A scrum to get through passport control and luggage collection, no parking available for anyone who has come to meet you and little chance of making it to the domestic terminal in time for a connecting flight. That’s the typical Johannesburg International airport experience. Fortunately, OR Tambo International airport will be much better.
The bright yellow Honda dirt bike roars down the vacant Baghdad parking lot before popping a wheelie and continuing another dozen metres on its back wheel alone. The rider then spins the bike to a halt in a swirl of pungent exhaust fumes, burnt rubber tyre tracks and a burst of applause from young men and boys who have gathered to watch Iraq’s impromptu motorcycle club.
In a culture where one-night stands, reality porn and Playboy logos on kids’ stationery have all become shrug worthily normal, it takes quite a leap of imagination to be sexually subversive. Take up pole dancing? No, that’s so commonplace that women organise group lessons for hen parties. Threesomes? No longer noteworthy. Faux-lesbianism? Yawn
Arnie drives a Hummer. And not just one. At one time the governor had a fleet of eight of the brutes to ferry him from photo op to photo op. He also has a private jet, which can be seen whooshing over the beach at Santa Monica as it takes him from his Los Angeles home to his office in Sacramento, 650km to the north.
Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala, the public face of fiscal rectitude and good governance in Nigeria has been axed as chair of the Nigeria Economic Intelligence Team, while on a trip to the United Kingdom to get further debt relief. Nigeria’s president Olusegun Obasanjo has appointed Minister of Finance Esther Nedadi Usman in her place.
The familiar bearded face gazes out from a billboard over a sunlit old Havana beside the reassuring slogan Vamos bien. Close by, another poster wishes the world’s longest-serving leader a happy birthday and calls for ”another 80” years.
Now, however, for the first time since he led his rebel army into Havana in 1959, the man who epitomises Cuba has stepped down, albeit temporarily.
Most historians nowadays find little to admire in the historical figure of Cecil Rhodes. His name has come to the fore during three recent centenaries (the centenary of his death in 2002; the Rhodes Scholarships, 2003; and Rhodes University, 2004), writes Paul Maylam.
As a non-South African, I will make no attempt to claim to understand fully how much Rhodes’s legacy negatively affected Southern Africans. It would be foolish, even heartless, if anyone ever condoned Rhodes’s racist, imperialistic actions. But is it fair or just to reduce Rhodes to the total sum of wrong things he did in his time? Surely there is more to Rhodes than what is highlighted in Adebajo’s article.
A year on from the Gleneagles summit — and governments, NGOs, multilateral organisations, civil society and the private sector are taking stock of what has been achieved in the past year. As an African-originated multi-national business committed to helping achieve the millennium development goals we believe two relatively unheralded achievements have evolved from ”the Year of Africa”.
Briton Jenson Button seized the first victory of his Formula One career in a Hungarian Grand Prix thriller on Sunday. While the 26-year-old Honda driver ended his long wait, triumphant at last in his 113th start, Renault’s world champion Alonso trudged away without a point after leading for much of the afternoon.