good came from the fact that the country turned sharply to the right. ‘ — Russian Federation Communist Party leader Gennady Zyuganov, as his party led the poll ‘ No, and […]