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/ 18 December 2006
A holiday in Jo’burg? Sure, there’s no better way to escape the beach-bound crowds, reports Justin Pearce.
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/ 22 November 2005
Cazombo sprawls along both sides of the single street that runs from the airstrip, past an echoing school and hospital building, to the oldest part of town where tile-roofed colonial villas are screened by the tortured shapes and thick scent of frangipani trees. Beyond lay a small open field of dry grass with a water tower and a vast satellite dish.
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/ 2 September 2005
"I am not separated from my husband — we were separated only by the police." Matilda* (59) has spent the past month in a village amid the dry bush of Matabeleland North. She is one of thousands of Zimbabweans to be dumped in the countryside in the past two months.
”Very good discussions — constructive discussions.” Anna Tibaijuka’s comments to journalists following her meeting with President Robert Mugabe sounded like the standard diplomatic brush-off. But anyone who had hoped the UN secretary general’s special envoy to Zimbabwe was about to tiptoe over the matter of housing demolitions would have been disappointed when her report on the visit was published a few weeks later.
The continuing flow of arms from neighbouring countries into the east of the Democratic Republic of Congo threatens the fragile peace in that region, Amnesty International recently. Also, the International Court of Justice in The Hague began hearing a case brought by the DRC, accusing Rwanda of armed aggression between 1998 and the present. Rwanda has rejected the allegations.
Mixed messages from the Angolan government about the timing of elections have raised doubts about whether Angolans will indeed go to the polls in 2006, as promised by the government over the past year. Two senior officials responsible for the country’s first poll since 1992 recently made contradictory statements about whether election preparations were running according to schedule.
An Australian academic who was deported from Botswana this week — apparently for his criticism of the government — has said the incident ”seems to have vindicated our arguments” about the state of democracy in the country. Professor Kenneth Good was declared an illegal immigrant in February.
People in Pomfret are tired of talking about the mercenaries. ”We only know they went to get bread, that’s all we know,” says Maria Dala. The men who ”went to get bread” had not just gone round to the corner café. Hidden among thorn trees in the remoter reaches of North West province, Pomfret doesn’t have a café; the fruit and veg stall where Dala stands is the only retail business to be seen.
When Domingos Silva left the Angolan army, he returned to his home village and enrolled for classes. At the age of 36, he says, ‘I decided to take the opportunity to learn to read.” Silva was conscripted into the Angolan Armed Forces at the age of 16. He had had little schooling before, and none […]
As the death toll from the Marburg epidemic in Angola passed 200, it emerged that cases of the deadly haemorrhagic fever had been present in the country since October last year. The disease was identified only last month. A spokesperson for the United Nations Transitional Coordination Unit in Luanda said the high levels of child mortality common in every rainy season had masked the presence of a new disease.