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/ 24 November 2006
Communist leader Moses Mabhida, who died in exile in Maputo in 1986, finally came home recently. Mabhida’s remains were exhumed in a special ceremony in the Mozambican capital attended by family members and ANC high-ups, including KwaZulu-Natal Premier S’bu Ndebele and Finance Minister Zweli Mkhize.
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/ 17 November 2006
A new generation of immigrants is finding its feet in South Africa. Niren Tolsi goes in search of the faces and places that are redefining Durban’s cultural scene.
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/ 9 November 2006
He was not so much the comrade, but the charou behind the comrade — so there was no Tony Yengeni-esque farewell for businessperson Schabir Shaik as he was driven from the Durban High Court to begin his 15-year jail sentence for corruption at Westville Correctional Facility.
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/ 3 November 2006
KwaZulu-Natal Premier S’bu Ndebele’s purging of the two remaining IFP provincial ministers from his multi-party cabinet is, according to analysts, symptomatic of the decline of the party and could lead to its political oblivion. On Wednesday, Ndebele reshuffled his cabinet, replacing the IFP’s Blessed Gwala and Nyanga Ngubane.
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/ 16 October 2006
‘He called me over to his house on my way back from the shop and asked me: ‘Do you think you can run faster than me?’ I didn’t answer and started walking away, then he grabbed me and pulled me inside and forced himself on me.” Khensani Mbokazi, a 23-year-old pre-op transsexual currently with a male body, was raped at 15 by her father’s friend. She was too scared to tell her parents of the rape, for fear of their response.
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/ 13 October 2006
Over the telephone Zenzele Sishi, vice-Âpresident of the South African Unintegrated Forces, sounds like a cross between Joseph Conrad’s Colonel Kurtz and a child soldier on amphetamines. His speech is erratic and he seems delusional at times, his story constantly changing. Sishi claims he is leading 3 000 paramilitaries, most of whom are former members of the Self Protection into training in the bush near the Swaziland and Mozambique borders.
Beach soccer spin doctors may credit former Manchester United striker Eric Cantona for helping spread the game around the globe, but the man doing that job in Durban last week during the African leg of the Fifa Beach Soccer World Cup qualifiers was, undoubtedly, Côte d’Ivoire’s Frederic Aka — without any pseudo-philosophical twaddle about seagulls, trawlers and sardines, thankfully.
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/ 18 September 2006
Local craft production — piggybacking on a national agenda obsessed with tourism and identified as a potential poverty alleviation sector — has increased in recent years. As has consumption. From the pavements of Durban to Stockholm markets, Niren Tolsi traces the various lives (and prices) of a piece of beaded jewellery.
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/ 16 September 2006
”There was something unfettered about the police rubber bullets fired at the Kennedy Road informal settlement in Durban on Tuesday night … Apparently without warning shooting erupted. As an overhead light near us shattered, people scrambled into the shacks.” Conflict between authorities and Durban shack-dweller organisation Abahlali baseMjondolo escalated this week, reports Niren Tolsi.
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/ 14 September 2006
Parking space outside the Eddels shoe factory in Pietermaritzburg is, like half-size-too-small pumps bought at an irresistible mark-down, inevitably tight. Which, for Richard Starmer, the company’s men’s merchandise director, is cause to grin: "At the time [of the 2001 management buy-out], one of our goals was that all the workers would one day have cars and we seem to be reaching that."