AMNESTY International has urged authorities in Guinea to release leading opposition figure Alpha Conde, president of the Guinean People’s Rally, and a number of his supporters. The human rights organisation claimed most of a group of 47 supporters of Conde had been tortured to extract confessions and did not have a fair hearing. Conde, a […]

STUDENTS in Angola will soon have to pay for their studies after a quarter of a century of free education, education ministry officials said. Ways of exempting the poorest pupils from the charges are being discussed. The new charges could mean even fewer people will get an education in this poverty-stricken country torn by civil […]

FORMER Nigerian military ruler Ibrahim Babangida ordered the October 1986 killing of journalist Dele Giwa, a lawyer for his family told a rights panel. Giwa, the editor-in-chief of Newswatch magazine, died when a parcel bomb exploded as he opened it. Babangida seized power in a coup in 1985 and ran the country until 1993. The […]

A GROUP of Northern Province farm workers who once worked for just R500 a month are now proud owners of a R2m naartjie farm. The provincial land affairs department handed the title deeds of Marobala Citrus Farm in Soekmekaar near Pietersburg to three farm workers’ trusts. The trusts, which comprise 137 farm workers, combined their […]

OWN CORRESPONDENT, Cape Town | Tuesday A MOTHER with a child on her back and two toddlers in her arms stood on the tracks in front of an oncoming train – and when the five-year-old child tried to scurry away, she pulled him back before the family was pulverised under the train’s wheels, Die Burger […]

MORE than 400 people have fled their homes to escape deadly clashes between farmers and cattle herders in central Tanzania, where 29 people were killed over the weekend. At least 29 people have been killed since Friday, when fighting broke out between small-holding farmers and Maasai cattle herders in a dispute over grazing land for […]

APARTHEID activist Steve Biko, who died in police detention in 1977, has been awarded the Duma Nokwe Human Rights Award, the National Institute for Public Interest Law and Research (Nipliar) said. Biko’s son Nkosinathi Biko received the award on behalf of his father. Biko said his father’s achievements included the establishment of the Ginsberg Educational […]

CHRISTOPHE DE ROQUEFEUIL, Gaborone | Tuesday US SECRETARY of State Madeleine Albright has wrapped up a swansong tour of three sub-Saharan African countries in Botswana with a call for the next US president not to neglect Africa. The administration of Democratic President Bill Clinton saw Africa as “vitally important to the United States,” Albright told […]

THE European Union has given Zambia 6m euros to be used to prepare next year’s presidential and parliamentary elections. The money is to be used to train electoral officials and to buy in voting material. Zambia is due to hold presidential, parliamentary and local government elections in the last quarter of 2001. Under the terms […]