As more and more people flee Zimbabwe and pour into South Africa’s cities, the social networks that have developed over the years to accommodate Zimbabweans are growing overburdened and, as a result, recent arrivals are increasingly having to brave life on the streets.
Mohammed Jalloh leaps in celebration after scoring a goal on a makeshift pitch along Lumley Beach in Freetown. He’s 23 and loves football. Like his hero, Arsenal’s Cesc Fabregas, he is a midfielder. Taking up his position again, Jalloh prepares for the restart. He flexes his muscles as he leans forward on his crutches, his weight on his left leg, the stump where his right leg should be is bandaged and dangling from his shorts.
At 3.30pm on Tuesday, President Thabo Mbeki did what he has been trying to for a long time. He began the process of firing deputy health minister Nozizwe Madlala-Routledge. Summoned to the Union Buildings on Tuesday afternoon in Pretoria, Madlala-Routledge was asked to resign.
Investigators on Thursday found more human remains on an Eastern Cape farm where the Pebco Three were believed to have been buried, the National Prosecuting Authority said. ”We uncovered further human bones and other material that we are going to subject to analysis,” said a spokesperson.
The South African government will look more closely at crimes against women, President Thabo Mbeki told a national Women’s Day event in the Northern Cape on Thursday. Mbeki said the government and the Presidential Women’s Working Group had agreed to look at the issue in a ”more detailed and specific fashion”.
The inclusion of the South African Communist Party and the Congress of South African Trade Unions prevented the African National Congress-led government from ”tilting to the right”, ANC deputy president Jacob Zuma said on Thursday. Speaking in Durban, he said that if workers and communists are not there, ”we are likely to tilt to the right”.
After a busy day trying to survive Zimbabwe’s economic crisis, Jeffrey Ndoro likes to relax after work with a beer. Even with inflation spiralling out of control, beer had been comparatively cheap before a price crackdown by President Robert Mugabe’s government caused supplies to dry up.
An amateur palaeontologist in Switzerland may have unearthed Europe’s largest dinosaur mass grave after he dug up the remains of two Plateosaurus. The dinosaurs’ bones came to light during house-building in the village of Frick, near the German border.
The Young Communist League (YCL) on Thursday called for charges to be brought against Congress of South African Trade Unions president Willie Madisha and a Pretoria businessman over a missing R500 000 donation. There has been an acceptance from Madisha that he received the money, ”so we think the police should open a case”, said YCL spokesperson Castro Ngobese.
Nearly 100 people have drowned in floods in Sudan, where rivers have burst their banks, inundating villages and farm lands, the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies said on Thursday. The toll over the past month was reported by the Sudanese Red Crescent, which has been leading the humanitarian response to the flooding.