Thousands of Zimbabwean commuters were on Tuesday stranded throughout the country as fuel shortages reached crisis proportions, state media reported. People in Harare are spending up to four days looking for buses to take them to rural villages ahead of a public holiday next week, ZBC radio said.
South African musician Hugh Masekela believes he is no longer welcome as a performer in South Africa, the Times Online reported on Wednesday. The trumpeter said that many talented musicians whose voices became symbols of protest against white domination found it hard to get bookings in South Africa.
The mayor of Mpumalanga’s Govan Mbeki municipality is expected to appear in court on Friday on charges of killing his deputy, police said. Sipho Nkosi will appear in the Evander Magistrate’s Court charged with Thandi Mtsweni’s murder, said Superintendent Sibongile Nkosi on Wednesday.
South Africa has taken huge steps in the past few years to increase the rights of women in the public and private sectors and to change patriarchal attitudes. Still many gender experts believe the battle is far from won and some critics believe that in some instances women are being left behind.
On May 19 1955, six brave women gathered the support of thousands of other women and marched in protest against the Senate Bill and the Separate Representation of Voters Act, which would finally remove the so-called coloured voters from the common voters’ roll. They wore black sashes, a symbol of mourning over the death of their constitutional rights.
Frida Kahlo, Lee Krasner, Eva Hesse, Käthe Kollwitz and Gertrude Stein have all infiltrated or raided an art gallery or festival around the world to promote women and minorities — or, at least, their alter egos, the Guerrilla Girls, have. This is a group of anonymous women who assume the identities of dead female artists and appear in public wearing gorilla masks.
The average abused woman leaves her husband 37 times before she divorces him. After every lame excuse, every bunch of flowers and every empty promise, she takes him back again. And again. And again. Why? Women’s rights activists, social workers and clinical psychologists agree: abused women are kept in abusive relationships by a combination of fear, emotional or financial dependence, low self-esteem or a false sense of loyalty.
Congress of South African Trade Unions (Cosatu) general secretary Zwelinzima Vavi expressed shame on Tuesday over how an apparent disappearance of an South African Communist Party (SACP) donation had been handled. ”We think the whole matter is such a clumsy disgrace to our movement,” he said.
What do you do when you have a municipality that owes R56-million on its water bill and a company threatening to cut off water to 500 000 people? If you are Matjhabeng executive mayor Mathabo Leeto, you crack your whip, get it paid and avoid political embarrassment and disaster for your constituents.
In Freetown’s rubbish-strewn slums, where sick children defecate in sewers by pot-holed streets, music blaring from shops and taxis tells Sierra Leone’s youth that politicians have failed their war-ravaged country. The West African nation’s 1991 to 2002 civil war was infamous for drugged child soldiers who raped and mutilated thousands of civilians, but now young Sierra Leoneans hold in their hands the future of their country, one of the poorest on earth.