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/ 31 January 2008
Central Methodist Church Bishop Paul Verryn has condemned the heavy-handed way in which police arrested up to 1Â 500 refugees housed at his church in the Johannesburg CBD. The arrests were made during a late-night raid on Wednesday. The church is seen as a sanctuary for Zimbabwean refugees.
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/ 25 January 2008
When Fredi Kanoute decided to play for Mali he did so with the kind of talk that would make Frantz Fanon and other black thinkers sit up and take note. ”Though I am French, born in France, and I grew up there, I always took my holidays in Mali. And inside me, something always said, ‘You are of Malian origin.’ I am not just French, I am also Malian.”
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/ 25 January 2008
The Nigerian method of low-budget movie-making is set to take off in South Africa if an upcoming producer has his way, writes Percy Zvomuya.
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/ 19 January 2008
Only last month Zimbabwe’s President Robert Mugabe appeared to have crushed all internal opposition when his party backed his bid for a sixth term as president, but it now seems that he finds himself having to put down a fresh internal party rebellion.
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/ 18 January 2008
Any country that wants to win the African Cup of Nations had better have a population of at least 15-million — or they might as well bury the thought. Since the inaugural tournament more than half a century ago, the Cup has only once been won by a country that boasts a population of less than 15-million — in 1972, four million-strong Congo-Brazzaville won it.
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/ 21 December 2007
The transnational family, nourished by email, chatrooms, long-distance calls and SMSs has increasingly become a feature of migrant communities. In this virtual family the husband might be living and working in South Africa, his wife slaving away as a nurse in England and their children at school in Zimbabwe, their country of origin.
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/ 18 December 2007
The idea of children crossing borders often conjures up images of paedophile rings, clandestine smuggling operations and helpless, vulnerable children, whisked away from their loved ones. Increasingly, however, foreign children living in South Africa are found to have left their homes willingly, in search of a better life here.
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/ 10 December 2007
In a class action suit that recalls the Treatment Action Campaign’s battle to access free antiretrovirals, the residents of Phiri in Soweto have instituted legal proceedings against the City of Johannesburg. They are challenging the installation of prepaid meters in March 2004 and the decision of the city on the amount of water allocated free to the city’s poor residents.
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/ 10 December 2007
Consider this hypothetical case: a Malawian-born, 18-year-old crosses rivers, mountains and borders and finds himself in South Africa’s gold mines. He gives his all for more than five decades until his body sags at almost 70. He decides to go back to Malawi, the land of his youth, to spend the rest of his days among once-familiar surroundings.
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/ 3 December 2007
It has taken the Movement for Democratic Change eight years to go from a being potent symbol of change to an organisation torn apart by divisive, childish rivalries and personality cults. And as the situation deteriorates, the party’s fractious and self-important leadership may irrevocably turn the once vibrant party into an empty shell, its once inspiring name and slogans into bywords for indecision and ineptitude.