You wake up in the morning, switch on your solar-powered lights, head over to your coffee maker and enjoy a delicious renewable energy beverage. You get dressed in carbon neutral clothes produced by off grid factories and catch the wind-powered underground to your energy-efficient office. A dream? No. Welcome to Masdar City in the United [...]
The 1970s at Wits were a time of mass meetings, all-night vigils, marches, arrests and security police spies. The decade ushered in the June 16 uprisings and the era of Africanisation, when the SRC and the National Union of South African Students (NUSAS) took a long, hard look at what it meant to be South [...]
The new BIG BROTHER who is watching you is the giant electronic eye on the world. This not only includes online criminals and internet fraud, but also an expanding network of as yet non-criminalised activities, including pervasive forms of surveillance, such as cameras in retail stores and microchips in garments that can track your every [...]
The ultimate prestige gift amongst wealthy Vietnamese who wish to curry favour with influential politicians and businesspeople is a rhino horn hangover cure. The powdered horn, priced at several thousand dollars for a few grams is packaged in an ornate little casket and presented with pride. […]
When we’re on Facebook, BBM’ing, Internet dating or sms’ing, we can be whoever our fantasy wants us to be and the people we meet online can become our fantasy relationship. Heather Dugmore explores the role of Facebook and other social media in extra-relationship affairs. […]
Beads are beautiful, aesthetic and one of the first expressions of human thinking. The oldest known beads in the world were found in the Blombos Cave on South Africa’s southern Cape coast. They date back 75 000 years ago when a human being walked the beach, collecting 60 shells of the same size, which were [...]
It has taken twelve long years for the original descendants of the Khomani San to start benefiting from their ancestral land inside and outside the Kgalagadi Transfrontier Park, even though it was returned to them in 1999. […]
When Julius Malema and other stone-throwing politicians try to win votes by shouting about redistributing more white-owned commercial farms, they need to be taken in hand and shown that this is as logical as drinking brandy to get sober. – Andries Pienaar, 2010 South African Sheep Farmer of the Year. […]
Wind and rain swept through the dark streets of Nieuwoudtville like a highwayman claiming his sweetheart. Sheltering from the storm in the large kitchen of a stone cottage, a group of friends sat round the hearth, where a woodfire crackled. They chatted and laughed and urged Hennie O’Kennedy to sing. […]
I knew there was something special about the chiffonier when I saw it standing on auction in the once grand dining room of No 2 Richmond Road, a Victorian home in the town of Middelburg in the Karoo. […]
