There is a meat market, where haunches of goat hang from the thatched roof. There are tea stalls and shacks selling hair mousse and skin cream. Some women dig vegetable plots while their neighbours shape clay and water with their bare hands to build new houses. The refugee camp at Iridimi, in north-eastern Chad, is home to 15 000 people who have fled the violence in Darfur.
Botswana’s Debswana Diamond Mining Company and the Botswana Mining Workers’ Union are talking informally on a resolution to the three-day-old illegal strike at three mines. The strike could end before a contempt-of-court hearing against strikers and all union officials resumes on Thursday.
Leaders of a Botswana Bushmen organisation left for the United States on Wednesday to obtain support for their fight against their government’s efforts to relocate them. The Botswana government is trying to persuade the Bushmen to opt for relocation to settlements outside the Central Kalahari Game Reserve.
The United Nations said on Wednesday it is still lacking two-thirds of the money it needs to meet emergency aid needs in Sudan for the rest of the year, particularly in the war-torn western Darfur region. Families who were forced to flee their homes and abandon their fields have completely missed this year’s planting season.
<li><a class=’standardtextsmall’ href="http://www.mg.co.za/Content/pd.asp?ao=121075">After exodus, refugees dig in</a>
Zimbabwe’s opposition Movement for Democratic Change (MDC) said on Wednesday it will withdraw from all elections unless the Zanu-PF government abides by electoral protocols ratified by the Southern African Development Community. The MDC has also withdrawn from the Harare City Council.
The siege of the Imam Ali shrine in the holy city of Najaf was on Wednesday approaching its end, with United States forces reportedly only 20m away and most of the rebel Mehdi Army fighters said to have either fled or been killed. Heavy fighting was ongoing on the streets of Najaf’s Old City but, according to The Guardian correspondent Luke Harding, who is nearby, the three-week siege was entering its final hours.
‘Prepare to march on Najaf’
The late Paul Meintjes, whose family was told by a ”prophet” that he would rise from the dead, has finally been laid to rest at his hometown, Hertzogville. Meintjes was buried in a local cemetery on Wednesday during a small ceremony attended by his sister, Hettie Voster, and her family. Meintjes’ widow, Anna, was not present.
A former Anglican bishop who seduced a schoolgirl 50 years ago on Wednesday became the first churchman in Australia ever to be defrocked. Donald Shearman (77) had sex with the girl regularly when he was a boarding house master and she a boarder in his care between 1954 and 1956.
The mother of former South African and now Australian rugby player Clyde Rathbone was recovering from injuries sustained during a burglary at her home on the KwaZulu-Natal South Coast on Wednesday morning. This comes less than a week after a newspaper article quoted her son as saying that since he had moved to Australia, he had a ”total lack of stress” and never worried about the safety of his fiancée.