Former president Nelson Mandela is leading a last-ditch attempt to save Deputy President Jacob Zuma, the Business Day website reported on Wednesday. It said this came after President Thabo Mbeki said he would announce his decision on Zuma’s fate after his return from a two-day state visit to Chile.
Three million children will die in the poorest countries of sub-Saharan Africa as a result of the failure of the global community to meet its promise of slashing the death rates of the under-fives by 2015, the United Nations will reveal on Thursday.
The Oscar-winning actor Anne Bancroft, who immortalised the role of the graduate-seducing Mrs Robinson on the big screen, has died at the age of 73. A spokesperson for her husband, Mel Brooks, announced on Tuesday that she had died of uterine cancer at a hospital in Los Angeles on Monday.
A man’s leg and part of his torso fell from a South African Airways (SAA) jetliner on to a suburban New York home on Tuesday as the aircraft prepared to land at John F Kennedy airport, authorities and the airline said. More remains were found inside the wheel-well of the SAA aircraft when it landed at JFK, arriving from Johannesburg via Dakar, Senegal.
Schabir Shaik’s case links back to the Hefer commission, and goes forward to Deputy President Jacob Zuma. The saga also goes further, to what President Thabo Mbeki should be doing, and this is the story the media should be chasing. All the way. It’s time to get beyond the last-gasp cliché’s like "shaken, rattled and rolled over".
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.