General

South Africa is back in the headlines for all the wrong reasons. Just two weeks after the National Union of Mineworkers ended a national strike, which threatened to seriously disrupt several key 2010 construction projects, workers are at it again. Tens of thousands of SA Municipal Workers’ Union workers have taken to the streets to […]

The Bokke boast players who are the undisputed world’s best in the following positions: wings (both), inside centre, scrummie, blindside (in our sense), lock (both — with emphasis). In the following positions we have players who on their day need stand back to no-one and in some cases are on their way to being the […]

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Well, apart from giving us a good dose of sadness, the VW Beetle “people’s car” and leaving us promising each other “never again”, I can’t think of anything else. And if grossly inflated vehicle prices and the ongoing massacres around the world are anything to go by, only one of those has really lasted anyway. […]

By Roger Diamond There’s something about being in trouble together, a binding force that brings people together, a mutual challenge or a common enemy. It seems to me that people would rather focus on such a threat, even though it’s remote or unlikely, than something more likely, but discriminatory. Take for example climate change, which […]

So Zlatan Ibrahimovic is apparently twice the player Samuel Eto’o is? Which form of reasoning Pep Guardiola used to come up with that conclusion I will never know. Statistics show that the Cameroonian hitman has been the best striker in Europe over the last five years, banging in league goals for fun. And he has […]

“The purpose of engagement,” said Kate Philip to a small but packed lecture theatre at UCT’s Hiddingh Campus this weekend “is to change the world, a world that is shaped by power. Power itself is not random, it is organised, and therefore to tackle forms of power, one must be organised as well”. This was […]

My maid, a sweet young lass called Tang Ying, brings me a punnet of strawberries under a thick layer of purplish mould. It had been softly rotting away, hidden under a packet at the bottom of our vegetable rack. She wants to know if she should throw it away. In the Family Convenience store of […]

Since June 8 2005 SA Rugby has carried the Eastern Cape Super Rugby franchise around its neck as a self-imposed albatross after declaring that SA had six Super Rugby franchises and this past week has seen a glaring display of dereliction of duty by SA Rugby’s Sanzar representatives. The 15th team, in an expanded Super […]

The Chinese worker suddenly and loudly laughed at me as I strode under my umbrella into the parking lot where our apartment building is on Beijing West road in downtown Shanghai. He stood directly in front of me and laughed, smirking at me: it was a loud, mocking, donkey’s bray. He shouted something at his […]

Tomorrow I turn 35. Officially, I become a white middle-aged, middle-class man. And doesn’t it suck balls? There was a time in history when that statement wouldn’t have struck fear in my heart. It would have been a coming of age. The reaching of a pinnacle of human development. In the 1950s we were the […]

Seneca, the stoic Roman philosopher, said “it is a rough road that leads to the heights of greatness”. He makes a fine point. Great men only emerge once they have endured trial and tribulation, exposing the barest shivers of their true character, which will either rise with the occasion or collapse under the weight of […]