In apartheid South Africa Chinese people were neither white nor black. While they have been mistakenly accused of enjoying honorary white status, that was afforded only to the Japanese. Today Chinese people, whether they are South African-born, Taiwanese or recent arrivals from the People’s Republic of China, still suffer from similar problems, as they are not considered previously disadvantaged.
I’ve discovered a lovely, sneaky trick to play on fellow gym-goers whenever I force myself to go to gym these days. Of course, no normal person wants to be in a gym surrounded by sweaty, heaving masses, but nobody wants to take the risk of being mugged while walking or jogging, writes Sukasha Singh.
When Pam Mokoena heard the sound of gunfire, she didn’t bat an eyelid. Hours later she was cradling the body of the second brother to have been gunned down in South Africa’s murder capital. Pointing to her sibling’s dried blood on the streets of Cape Town’s Nyanga township, Mokoena shakes her head and mumbles: ”Only God knows what is happening here.”
It must rank among the greatest compliments the late Mario Puzo, author of The Godfather, ever received. A court in Chicago recently heard Frank Calabrese Sr commend the description in the novel of a mafia initiation ceremony as ”very close” to the truth. Coming from Calabrese, that was high praise indeed. He is alleged to be a head of one of Chicago’s most notorious crime syndicates, the Outfit.
United Kingdom high street bank Barclays surprised the City of London last week by announcing an audacious tie-up with the Chinese government to boost its bid for ABN Amro. Barclays tabled a â,¬67,5billion improved cash-and-shares offer for the Dutch bank after it won a pledge from the state-run China Development Bank (CDB) to inject â,¬10,4billion into the merger, should it go ahead.
Environmentalists are up in arms about who should be responsible for ensuring the mining industry cleans up its act as Eskom fast-tracks its coal-fired power plans. Eskom has announced its intention to double electricity output in the next 20 years and the department of minerals and energy is the main player and referee in issuing and policing coal-mining permits.
Said Alkhateeb, manager of the Strategic Studies Centre in Khartoum and a former general secretary of foreign relations for the ruling Sudanese National Congress party, travelled to Pretoria recently. He spoke to the Mail & Guardian about South Africa as a possible host and mediator in new talks between the Sudanese government and those Darfur rebel groups that refused to sign the Darfur Peace Agreement.
Take five Bulgarian nurses and one Palestinian doctor who are working in an ill-equipped hospital. Accuse them wrongly of infecting 426 children with HIV-contaminated blood. Then lock them up for eight years, torture confessions out of them and sentence them to death, and you end up with a full partnership deal with the European Union.
The Mail & Guardian‘s latest ”exposé” of ostensibly malevolent higher education management (”Education under the axe”, July 13) — this time aimed at Unisa’s academic restructuring — cannot go unchallenged. Unisa wishes to set the record straight and foster a more nuanced and insightful debate on the restructuring of higher education, writes Narend Baijnath.
You wouldn’t know it if you visited Barry Aaron’s Sandton law offices, but South African courts have been setting some fine precedents on how press freedom functions within the carefully poised architecture of the Bill of Rights. Nevertheless, Aaron’s clients pay to keep him in the tawdry pastiche of Nelson Mandela Square, writes Nic Dawes.