P rofessor Shirley Kossick, a regular reviewer of fiction for this paper, will be speaking on Shakespeare’s women at 10am on Saturday November 11 at the Natal’ Labia Museum in Muizenberg. Regulars are invited to an end-of-year tea after the talk.

ED STODDARD, Pretoria | Friday ANGOLA’S Unita rebels last year mined alluvial diamonds worth around $300m and have perfected ways to evade UN sanctions, a respected regional think-tank said this week. ”Without diamonds, Unita will not be able to prosecute its war at the level it does, but of literally all the commodities in the […]

NIGERIA’S third biggest party has split into factions after its first national convention ended with the election of two chairmen, party officials said this week. At the main convention of the Alliance for Democracy (AD) in Abuja, a faction led by Justice Minister Bola Ige elected former lawmaker Ahmed Abdulkadir as chairman. Simultaneously, another faction […]

ILDA JACOBS, Washington DC | Thursday AMERICANS are discovering one of South Africa’s best-kept secrets: dunking rusks in their morning coffee. Until recently freshly baked rusks could not be bought for love or money anywhere in the United States. But Kalahari Limited, a South African-owned company in Atlanta, has changed that. The dried biscuit invented […]

EBOLA fever has claimed five more lives in the north Ugandan district of Gulu in the past 24 hours, bringing the total death toll to 80, the government said. Twelve more patients were also admitted to the two hospitals in and around Gulu town, bringing the total number of those affected by the disease to […]

SWAZI groups meeting in Johannesburg have called for an international campaign to isolate the tiny mountain kingdom to avoid civil war. “We continue to have an undemocratic, despotic, totalitarian monarchy in Swaziland,” said Bongani Masuku, secretary general of the Swaziland Solidarity Network (SSN), an umbrella organisation working for democracy. The campaign comes after two weeks […]

THE case of six Mpumalanga men accused of hanging a suspected witch from a graveyard tree has been set for trial after being postponed eight times over the past year. The men allegedly hanged Simon “Killer” Magagula, 30, on December 26 last year after accusing him of bewitching roosters that pecked people and killed them. […]

A SECOND decomposing body has been found in bushes where a man was caught cooking a human liver and thumb over a fire near Hazyview in Mpumalanga. A team of 40 people and police sniffer dogs found the body in a donga, 30m from where the first body was found in a shallow grave near […]