Xing Houyuan’s advice to investors who seek her out is patient and practical: do due diligence on any potential partner, clarify its ties to the government and make sure you control any joint venture. Her words would have sounded familiar to any firm trying to enter China in the 1980s and 1990s. But the nervous-looking man who had just shown Xing his proposal was Chinese, and he was looking to do business in Africa.
The race to exploit the last unexplored wildernesses on Earth is intensifying. Survey ships have been dispatched across the oceans, and marine consultants hired. Submersibles are being lowered into inky depths to record underwater contours and take sedimentary samples. Politicians around the globe, waving their countries’ flags, have boasted about securing oil, gas and mineral resources for future generations.
Life was once described as ”nasty, brutish and short”, but that would be a better description of death throughout most of history. People died as children or in their prime, so ageing and the aged were rare. The most common forms of death were by infection, violence, accident or childbirth. Death was rapid: people were fully alive one day, and fully dead the next.
Simone de Beauvoir was an iconic figurehead of the 20th-century struggle for women’s liberation, but as France marks the centenary of her birth on Wednesday, critics are taking a cold, hard look at her life and legacy. Beauvoir’s groundbreaking 1949 work on the female condition, The Second Sex, her defiance of social taboos, propelled her to near-mythical status in France and abroad.
My country is in turmoil. We voted on December 27 and the voting process was the most peaceful in our history. The voter turnout was higher than ever. For the past few years, the most disenfranchised — the poor, those far from the metropoles, the youth — have registered to vote.
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The funeral service of Mlungisi Sisulu, grandson of liberation struggle icon Walter Sisulu, will be held on Sunday in Randburg, the family said on Monday. ”The funeral service will be held on Sunday January 13 at the Walter Sisulu Hall in Randburg, Johannesburg, at 10am,” the family’s spokesperson, Zwelakhe Sisulu, said in a statement.
Injured West Indies captain Chris Gayle is out of the deciding third test against South Africa, the touring team said on Monday. Gayle broke his thumb while batting in the second Test in Cape Town, which South Africa won by seven wickets on Saturday to level the series at 1-1. ”Chris is not going to be ready to play,” West Indies media officer Philip Spooner said.
A blood-diamond expert and an account from a Sierra Leonean miner who said laughing rebels hacked off his hands and burned his family opened the war-crimes trial against Liberia’s Charles Taylor on Monday. The former Liberian president, once one of Africa’s most feared warlords, faces charges of rape, murder, mutilation and recruitment of child soldiers.
The Ginwala inquiry into suspended prosecutions head Vusi Pikoli on Monday announced a timeline for key submissions to it, it was reported. Lawson Naidoo, spokesperson for Frene Ginwala, said they were expecting Minister of Justice and Constitutional Development Brigitte Mabandla’s submission on January 15 and Pikoli’s on January 31.