CINEMA: Digby Ricci THAT acerbically brilliant novelist and essayist, Brigid Brophy, once titled an essay on Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women: “A Masterpiece, and Dreadful”. The “dreadful” aspects, inevitably, provoke the most enjoyable and unabashed tears: Marmee’s long- suffering, instructive “storytelling” (“So they agreed to stop complaining, to enjoy the blessings already possessed”), Beth’s affectionate […]
Despite its small size, Malawi sparkels with quickly=20 accessible variety, writes Stephanie Nettell FOR a while the road south from Lilongwe, Malawi’s spacious=20 but somehow amiably suburban capital, closely follows the=20 Mozambique border. On its right are the remains of=20 pathetically blasted dwellings, on its left neat undamaged=20 huts — but they are empty and […]
Nicholas Lezard WHEN asked “Read any good books this year?”, Captain Corelli’s Mandolin by Louis de Bernires (Minerva) is the one that has most consistently sprung to mind. It is a story of the Italian occupation of Cephallonia in World War II — a conventional historical epic, it’s the kind of book you’d take on […]
His body told him it was tired but the messages on Shaun Meiklejohn’s arms helped him to victory in the Comrades Marathon ROAD RUNNING: Julian Drew A CURSORY glance at many photographs of Shaun Meiklejohn could present the newly crowned Comrades Marathon champion as a trendsetter in the sphere of body adornment. As was the […]
HAZEL FRIEDMAN, a rookie recruit to the Internet, ventures into the cyber-art world – — but decides that, after all, there’s nothing like the real thing I AM haunted by a serial nightmare. I’m travelling through space on a surfboard, when this little guy — a brunette John Denver – — flies up to me […]
THEATRE: Bafana Khumalo THE first time I saw Welcome Msomi’s Umabatha was over 20 years ago. The play was well-marketed to the township schools’ audience, and we paid the princely sum of 10 cents to go to the open-air Jabulani Amphitheatre in Soweto. For that we were rewarded with an afternoon out of the classroom, […]
CINEMA: Stanley Peskin=20 THE title of Tim Burton’s Ed Wood, which is about the real- life film-maker Edward D Wood Jr, is perhaps a play on the=20 word Hollywood (a name we see emblazoned more than once on=20 the famous Beverly Hill) as well as a reference to his own=20 Edward Scissorhands (1990) which, like […]
Gary Cummiskey=20 SOUTH AFRICAN REVIEW 7: The Small Miracle edited by Steve=20 Friedman and Doreen Atkinson (Raven Press, R49,99)=20 THE Small Miracle is a compilation of essays and the sequel=20 to The Long Journey, which traced the story of Codesa I and=20 II. This wide-ranging new volume focuses on events and=20 issues from Codesa to […]
CINEMA: Stanley Peskin BOTH Just Cause and Captives are set in prisons, one in London, the other in the Florida Everglades. In Just Cause, directed by Arne Glimcher, Paul Armstrong (Sean Connery), a retired lawyer, comes into a district that is insular and hostile to his cause, which is to investigate the murder and rape […]
Welcome Msomi, creator of Umabatha, in The Mark Gevisser Profile The divine justice of it all. When Welcome Msomi took his “Zulu Macbeth” to New York in 1979, he found it boycotted by the African National Congress and its supporters, who claimed that because it was “ethnic” (Zulu costumes, Zulu language, Zulu dancing), it had […]
Eddie Koch IN a bold move to clamp down on venality in public office, the African National Congress has decided its MPs must open their family assets and extra- parliamentary earnings to full public scrutiny. The dramatic decision — possibly a first for any political party in the world — coincides with efforts by the […]
The festival of theatre at the Market Lab this weekend opens windows into a range of communities. David le Page reports THE wealth of plays at the Market Laboratory’s Community Theatre Festival this weekend represents an outpouring of imaginative energy that could leave those whose only regular creative act is choosing a title at the […]
FINE ART: Ivor Powell THE Bag Factory studio complex in Fordsburg might one day serve as a parable of the new South Africa — a parable whose point is how unusual normality is in this curious country of ours. The Bag Factory has no real agendas. It provides studio space for professional artists, and just […]
Puppets will magic away the mundane conventions of teaching science in an innovative multimedia series starting on NNTV this week, writes David Le Page A MULTIMEDIA approach to primary science education developed entirely in South Africa, and already acclaimed overseas, is to be launched today with the broadcasting of the first of thirteen half-hour episodes […]
Trade unions are planning a major offensive against the new Labour Relations Bill, reports Eddie Koch ORGANISED labour flexed its muscles this week as talks between trade unions and employers over the new Labour Relations Bill headed for deadlock. The Congress of South African Trade Unions (Cosatu) will hold an emergency executive meeting at the […]
The government will be publishing its White Paper on Arts and Culture in the new year. HAZEL FRIEDMAN finds out what’s in store for IT doesn’t take soothsayer’s skills to predict the contents of the government’s White Paper on Arts and Culture, which will be released in the new year. Simply refer to the first […]
Last week, the Taiwanese ambassador to Pretoria was the only representative of the non-corporate world in a Mail & Guardian picture of the exclusive club of donors of R750 000 to President Nelson Mandela’s Children’s It is not unreasonable to assume that the ambassador’s generosity has something to do with the fact that his government […]
The need to create jobs has emerged as the burning issue for the government, labour and business, reports Reg Rumney Suddenly, at the end of a year in which economic growth and fiscal and monetary discipline held centre stage, joblessness has entered like Banquo’s ghost. The official unemployment rate is around 33 percent, but the […]
Bafana Khumalo Native tongue ‘Things are bad, B-man, I am telling you. They really are.” The man in the business suit took a slug of a three-finger scotch and lit me a cigarette. “White folks should not be behaving like this, productivity will be at an all-time low with this Rugby World Cup thing. “Already […]
Bronwen Roberts Thousands of Eastern Cape taxi commuters were terrified this week as they rode from one town to the next. Many sang and prayed to God to save them from the very people whose service they were using as a vicious war between rival taxi groups fighting over routes continued unabated. The slaughter has […]
The Volkstaat Council has concluded that its dream is not practicable, reports Jan Taljaard After 44 council meetings, 60 committee meetings and more than R3-million in salaries for its 20 members, the Volkstaat Council (VC) has abandoned the idea of an Afrikaner homeland — for the time being. The VC, a council of rightwingers investigating […]
ANDREW WORSDALE separates the intelligent and stylish from the Dumb and Dumbers in his best and worst of 1995’s movies IN a year dominated by Jim Carrey at the box- office — The Mask and Dumb and Dumber were the two top-grossing movies in South Africa, earning a combined income of R16,5-million — – there […]
With the African Nations Cup finals to look forward to, it is hoped that the administrators match the success of the SOCCER: Lungile Madywabe ON the field, South African soccer has made admirable progress since its readmission into world football three years ago but this progress has not been reflected in the administration of the […]
Marino Corazza MOVEABLE FEAST=20 IT’S Sunday May 29, and I’m at Sol’s very own, charming Sun=20 City. In the Soup Bowl, to be exact. At 6:30pm, it’s=20 showtime, folks: the Loeries.=20 ‘Twas the time of year for the pulp and celluloid maestros=20 to receive their just accolades. Fiction, but nevertheless,=20 let’s not kid ourselves, this […]
A light-hearted look at some developments on the business and financial scene * The Advertising Standards Authority (ASA) dismissed a complaint against a Paul Revere ad by the Tobacco Action Committee. The committee said the horse used in the ad was subjected to passive smoking, noting the rider’s cigarette was closer than a metre to […]
Let’s look a gift horse in the mouth, Reg Rumney suggests Promotional material the Mail & Guardian staffers received this year ranged from the sublime — a useful desktop calculator — to the ridiculous: that is, the grey concrete brick that arrived at reception for me. At first I thought it a veiled threat, but […]
GOLF: Jon Swift WE are a nation of immense expectations, buoyed by the optimism which tends to flatten out the hills of the failures which are so inherently part of the human condition. In the realm of South African golf, thank heaven we We have had any number of success stories within the boundaries of […]
Shaun de Waal=20 CHEAP LIVES by Antony Sher (Little, Brown, R79,99)=20 SOME years ago, as the first buds of a new South African=20 dispensation began to open, much ink was expended in=20 speculation about what new forms our literature would now=20 take. It was assumed that the exigencies that drove the=20 apartheid-era novels of such […]
CLASSICAL MUSIC: Coenraad Visser A STRING of world-class performances — what a rare treat for Gauteng classical music With the National Symphony Orchestra, Swedish cellist Torlief Thedeen confirmed that he is one of the most exciting and proficient cellists on world stages today. His compelling and passionate performance of Shostakovich’s Cello Concerto No 1 was […]
Ivo Correia South Africa will kick off World Environment Week by=20 hosting the United Nations Environment Program’s Global 500=20 awards on June 5. President Nelson Mandela will host the award ceremony which =20 will be attended by environmentalists from around the=20 world. The awards are intended to reward exceptional work=20 on behalf of our planet, […]
The theme of this year’s World Environment Day, being=20 staged in South Africa for the first time, is rooted in the=20 struggle for democracy and unity Eddie Koch reports SOME years ago Albie Sachs, then the ANC guru on=20 constitutional matters, wrote that an end to apartheid was=20 the balm that would mend the scars […]
The head of Avia Airlines has a shady past, reports Stefaans BrUmmer GERT de Klerk, the former airline mechanic whose Avia Airlines has made him South Africa’s Richard Branson, built his empire flying clandestine military contracts to war-torn Angola in the 1980s. Avia this month became South Africa’s first independent carrier to ply the lucrative […]