The subject was, unsurprisingly, Nelson Mandela and what has been a widespread deification of the great man's lifelong achievements.

She says she still feels bruised by the whole affair. Publishing your first novel and finding it short listed for the Whitbread First Novel Award ought to have been an experience to cherish for Rachel Zadok.

In one sense, at 4ft 9ins, there isn't a lot of Precious McKenzie. But it's a case of the old saying – there is more than meets the eye.

Cape Town is not exactly short of decent views. But the vista from Philip Le Roux's office window is breathtaking. Laid out before him are the sumptuous gardens of Kirstenbosch and the mountains behind as a backdrop, as if in a painting.

She glides serenely into the room, with the grace and elegance of a swan. But like the swan, you do not see the non-stop motion of the legs, propelling Pam Golding here, there, everywhere...

Imagine the fantasy of being the most successful sports person in the world.

The fund of goodwill and optimism for South Africa is felt right across the world.

It started with a simple camping trip to the Cape's Gansbaai region, back in 1991. Heiner Lutzeyer and his son Michael just wanted a few simple days resting and relaxing close to nature...

He lives in a Cape Town cottage built for officers before the Boer War. Perhaps not surprising then, that Melvyn Wallis-Brown revels in the subject of history, not least how it has underpinned the structure of his beloved Bishops school.

The important guests had arrived, 60 of them were in the restaurant. In the kitchen of 'Le Quartier Francais' at Franschoek, you could cut the tension, like a knife through butter.

Shootings, robberies, assaults: damaging levels of long term unemployment. Young people without jobs and with little hope...

They came at three in the morning, their regular calling time. He still remembers the fear of a 5 year-old boy, awoken in the dark by the shouts, the barking of police dogs and the threats. "They would come barging in turning the house and our beds upside down, searching, always searching."

Louis Mzomba is a schoolteacher in South Africa. He’s a man in love with his job and his country but sometimes they make him cry. Take the case of Andile.

He has pursued almost a crusade, a missionary like zeal against the Western world, its inadequacies and corruptions, for almost 40 years. Few politicians of recent times have escaped the withering criticisms, the icy blast of his rhetoric. He once disparagingly called South African former Finance Minister Trevor Manuel "a long haired biker of the 1980s".

Under the shade of a leafy tree, within a stone's throw of Newlands, his great old stamping ground, John Gainsford reflects on his life and times.