Staff Reporter

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.

Last week our financially crippled airline, South African Airways (SAA), announced it will be spending in excess of R30-billion on updating its fleet. But don’t let this worry you. The decision was taken by exactly the same cluster of SAA eggheads who employed Coleman Andrews.

The Democratic Alliance did nothing wrong. All the DA did was discuss, negotiate, arrange, set up and do all the paperwork in order to accept an R800 000 donation from an international fraudster.

The spectre of an invisible sniper casually picking off innocent citizens going about their business in suburban Washington is a terrifying one. People are staying home from work, parents are keeping their children out of school.

The career of former Rhodesian prime minister Sir Garfield Todd who died on Sunday, aged 94, spanned half a century of dramatic change in Central Africa. Todd, who was described variously as a flamboyant autocrat, a dangerous liberal and the nation’s conscience.

On the afternoon of June 3 1998, I spent a few hours in the company of an extraordinary man. It was the first and only time I met him. Listening to him speak I became aware of a formidable mind with access to wide experience.

In another of his increasingly astonishing revelations, President Thabo Mbeki recently announced that he had become aware of a new political party, in diametric opposition to the ANC.

Two books I would like to say something about as we lift our groggy bodies out of this fleeting season of good cheer: Polish journalist Ryszard Kapuscinski’s <i>The Shadow of the Sun</i> and American novelist Barbara Kingsolver’s <i>The Poisonwood Bible</i>.

Whizz-kid Mark Shuttleworth has come up with the notion of appointing himself First African in Space. When Yuri Gagarin was launched into the atmosphere on April 12 1961, the Soviet Union was able to proudly herald him as "the first human in space".

There is a permanent whiff of sulphur in the air in Goma, as if the devil has just passed through, and might well be back at any moment. Even at the best of times, when Mount Nyiragongo is in repose, its volcanic authority is stamped on every part of life.

This week I sneaked, almost (but not quite) unnoticed, into a midday matinee of Leon Schuster’s latest offering, <i>Mr Bones</i>. Like most people who think themselves too sophisticated for the kind of movies Schuster churns out, I didn’t really want anyone to see me doing it.

The Inkatha Freedom Party has decided to invest in Hypo-Plus, a controversial product that claims to be effective in the treatment of HIV/Aids. The <i>Mail & Guardian</i> revealed last week that the ANC’s Umkhonto weSizwe Military Veterans’ Association was linked to a company involved in marketing Hypo-Plus.

Don’t be fooled into thinking soccer is just a game. I have to confess that I don’t know much about sport. I was actually thrown out of the three-legged race in primary school for persistently trying to let my partner do all the running. It went downwards from there.

A man with no clothes on is bound to be slippery. When I called Beau Brummell on the cell number at the bottom of his hand-written press release, it took some time for the man himself to come to the phone. The lady who answered politely asked me to hang on while she located him.

George Soros’s understanding of global finance is rivalled only by that of Alan Greenspan. He didn’t exactly look like one of the richest men in the world. In fact, he looked like a wandering Hungarian Jewish refugee of around 1947 — a casual check jacket worn over an unremarkable blue shirt.

Even the most remote political observer would have noticed that South Africa crossed a critical threshold. Whereas previous public exchanges between the ANC and Cosatu and the SACP have ended in stalemate, the week’s exchanges revealed that political discourse has shifted leftwards.

This year’s Aardklop festival, the fifth — stretching over five days last week — attracted to villagey, leafy Potchefstroom no less than 120 000 people to attend some 90 shows. My report of an attendance filling only two of those days, with a mere seven of those shows, must be understood to be an under-embrace of that most pleasant of spring rituals. Still, seven new, worthwhile plays are more than one gets to sample in Johannesburg these days in a month.

Sharp-eyed readers will not have failed to notice that I did not finish a thought that I began in last week’s column–namely, what the films in the <i>Three Continents Documentary Film Festival</i> held at Buenos Aires, Argentina, were all about.

An article told of a South African musician who has come back to Africa in order to make contact with the "true roots" of jazz. The piece reiterated a comfortable fiction about Africa having single-handedly hosted the birth of jazz.

September 27, 2002 An unfolding human tragedy Being invited on to the jury of the Three Continents International Documentary Film Festival in Buenos Aires is one of the more interesting assignments that has come my way in recent years, for two reasons. A footnote or a hero? Steve Biko was just about to turn 23 […]

An extraordinary tale of mistrust and resentment between two generations of South African spies has run like an exposed nerve through the proceedings of the Desai Commission in Cape Town. Much of the attention has focused on the financial scandals in which some DA office holders have been involved.

“The thing about Andr Nel,” sighed a former national selector last summer as Australia pasted the South African bowling all over the Wanderers, “is that he looks like a fast bowler and behaves like a fast bowler, but he just isn’t very fast.” Nel was at the centre of a minor rumpus last year when […]

For a first-time visitor the reasons why Zimbabwe has garnered so much negative international publicity are not immediately apparent — many have commented on how normal everything appears. Harare’s roads have lots of smart new cars, the fashionable suburbs still look good and one does not have a sense of vulnerability to violence on the […]

Being invited on to the jury of the Three Continents International Documentary Film Festival in Buenos Aires is one of the more interesting assignments that has come my way in recent years, for two reasons.

What is most puzzling about the proposed Broadcasting Amendment Bill is why anyone thought it was needed. Nudging the SABC into fulfilling its obligations could come from far less weighty mechanisms than an amendment Bill.

Deputy Minister of Safety and Security Joe Matthews has opened a probe into opposition claims of a possible cover-up and massive bungling by criminal justice officials in the Martin Whitaker murder investigation. Whitaker was allegedly shot and killed by Dumisani Ncamazana.