She is five foot nothing in her trainers with hair pulled into a ponytail that reaches the small of her back and a multicoloured thread round one slim wrist. She has an AK47 over one shoulder and she is talking about killing men.
Witches haunt Kinshasa, the Democratic Republic of Congo’s violent capital. With pinched faces, bloodshot eyes and swollen bellies, they are horrifying to see; plaguing the city’s streets by day, and retiring when nights falls to stinking graveyards and typhus alleys. And all of them are children.
In this part of the world a gardener is a good substitute for the ubiquitous taxi driver as a foreign correspondents’ source. Taxi drivers in South Africa tend to be refugees from Eastern Europe and as such too busy mulling over past injustices to have much time to gather their thoughts about their adopted homeland and its neighbours.
President Thabo Mbeki is to petition UN Secretary General Kofi Annan urgently to get UN peacekeepers in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) to be more aggressive in defending civilians in the war-torn country, or to make way for African intervention.
Angry African National Congress members in KwaZulu-Natal are threatening to use the party’s majority in the legislature to undermine the Inkatha Freedom Party-led provincial executive if it does not drop a Democratic Alliance cabinet member.
More than 120 people were reported to have been sucked to their deaths in an extraordinary incident when the giant back door of a Russian-built transport aircraft flipped open as it flew 10 000 feet over the Democratic Republic of Congo late on Thursday.
A stand-off outside the compound of UN peacekeepers in the northeastern Democratic Republic of Congo town of Bunia ended overnight but sporadic shooting and tension continued on Saturday.
A British government inquiry will reveal on Monday that the brains of thousands of depressed people were illegally removed after their deaths and kept for medical research over a 30-year period, The Times newspaper said.
Black and white business in South Africa united on Friday when the presidents of the country’s four chambers of commerce signed a surprise agreement in Bloemfontein.
One of the world’s largest food firms has bowed to pressure from animal rights activists over the treatment of its animals.