”It happens when your ancestors tell you to be a fortune teller. They come to you in a dream; when they come to you, you have to do it,” says Mandlenkosi Mthiyane, a sangoma at at the Faraday muti and traditional healers’ market in the centre of Johannesburg. Read our in-depth report in two parts on traditional healers in South Africa.

The Sunday Times has a ”revolutionary plan” to start a free daily newspaper, to be launched by March next year, media analyst Anton Harber says on his blog. The paper will apparently be delivered for free to Sunday Times subscribers — a unique way of launching a free newspaper.

The Democratic Alliance (DA) in the Tshwane metro council this week handed in a motion of no confidence against the city’s executive mayor, Gwen Ramokgopa, calling for her immediate resignation. Meanwhile, Tshwane residents are losing their faith in the local government’s bureaucratic system, saying it is a mess and disorganised.

Walking through the haphazard alleyways of near-downtown Johannesburg, the scents and sounds linger in the air, while the words of American writer Thomas Wolfe resound in my head. ”All things on Earth point home in old October,” Wolfe wrote in 1935. And when Ramadan (the Muslim fasting month) falls in October, Fordsburg, still ”home” for much of the city’s Muslim community, reflects his words in bounds.

In the early stages of Somalia’s civil war, most people had only two options, says Hadith Oslan, a Somali refugee living in Cape Town: to fight or to run. Oslan chose to run, fleeing his country’s political turmoil. ”I thought I would be safer here,” he says. Oslan (26) left Somalia and his family in 2003, moving to neighbouring Kenya.

A Pretoria police inspector, who has received death threats since arresting an African National Congress (ANC) ward official from Mamelodi in August, says she will continue her investigation despite the constant harassment. ”It’s all about politics,” Inspector Louise Claasen told the Mail & Guardian Online. ”I will carry on the investigation.”