Fancy a nostalgic train safari to Mpumalanga or Victoria Falls? Better not get your hopes up, warn private train tour operators. They complain that a shortage of locomotives, coupled with poor planning, has made business conditions increasingly difficult. While major players are known to be affected, smaller operators have had to close down.
This year’s winner of the Caine Prize for African Writing, Ugandan writer Monica Arac de Nyeko, speaks to Stephanie Wolters about her winning story, some of the issues she feels strongly about waht motivates her as an African writer.
Using renewable energy can be expensive, but households can start managing their energy requirements by considering both the demand and supply side of the equation. They can diversify through using renewable sources and the most energy-efficient options. The house becomes the power plant and the shortfall is sourced from the grid.
"A wise and courageous decision," the then- vice-president FW de Klerk called it when we met in Amsterdam in 1995. These few encouraging words dispelled all our doubts about moving to South Africa. In April 1996, with my wife Patricia and son Ludo, we left Holland behind.
In a classic American western, there are good guys and bad guys. The good ones are the settlers, who are making the prairie bloom; the bad ones are the Indians, who are blood-thirsty savages. The hero is the cowboy — with a big revolver or two, ready to defend himself at all times.
It is a party trick well known to curious teenagers across the United States. Zoom down on Washington via Google Earth and you get an extraordinary eagle-eyed view of the world’s greatest powerhouse. There’s the White House and its West Wing. Sweeping south-east across the Potomac you soar above the Pentagon. But there is one thing you can’t do.
At five feet tall, Asma Jahangir is not an imposing figure, but for almost four decades she has towered over Pakistan’s human rights war. She has championed battered wives, rescued teenÂagers from death row, defended people accused of blasphemy and sought justice for the victims of honour killings. These battles have won her admirers and enemies in great number.
Hanno Renn, a Freiburg taxi driver, invested in a communal solar electricity system on a building in the German town in 1993. "Everyone laughed and said I was wasting my money," he says. But now he has paid off his investment and earns a regular income from the electrical company for the power he generates. "I have had the last laugh," he grins.
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.
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.