There are layers of secrets to South African history that no one seems to want to dig up any more. Take for instance, the hi-tech murder of the president of Mozambique, who died in a deliberately created plane crash. In case you think airplane crashes don’t mean much, look at what happened in Rwanda after one little plane mysteriously crashed.

The digital recording and playback of television programmes, along with all its accompanying features and extras, began in earnest in the United States about six years ago with the TiVo and ReplayTV systems, box-top units now estimated to be in more than 10-million American homes.

There have been ferocious battles over banning adultery or outlawing headscarves. Now drink has become the battleground in Turkey’s struggle to define the country’s values. Turkish liberals and secularists are angry about the efforts of the conservative government of Recep Tayyip Erdogan to limit and ”ghettoise” the supply and consumption of alcohol.

Kamboja Street is so close to the sea that the tsunami all but levelled it a year ago. Most of the fishermen’s villas, with their red-tiled roofs, fluted columns and verandahs, were shaved off the earth by the great cutthroat razor of water. A year on, the first replacement house has only just begun to be built, by the American charity Care.

Democratically elected presidents in Burundi and Liberia have presented at least two indisputably positive developments in Africa. Given the war-torn state of the countries they’ve inherited, Ellen Johnson-Sirleaf in Liberia and Pierre Nkurunziza in Burundi probably need regular reminding of this.