ANIMAL PICKETSANIMAL rights activisits picketed in Johannesburg on Saturday against Environmental minister Pallo Jordan, demanding that he resign for allowing a consignment of 40 baboons to be exported to a controversial French animal experiment laboratory.
NOBODY NOTICES DIAZ
The weekend marked the 500th anniversary of the event that launched the colonial age in Africa — Portuguese explorer Bartholomew Diaz setting foot on Cape soil. But there were no celebrations or speeches in South Africa, the country that exists as a consequence of that trip.
FOOD AID RUNS LOW
SOME 200 000 Sierra Leonians are “virtually destitute” with UN World Food Program stocks running desparately low, the agency warned on Friday. The agency has only enough food to feed 65 000 people for another month. The food crisis is the result of political strife following the May military coup, and sanctions imposed by neighbouring states.
‘PROSTITUTES’ PULLED OFF PLANE
FIFTY Nigerian women have been arrested as they boarded a Lagos plane bound for the Ukraine on suspicion that they were being hired as prostitutes to work in Europe. A chief from neighbouring Benin arrested along with them is believed to be their procurer. The women deny the charges and say they were travelling aboard to study.
CONSCRIPT LABOUR BILL DROPPED
THE Mozambique government has withdrawn a plan for a conscript national development service after the opposition Renamo group opposed it as unconstitutional and a form of forced labour. Lawyers have also warned that the constitution permits only voluntary labour.
SUZMAN AT 80 The indomitable Helen Suzman, sole voice of conscience in the white parliament for many years, turned 80 on Friday, inspiring many tributes, including one from old friend, 79-year-old President Nelson Mandela. “Helen Suzman’s courage and forthrightness, in the face of fiercely entrenched racial prejudice, inspired others to reject racial discrimination and minority privilege,” he wrote, “and to embrace the concept of genuine nonracial multiparty democracy …Her unrelenting struggle for justice has touched the lives of millions of South Africans.”
WITS ACADEMIC WINS PRIZE Dr Lee Berger, head of the paleoanthropoogy research group at the University of the Witwatersrand Medical School, is due to receive the first National Geographic Society Research and Exploration Prize on Friday night. Berger is being honoured for his study of a 117 000-year-old humanoid footprint found in the Western Cape which, he says, is additional proof the human species began in southern Africa, not eastern Africa.