It’s just another sunny afternoon in Alex, and foreigners are taking the opportunity to salvage what is left of their possessions. When the sun goes down, they’ll need to be back in their tents behind the palisade fence of the parking lot of the Alexandra police station, which has been turned into a tent city.
Many say Alex is the last place they expected this kind of violence to erupt. It is known as multi-cultural and multi-national, a melting pot where South Africans and foreigners from different race and ethnic groups have lived together for years. One life-long resident, 25-year-old Thandi Madlala, says she has always had Mozambican neighbours, "and it’s never been an issue".
As IFP leader Mangosuthu Buthelezi threatens to challenge a new KwaZulu-Natal law in court, the provincial government has released correspondence showing that only last year he demanded that same law be enacted. The law in question will make the position of chairperson of the KwaZulu-Natal House of Traditional Leaders permanent, and Buthelezi will have to choose between his position as part-time chair of the house and his job as a national MP.
The Johannesburg City Hall walls vibrate with the latest kwaito and house music sounds; the floors shake from the roar of the crowds as they dance and march around the hall; youths perform the latest dance moves amid screams of ”Heitha maGauteng Heitha! [Howzit Gauteng!]”
Cervical cancer still kills thousands of women in South Africa, mostly poor women in their 40s and 50s, many of whom are the breadwinners in their families. Last week pharmaceutical company Merck Sharp & Dohme launched a cervical cancer vaccine, known as the quadrivalent human papillomavirus recombinant vaccine.
Fourteen years into democracy, South Africans are over the rainbow nation and growing up fast. And nowhere is our transition from ”colour-blind” children to sharp-tongued teenagers more evident than in the jingle of fruity, rooty names we’re using to describe ourselves and one another.
For thousands of patients quarantined for up to a year with multidrug-resistant or extensively drug-resistant tuberculosis, the Easter holiday period only reinforces their loneliness. Last December, patients in Gauteng and the Eastern Cape broke out of TB hospitals to be with their families during the festive season.
Dorah’s Ark in Roodepoort, Gauteng, has become a familiar name to many Mail & Guardian employees. The newspaper became involved with the soup kitchen run by Dorah Mazibuko and her husband, David, about two years ago and since then has donated clothes and toys to it.
On a wall outside a crumbling school in rural Gokwe, central Zimbabwe, a battle is being fought. A youth is pasting a Morgan Tsvangirai poster over graffiti, written in bright orange paint, proclaiming: "Good morning Makoni." A few years ago, this would have been a job done under cover of darkness, and hurriedly.
Dumiso Dabengwa, the senior Zanu-PF member who has rebelled against President Robert Mugabe to back Simba Makoni, says the ruling party needs reform to save Zimbabwe from ”falling into the wrong hands”. ”This is a rescue operation,” Dabengwa said after appearing with Makoni in public for the first time.