While South Africa reeled in shock this week and the cumbersome machinery of international organisations creaked to life, the most effective responses to the xenophobic attacks came from municipalities, ordinary citizens and faith groups.
"Downtown Johannesburg is a wasteland this Sunday. Marshall Street is criss-crossed with makeshift barricades of rusty barbed wire, tyres and chunks of concrete. In Main Street, shops have been literally disembowelled, their heavy-duty Jozi iron shutters wrenched off and their interiors cleaned out." <i>Mail & Guardian</i> reporters Nicole Johnston and Percy Zvomuya venture into the Johannesburg CBD.
Hundreds of frightened foreigners fled to the sanctity of the Jeppe police station in central Johannesburg on Sunday morning following a night of deadly xenophobic violence that claimed at least five lives and left about 50 people injured. The atmosphere at the police station was tense, with helicopters circling overhead.
The wave of pogroms that saw foreigners fleeing Alexandra this week, clutching at the tattered remnants of their lives, should surprise no one. Xenophobic attacks have been growing in ferocity and frequency. In just the past three months Gauteng has witnessed a wave of attacks from Itereleng to Atteridgeville and from Alex to Diepsloot.
”Borneo has done two amazing things for me: it has overcome my trepidation about scuba-diving and emboldened me to willingly swim in shark-infested waters. Being claustrophobic, as well as having had a bad experience the last time I tried to learn scuba, I’ve been quite happy to putter along on the surface admiring the pretty fish below” writes Nicole Johnston
Once hailed as a healthy alternative to trans-fats, as a green wonder-fuel and as a driver of South-East Asia’s economic prosperity, palm oil’s image has taken quite a beating recently. Now seen as a biofuel baddie — palm oil biodiesel generates 10 times more carbon dioxide than petrol.
”For the past few years I’ve been taking a break from everything generally branded ‘New Age’,” writes Nicole Johnston. ”So when the editor assigned me to have my Chinese horoscope read and visit a healer who speaks to angels, I was more than a little dubious.”
For just about all of my life — from about the age of three — I have had to deal on a daily basis with personal comments aimed at something I have no control over. I am tall (six foot two, to be precise) and for some reason a certain kind of person feels the need to draw my attention to this simple fact of anatomy, writes Nicole Johnston.
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/ 5 February 2008
I’m not one of those high-maintenance women, truly I’m not. Wild Caucasian ponies couldn’t induce me to endure that refined form of torture that is a leg wax, and a Brazilian wax is simply the devil’s work. I’ve never been heard to wail over a broken nail or to refuse to leave the house until I’ve put on a face full of slap.
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/ 31 January 2008
It was a match made in cartoon heaven: the guy with a shower on his head meets the guy with tattoos on his head; the man who says Zulu culture permits him sexual licence and the man who says America guarantees him regular blowjobs. Well, that was the plan: Jacob Zuma was jetting back early from Davos to host a charity banquet with “the baddest man on the planet”.