If you asked someone to list 10 words they associate with South Africa, "crime" would almost certainly be among them. With 35 000 young people under the age of 21 currently awaiting trial or sentenced and imprisoned, it would seem that lawlessness is going to be a defining feature of South Africa for a long time to come.
In my two previous columns, I looked at the basics of education. What is basic about education, and what is basic to accomplishing it? The answers, I said, revolve around the tight connection among three familiar terms: learning, change and leadership. Education is most fundamentally about learning.
Clinics in rural areas often have hundreds of pamphlets on health issues, but very few of these well-intended leaflets reach their target audience. About 30% of South African adults are functionally illiterate and this figure is often higher in rural communities where many pamphlets end up as fuel for the household fire.
It’s hard to imagine, from our modern vantage point of mass censorship, "Homeland Security" Gestapo-like control, Pentagon-funded war films and propaganda disguised as Hollywood product — but, for a brief moment in the 1970s, film in general was allowed to reflect accurately the distaste and revulsion for the government and the military that seems almost impossible to imagine today.
Maria Mogotsi* works as a domestic worker in Johannesburg and is responsible for the education of seven children — her own five plus two of her deceased brother’s children. While Mogotsi is determined that all seven should get a decent education, the total monthly school-fees bill takes a huge chunk of her salary.
For 48 years Boys Town has worked to stamp out a reputation for itself as one of the country’s landmark institutions for the residential care for boys. In February, the Alpha Family Home for Girls opened its doors in Claremont, Cape Town, to its first intake of five girls. The home can now accommodate 10 girls.
”We are opposed to the continued Israeli occupation of the West Bank and Gaza Strip. We are equally opposed to the, at best, misguided, at worst, immoral attempts by the Association of University Teachers to boycott the Israeli academic community,” writes Professor David Newman and Benjamin Pogrund, former deputy editor of the Rand Daily Mail .
Out in a remote rural area of the Transkei last week an unusual cattle auction, held by a new black economic empowerment auctioneering company, took place. Buyers gathered near a school in the Peddie location, 100km by road from East London. They were bidding for animals that would otherwise end up being sold for ceremonial slaughter or to travelling smouse or speculators.
The United Nations is looking into how best to resolve the problem of internally displaced persons worldwide, a senior UN official has said, describing internal displacement as a neglected humanitarian issue. More attention will be paid to eight countries with acute IDP problems, which include Nepal, Somalia and Sudan.
Standard Chartered, one of the United Kingdom’s leading banks in the developing world, is proud of its record in Africa. The winner of several awards for best foreign bank south of the Sahara, the bank has a -million-a-year fund for community projects, taken from an operating profit across the continent of -million.