Labour tenants are fighting back after a wave of evictions, reports Vuyo Mvoko MBULAWA Mavimbela faces a terrible dilemma — either he loses his home or all the wealth he has accumulated in his 55 years: 27 cows and 54 sheep. Mavimbela, a “farm boy” since birth, is a labour tenant in the Piet Retief […]
CINEMA: Fabius Burger AT a recent Hollywood party, Jodie Foster jumped on Mel Gibson’s back and rode him like a horse — apparently their way of showing that Maverick, their upcoming western, will be politically correct. Women, no longer loving wives frying corn fritters back at the homestead, now also brandish the whip. But two […]
RUGBY: Barney Spender HOW many eyes does a kiwi bird have? It is a popular question doing the rounds among the South African media, supporters and probably the players as well. The answer is usually deemed to be one at most and, in the case of some referees, officials and home supporters, none at all. […]
The new health minister launches a massive Aids programme to deal with the looming crisis. Mark Gevisser reports AFTER years of official foot-dragging and negligence, the government has finally endorsed an Aids programme that could see as much as R256-million allocated to Aids prevention and care in the next two years. In the most important […]
THEATRE: Guy Willoughby ANGELS are definitely making a comeback. Ever since Wim Wenders’ achingly lyrical movie Wings of Desire (1987), the prospect of lovely and innocent beings at work in a fallen world has taken imaginative hold. This is perhaps a signal that, in the West, the world is regarded as so irretrievably rotten that […]
Wisden editor Matthew Engel reports on South Africa’s return to the home of cricket LAST WEEK, when the touring South African cricketers were playing Durham on the little ground at Chester-le-Street, Wayne Larkins, a man who hits a cricket ball very hard, pulled a delivery from Allan Donald, a man who bowls a cricket ball […]
Weekly Mail Reporter THE ANC’s Johannesburg headquarters, Shell House, is pervaded by disillusionment and insecurity as hundreds of staff members wait for cutbacks in the organisation’s operations. This is despite assurances from their leadership that the organisation will look after its employees. The scaling down of the ANC’s headquarters after its election victory has been […]
For astronomers it couldn’t get any better than this. But the people of Sutherland couldn’t have cared less about the Shoemaker-Levy 9 comet, reports Mondli waka Makhanya THE men at Sutherland’s South African Astronomical Observatory were as bubbly as nursery school kids at a birthday party as they prepared to view the first in a […]
Dutch bassist Eric van der Westen keeps forging links with South African jazz. Now local musos can sample his technique at a series of workshops. Gwen Ansell reports `LAST time I left South Africa,” reflects Dutch jazz bassist Eric van der Westen over a heaped plate of Yeoville’s best bacon and eggs, “it took me […]
ONE of the more remarkable sidelights of the Pick ‘n Pay dispute has been the comment by the Democratic Party’s Douglas Gibson that as a developing country, South Africa “cannot afford militant unions much longer”. The National Party has also weighed in with calls for government intervention, saying that “unambiguous choices will have to be […]
State security files obtained by the Mail & Guardian under the new Bill of Rights are empty or inaccurate — suggesting police have hidden or destroyed the information they collected during the 1980s. By Weekly Mail Reporter THE Mail & Guardian’s campaign to have the government release security information collected in the 1980s has revealed […]
Weekly Mail Reporter THE police file on Mail & Guardian co-editor Anton Harber — the first such security file from the 1980s to be released — consists of three scanty A4 pages of a computer printout, filled with errors. If the file is anything to go on, the police knew almost nothing about Harber; what […]
Andrew Trench and Paul Stober SOUTH AFRICAN security forces are keeping a close watch on the former homelands of Transkei and Ciskei as simmering discontent in police and military ranks threatens to jeopardise order in the regions. South African intelligence assessments of the former homelands warn of a breakdown of discipline in the ranks of […]
“WHY have the killings stopped? Because we have overrun most of the country,” says Abby Muvunandinga, the Rwanda Patriotic Front’s young information officer at Losumo border crossing. In the gorge below, where the Kagera river flows from Rwanda into Tanzania, six bloated, naked bodies slosh in the water — another day’s crop from the killing […]
After being runner-up in the Open twice, Nick Price finally got his hands on the Claret Jug last weekend GOLF: Paul Martin THOUGH it’s flown trans-Atlantically with him, Nick Price still hardly ever puts his Claret Jug down. It overflowed with champagne on Sunday evening, causing a champion’s hangover, but on Monday after a three-hour […]
Sibusiso Nxumalo talks to some `illegals’ A comment by Edwin, a Nigerian now living illegally in Johannesburg and studying business science at Damelin College, sums up the pressures driving many from distant African countries to South Africa: “It’s much better than at home. At least there are still some jobs and there aren’t too many […]
* DESPITE the inevitable griping about the ad industry’s high profile Loeries Awards, an independent Markinor survey shows this year’s ceremony got the thumbs’ up from those who attended. Seventy percent of respondents thought attending the Loeries was very good or good value for money in terms of business generated or staff motivation.
Farouk Chothia FRESH allegations about a high-ranking South African policeman arming an Inkatha warlord three weeks after the April elections have heightened ANC frustrations in kwaZulu/Natal over the failure of Safety and Security Minister Sydney Mufamadi to act on reports linking Natal policemen to violence. The charges are contained in an affidavit by a man […]
Poetry readings and techno raves put punch into an often predictable Fringe, writes Alex Dodd ONE flu-ridden Grahamstown local wildly theorised that the sewer system was under such pressure at this year’s festival that the purity of her drinking water had been affected. The festival’s outsize status similarly affected the art scene — although art, […]
The ANC’s traditional leftwing tussles with a `pragmatist’ camp for the soul of the party. Paul Stober reports The African National Congress’ parliamentary caucus has become the front line of a battle between the organisation’s “socialist” and “pragmatic” camps. According to ANC parliamentary sources, the battle is about the future direction of the ANC. This […]
THEATRE: Bafana Khumalo A GROUP of highly skilled musicians, dancers and singers invades a small stage, bashing out a mournful tune, the sound filling up the venue until even the most restrained member of the audience acknowledges: “They are good, they are damn good!” This is the scaled-down version of Mothobi Mutloatse’s Sell Out! The […]
Never mind Pepsi, Canada’s Cott Corporation is the latest threat to Coke in South Africa, reports Teigue Payne CANADIAN housebrands company Cott Corporation has captured a sizeable slice of the supermarket own-brand cola market. Yet its techniques could be extended to many other products — and could be copied by other entrepreneurs. Cott, which has […]
Reg Rumney reports on an innovative union scheme to help retrenched miners create jobs A TRAIL-blazing union-initiated job-creation centre is already pumping R40 000 a month into the rural community in which it operates. The National Union of Mineworkers’ Mhala Development Centre was launched in the former Gazankulu in the Eastern Transvaal at the beginning […]
Sibusiso Nxumalo IT’S a chill Monday morning in a coal-yard in White City, Soweto. Oupa Nsibande, his face black with soot, is among a group of men gathered around a flaming inner-tyre they are burning for warmth. Though it’s only 6.30am, they’re swigging in turn from a carton of sorghum beer. The yard is dominated […]
Sydney Mufamadi is expected to run the crucial police ministry without staff or a budget, reports Paul Stober SAFETY and Security Minister Sydney Mufamadi, faced with the difficult and urgent task of reforming the police, has a simple problem: he has not been given the personnel or resources to do the job. With policing services […]
Alex Dodd A SMALL Grahamstown-based book dealer has made one small step for South African book distribution and one giant leap for readers of offbeat, locally obscure literature. Deep South Distribution (DSD) was started three years ago by Rhodes BA graduate Paul Wessels as a result of his own “frustration with not being able to […]
RUGBY: Barney Spender HALF-way through the tour, and the South African players and management know that they are looking down the barrel. This tour now rests on the fate of the second test in Wellington tomorrow week. Lose that and the series is gone and the tour will be deemed a failure no matter what […]
The PWV will be hard-pressed to construct 150 000 houses a year, reports Drew Forrest THE low-cost housing field has become a house divided since Tokyo Sexwale’s PWV master plan was abruptly thrust into the public arena. “Crazy”, “Victorian Utopianism”, “not a real plan at all” have been among the reactions of sceptics to the […]
Textile firms’ share prices are surging, but the industry is still in the doldrums, reports Jacques Magliolo MARKET experts play down last year’s 80 percent increase in textile industry share prices, saying the sector has “seen its good times and must now face the real world of Gatt, higher competition, strained profit margins and much-needed […]
Native tongue Bafana Khumalo GRAHAMSTOWN, beautiful colonial Grahamstown. I found myself walking through its streets last week, freezing some very delicate parts of my anatomy, while trying to come up with profound critiques of the theatrical and musical productions at the festival. This town and I go back a long way _ to the early […]
CRICKET: Jon Swift IT is of course supposition, for no one in the United Cricket Board would be so arrogant as to make this claim, but South Africa are starting to wield an increasing influence on world cricket affairs. It shows in a number of aspects, some of them spelt out by UCB managing director […]
As a new government commission prepares to examine mine safety, Vuyo Mvoko speaks to a victim of a mining disaster A WARD at the Rand Mutual mine hospital in Johannesburg has, for nearly a quarter of a century, been “home” to paralysed migrant miner Marcelino Kangombe. In 1971, he had been employed for only seven […]