Corrie Holloway is one of an increasingly maverick pack of women challenging racial and gender stereotypes by being the only white biker in a motorcycle club in Soweto. With her blond and dyed Afrikaner hair and green eyes and ”biking in the blood”, Holloway embodies the rainbow nation by being a member of The Eagles.
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/ 12 December 2005
Having carved a niche as South Africa’s first black showjumper in a sport traditionally reserved for rich whites, Enos Mafokate has now taken his love for horses to the heart of Soweto township. Mafokate is cultivating the hope that township children will one day too fly high the colours of South Africa’s rainbow nation.
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/ 29 November 2005
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The tiny Southern African kingdom of Lesotho is one of the world’s worst Aids-hit countries with a 27% infection rate, but only about 11% of people in need have access to free anti-retroviral drug treatment. Aids kills nearly 70 people each day in the landlocked mountainous state.
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/ 26 September 2005
After a career of more than 50 years, South Africa’s legendary singer and anti-apartheid activist Miriam Makeba has decided she will end her performing days with a farewell international tour that starts in Johannesburg on Monday. ”I have to go and say farewell to all the countries that I have been to, if I can. I am 73 now, it is taxing on me,” Makeba said in an interview.
Large field rats from Western Africa are being used in Mozambique to detect landmines that still threaten hundreds of thousands of people and hamper economic activity 13 years after the end of a brutal war that claimed up to one million lives.
About 50 children per day are raped in South Africa as the country struggles with the legacy of apartheid, HIV/Aids and an influx of sexual material into a society that remains somewhat puritanical. Police reports recount girls as young as five being raped, sometimes by boys who are barely into their teens.
Three musicians are recording a song about the killer Marburg virus in Angola — just one example of actions taken by ordinary citizens who want to stamp out the virus now claiming up to 10 lives a day. ”Marburg, leave our people in peace. We are going to kick you out of this country,” goes the song in Portuguese.
Health experts fighting the killer Marburg virus in northern Angola said on Monday they were facing denial from families who are refusing to send their sick to hospitals or are taking them out of the city, worsening the risk of contamination. Isolation of victims is the only way to slow the spread of the disease, for which there are no drugs or vaccine.
Fear stalked the streets on Saturday in the squalid northern Angolan town of Uige, devastated by years of civil war and now the epicentre of an outbreak of the killer Marburg virus, which has claimed 180 lives so far. In Uige province alone, 160 people have been killed by the virus, which has claimed 98% of those infected in the outbreak.
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/ 17 November 2004
Namibia’s president-in-waiting Hifikepunye Pohamba says expropriations of white farms are ”going to happen” in his Southern African country but has pledged to ”talk, talk, talk” to make them as painless as possible. In an interview with AFP, Pohamba portrayed himself as a man of dialogue who is sensitive to the impact that land reform can have on people’s lives in this country of 1,82-million people.