Staff Reporter

I wonder how nervous the South African government and the peace-loving people of Durban are about the forthcoming conference on racism, scheduled for the Banana City at the end of August.

A local production of <i>The Blacks</i> leaves questions unaswered. French writer Jean Genet’s play <i>The Blacks</i> is a tricky customer at the best of times – and its author intended it to be so.

I was last in Amsterdam in 1987. The world was still in the grip of the Cold War. The Berlin Wall was still standing. Nelson Mandela was still in jail. God was in his heaven and the devil was still in hell. Or so the theory went, anyway.

The Berlin Wall is gone, but liberated inhabitants are still searching for the elusive anchor of their souls. Someone once asked John Le Carre what on Earth he would write about, now that the Berlin Wall had fallen.

The United States’s stance on the racism conference was strange, but predictable. It seems that there are no new stories in this world – only new twists, and sometimes new endings. The World Conference on Racism, Xenophobia, Intolerance, etc, etc, will come to a spluttering end.

Phaswane Mpe is a short, sharp, earthily intellectual sort of guy, bursting with a love of language and linguistics (mostly English and Pedi), who somehow manages to combine all these things into his short, powerhouse of a novel, <i>Welcome to Our Hillbrow</i>.

The US may react with warlike vengeance, or avoid spiralling into reprisals. On Day Zero, the reaction of America’s leaders was one of dumbfounded inarticulacy. It was hard to follow what any of them, particularly the president, was trying to say.

Something extraordinary is happening in the wake of the New York tragedy. It is already hard to recall what normal life was like – and this is only the beginning. Americans in general, and New Yorkers in particular, are struggling to come to terms with their living nightmare.

One is beginning to get the hang of what United States President George W Bush is getting at when he warns the world that this is going to be "a different kind of war". "This is not going be like any other war you’ve ever seen," says the prez.

Like paradise, Equatorial Guinea is made up of equal parts of charm and horror. The sign on the wall of the quaint seaside restaurant reminds citizens that September 27 is the international day for tourism.

Suddenly, our time in Cameroon is drawing to a close. It has been a year and a half – a long year and a half, at times, plagued by Third World frustrations that could sometimes be taken as personal affronts: the thudding heat, the hideous airport, the dysfunctional roads.

The last thing I remember, I was casting rather cold words on the spectre of Johannesburg’s billion points of electric light sprawled smugly across the dark Highveld, rising up to meet me as I prepared for my final descent.

In the legendary Helena Sheehan-Jeremy Cronin conversations, Cronin pondered the tension between intellect and organisational discipline. But Dumisani Makhaye’s slapdown of Cronin evaded this issue, merely dismissing Cronin as a would-be "white Messiah".

The responses to this week’s bombings were predictable. Political parties condemned in the strongest possible terms the wanton destruction that accompanied the bombings. The police told us, with absolute bravado, that they knew who the bombers were and vowed that it was only a matter of time before they would have them behind bars. Afrikaner organisations used the opportunity to score political points by warning the government that if it did not take this ethnic group’s concerns seriously, pent up frustrations would result in more violence by extremist groups.

South Africa has emerged from a baptism of fire. The miracle of transformation, which saw a smooth transition from apartheid to democracy, is a cause for great celebration and thanksgiving.

Yes, to tell you the truth I am sick of hearing myself moaning. I am sick of not walking tall and not going out to buy South African potatoes with "Proudly South African" stickers on them.

In case you haven’t heard about it, a "coalition" of businessmen and civic leaders in Port Elizabeth is intending to erect, at some phenomenal cost, a 30-storey-high metal statue of Mr Nelson Mandela, in the middle of the harbour.

Affordable drugs: Plans for a two-tier system for drug pricing, which will supply cheap medicines to poor countries though they will remain far more expensive for the rich, will be launched this week by the United Kingdom’s International Development Secretary, Clare Short.

From hosting the World Summit on Sustainable Development to the African Union inaugural summit and mediating in the Burundi ceasefire negotiations, South Africa’s taxpayers are picking up the tab — just short of an extra R427-million over and above February’s budget allocations. The costs of South Africa’s new international role as outlined in Minister of […]

General Francisco Franco’s Spanish dictatorship stole children from the families of his leftwing opponents and gave them to his supporters or sent them to be brought up in convents or monasteries, according to a book published yesterday. “They took my child to baptise him but they never brought him back,” said Emilia Giron (82) whose […]

I’ve been told that Johannesburg has been built, knocked down, and rebuilt five times since it was founded somewhere around 1886. Not that each wave of construction and destruction happened all at once.

Like many other concerned citizens I am very worried about what is going to happen to that clever but largely misunderstood fellow, Tony Leon. So far I haven’t actually lost any sleep over Tony.

In his novel, The Chateau, set in France in 1945, the American writer William Maxwell delicately explored the relationship between a young American couple, Harold and Barbara Rhodes, and the Europeans they encounter on a trip just after the end of the war.

I am inspired to write this article (in ebullient defence of our worthy and misunderstood presidential representative) by the quite unseemly attacks made on his character and intellect in last week’s <i>Mail & Guardian</i> ("Mbeki’s malaise goes deeper than Parks").

Newspapers and television continue to seethe with yet more uninformed comment on the matter of the so-called HIV/Aids crisis. I cannot but sympathise with the frustrations of our Department of Health in its lonely and audacious crusade against this killer virus.

Malegapuru Makgoba’s angry outburst about the cynical exploitation which has taken place around the dying child, Nkosi Johnson, spoke loudest in its subtext. People of unpretentious sensitivity have writhed in shame at the media junket that has been made of this child’s impending death.

Last Friday President Thabo Mbeki made his annual State of the Nation speech to Parliament. As expected the occasion exposed us to another display of the bossman’s ebullient wordplay, another glimpse across the bright fabric of a mind that passeth all common understanding.

There is an ironic parity between utterances made recently by Sir Antony Sher and those made some years ago by another South African-born actor, Janet Suzman.

Around the end of next month a novel of mine is being published. <i>Songs of the Cockroach</i> is set in the Cape Town of 2004 and takes a wistful look at various corrupt or absurd enterprises, the sometimes abominable people driving them three years from now.

As much as it irks one to admit it, Percy Sonn got it absolutely right. Hansie Cronje should immediately be returned to full participation in not only cricketing but its associated gambling activities as well.