After the new post-apartheid Constitution was adopted in 1997, restrictions were swept aside and mines reported queues of up to 500 women vying for the chance to work underground. Now women are snubbing domestic employment to prove their mettle in the male-dominated mining industry.
A series of broken promises and undemocratic practices by the government has added weight to the Landless People’s Movement (LPM), which is now seeking international support — precisely the outcome the government hoped to avoid, said the grass-roots organisation this week.
”We, the landless people of South Africa, declare our needs for our government and the world to know. We are the people who have borne the brunt of apartheid, of forced removals from our fields and our homes, of poverty in rural areas, of oppression on the farms and of starvation, neglect and disease…”
The world is in a ”race against the clock” to avert the looming famine in Southern Africa, says Jacques Diouf, chief of the United Nations’s Food and Agriculture Organisation.
A year ago in Stockholm an audience of government representatives and environmental groups applauded enthusiastically as Kjell Larsson, the Swedish Environment Minister, announced that a United Nations treaty banning or restricting 12 toxic chemicals, known as the dirty dozen, had been adopted.
A white man is accused of killing a black man late one Saturday night as he walked home with a friend, and the people of Cullinan, a small mining town outside Pretoria, are taking sides
BEAU Brummell, the self-appointed South African king of nudity, is experiencing the stirrings of rebellion from some of his less gracious subjects.
Gay activists anticipate a Constitutional Court judgement soon, giving same-sex couples the legal right to jointly adopt children – which would be a landmark in the country’s gay rights legislation
NELSON Mandela was again a lone voice this week as he threw his weight behind the fight for a tuberculosis-free Africa