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 Franz Krüger: THE OMBUD
The hamster has landed
Just for fun, I think I will write up a document titled Special Blue Hamster Consolidated Surveillance Report and fax it to media and trade unions. It will say something along these lines: Gauteng's monorail project is really a ploy by a syndicate of Malaysian bookmakers to fund the ANC leadership bid of one of the candidates, codenamed X, writes Franz Krüger.
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 Richard Calland: CONTRETEMPS
Tony Blair's world of good and evil
Alongside the Oscar-winning performance by Helen Mirren, The Queen included cameo performances depicting the relationship between Tony Blair and his then-trusted lieutenant, Alastair Campbell. Unlike Mirren’s character, they were hopelessly implausible for one simple reason -- the conspicuous absence of any profanity.
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 Tom Eaton: VIVA GAZANIA!
Parisparisparisparisparisparisparis
It’s not as if it had been a quiet week, mind you. In the Kremlin, Russia’s new apocalyptics dimmed the lights, dusted off 30-year-old slides of trajectories and megadeath estimates and similar nuclear porn, and ruminated, jowls a-wobble, about the possibility of rolling their seeping, rusting arsenal westward on 10 000 donkey-carts.
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 Guy Berger: CONVERSE
Black editor negotiates race and audience
It's been a remarkable turn of the tables as Henry Jeffreys recently notched up one year as the first black editor of Die Burger. The paper historically was at the heart of Afrikaner nationalism. His position at the publication is a measure of the immensity of change in South Africa. So, how has it been working out?
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 Binyavanga Wainaina: CONTINENTAL DRIFT
Sailing the ocean of drained brains
The nation is a bathtub. Oh my God, it’s brain draining! Recently I heard that somebody was publishing a piece accusing me and others of “selling out to the West”. Now, I wish I could announce that I did not care, but in truth my stomach coiled for a while, guiltily.
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 John Matshikiza: WITH THE LID ON
Even Confucius, he confused
I must say that I am gobsmacked by the responses in these pages to a couple of observations I made in this column relating to the new Chinatown in Cyrildene, east Johannesburg. On reflection, I must have been losing it. I was guilty of becoming complacent, and writing as if regular readers were fully aware of my irreverent style. Bad mistake.
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Tom Eaton: VIVA GAZANIA!
You strike an SUV, you strike a rock
South Africa’s middle class is not easily moved to anger, perhaps because anger requires passion, and passion requires a mind and heart, operating roughly in tandem. It is almost constantly irritable, of course; but pure, white-hot rage seems to be quite beyond the scope of the great Afro-Tuscan and Cape-Venetian wastelands that signify our economic dawn and cultural dusk.
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Richard Calland: CONTRETEMPS
An establishment candidate emerges
An establishment candidate was always going to emerge, eventually, from the Byzantine confusion of the ANC’s leadership fight. It was only a question of when -- and, of course, who. The new South African establishment, just like any establishment, requires the reassurance that its interests will be served at the apex of government.
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Franz Krüger: THE OMBUD
A community offended
Maybe race is still too big an obsession for South Africans to have a reasonable discussion about it. Real, old-style racism has been driven underground -- into private discussions around the braai fire and nasty little corners on the internet. Honest public discussion about race is rare.
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John Matshikiza: WITH THE LID OFF
New take on the African Union
So, anyway, I was looking through various websites on the internet, trying to find some concrete information for a talk I had been invited to present on the occasion of the forty-fourth anniversary of Africa Day, May 25 2007. The sacred anniversary had originally been called “Africa Freedom Day”, when it was dedicated as such at the launch of the then brand-new Organisation of African Unity in the Ethiopian capital of Addis Ababa on that date in 1963.
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Tom Eaton: VIVA GAZANIA!
All for one and one for all
"Your point is well made and well taken, comrade, but this committee is not convinced that petitioning the World Wildlife Foundation to rename the sperm whale is an appropriate way to launch comrade Tokyo’s candidacy. We have to consider what the voters want, and the voters want balloons and ANC-themed T-shirts. Batho Pele, that sort of thing.”
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Guy Berger: CONVERSE
World newspaper congress comes to Cape Town
South African newspaper editors came home from Moscow last year all fired up to take their online editions more seriously. They had been delegates to the World Newspaper Congress and become enthused by colleagues from developed countries who could talk about little else.
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John Matshikiza: WITH THE LID OFF
Reliving a jungle disaster
I heard with a sickening sense of foreboding the news that an airliner had come down somewhere in Central Africa shortly after take-off from Cameroon’s main airport at Douala. Any airliner coming down anywhere in the world fills me with this kind of dread. The feeling is fuelled by hundreds of take-offs and landings across four continents in a long travelling life.
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Nick Said: CAUGHT OFFSIDE
Was it really that bad?
It is estimated that about 70% of South African football fans support either Kaizer Chiefs or Orlando Pirates, which begs the question: Are the Soweto giants really good for our soccer? The 2006/07 season has been described as boring, lacking intensity and poor in quality, but for me this has been one of the more interesting campaigns in recent times.
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Tom Eaton: VIVA GAZANIA!
Is it a bird? Is it a plane? A shrink?
It is not Slaughterhouse 5, or Catch-22; it is not even The Magnificent Seven. It is neither Zuckerman, nor Everyman. It is Spider-Man 3, and no more. There is a film, in which there appears a man, who is also a spider, and he has appeared three times. That is all.
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Richard Calland: CONTRETEMPS
The Zille gambit: delivery or rhetoric?
Most opposition leaders can enjoy the luxury of opposition: they can promise the world, free of the responsibility to deliver it. The new leader of the DA, Helen Zille, is in an unusual position. Wisely, she has decided to remain mayor of Cape Town. She is betting that the opportunity to match words with deeds outweighs the risk that her term as mayor will expose her utterances for empty rhetoric.
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John Matshikiza: WITH THE LID OFF
The polarisation is complete
I could swear I saw French president-elect Nicolas Sarkozy wince a couple of times as a small woman with a big voice launched into the French national anthem right after his acceptance speech. Amplified to fill the open air stadium where Sarkozy’s supporters had gathered in rapturous self-congratulation, the woman belted out the words that had been born out of the bloody French revolution of 1789.
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Tom Eaton: VIVA GAZANIA!
All the better to cook you with
The concerns of old wandering knights are no longer the concerns of industrialised Spain and Don Quixote’s windmills are gone. Were that ancient champion and his squire to amble, clanking and saddle-sore, onto the great baking plain of Iberia, they would find themselves dwarfed by a new enemy.
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Nick Said: CAUGHT OFFSIDE
Sundowns' failure a worrying sign
Mamelodi Sundowns may have cruised to the Castle Premiership title this season, but they were taught a footballing lesson by Egyptian side Al-Ahly in the CAF Champions League recently. That should have provided a wake-up call to South Africans who believe that the Castle Premiership sets the benchmark in terms of African league competition.
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Guy Berger: CONVERSE
New tools to crack your media consumption
Last week was World Press Freedom Day on May 3 -- a good occasion to create and share some cool online research tools about South African media. There are 10 listed below, ranging in complexity as you read. But spending 30 minutes on getting to grips with them now could save you days' worth of online search time in the future. True.
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| MORE ARTICLES |
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| Binyavanga Wainaina : Knee-jerk nativism |
| John Matshikiza : Oiling the cogs of sleaze and war |
| Tom Eaton : Vernietentieten or Freedom Road? |
| Nick Said : How words can hurt |
| Richard Calland : The SACP at a loose end |
| Franz Krüger : Sleaze: Devil's in the details |
| John Matshikiza : Natural-born matricide |
| Tom Eaton : 59-trillion reasons for a let-them-work ethic |
| Guy Berger : Revealing race: Is anyone interested? |
| Binyavanga Wainaina : Africa through the looking glass of pity |
| John Matshikiza : Massaging race into cabbage |
| Tom Eaton : Breeding in a time of gene-deprivation |
| Nick Said : Mission impossible? |
| John Matshikiza : They should be so lucky! |
| Tom Eaton : The bunny is always right |
| Nick Said : Leadership letting us down |
| Guy Berger : Old media have a chance to prepare, but will they? |
| Tom Eaton : Seeing is deceiving |
| Nick Said : Building for the future |
| Binyavanga Wainaina : The trouble with InstaNations |
| John Matshikiza : An artful life is lost, Lindelani |
| Tom Eaton : Free and Fair in Exile House |
