It is best known for the audacity of its campaigns: protest messages stamped on condom packets and bank notes, and pithy postcards to President Robert Mugabe — but who it is, is less apparent. An underground group of anti-government activists, Zvankwana-Sokwanele — "Enough!" in Zimbabwe’s two main languages, Shona and Ndebele — do not operate out of offices with a nameplate on the door.
There’s a lot of baggage associated locally with the word "protest". Generally speaking, it has become a word with a whole bunch of hidden meanings, depending on who is using it. When the government uses it, it tends to be talking about the "good old days" of anti-apartheid protest against the <i>previous</i> government. But things have take a different turn these days …
An earth tremor injured six miners one day before the earthquake that hit DRDGold’s North West operations on Wednesday, trapping 42 mineworkers underground. The National Union of Mineworkers is incensed about the quake and is blaming the mine management, which, said the union, has a "terrible health and safety record".
"The audience was now openly hostile, its mute boredom transformed into a continuous murmur of discontent, like angry bees massing in the heat of summer. He thought he saw the glint of a dagger under a toga. It was time for the pontification to end. Just two more minutes, he thought, and plunged on -" Tom Eaton presents the final instalment of the Dictionary of Received Ideas.
I wrote to the <i>Mail & Guardian</i> two weeks ago to respond to numerous articles that Mike van Graan had written against the Department of Arts and Culture. My article appeared as an edited letter to the editor. The self-appointed "god" of the arts, Van Graan, then had the unfair advantage of responding to my whole article. I find this unethical, writes Director General of the Department of Arts and Culture Itumeleng Mosala.
Syria’s supporters in Lebanon struck back against the ”cedar revolution” this week with a show of strength that easily dwarfed anything their opponents have been able to muster. They drove into Beirut in cars, waving Lebanese flags, and in battered buses decorated with pictures of the Syrian-backed President, Emile Lahoud.
I clearly misunderstood Marlise and, no doubt, the rules of the game. You see, Marlise had started and managed a successful electronic equipment business for nearly a decade in a neighbouring country and was trying to establish herself in South Africa. So through common contacts, she eventually identified the right entrepreneur she would want to partner with to create a BEE company — me!
Thomas is hunched over a car engine, busily dismantling it, his hands covered in grime. He seems so adept that a casual observer might mistake him for a veteran mechanic. But nothing could be further from the truth. Now 21, he has been serving as an apprentice mechanic for a mere six months. For two-and-a-half years before that, he was part of the legion of children living on the streets of Zimbabwe’s urban centres.
Unrelenting United States pressure on Cuba, set to ratchet up again at next week’s United Nations Human Rights Commission meeting in Geneva, is testing relations between the Bush administration and a new generation of centre-left Latin American leaders. As it has done each year since the early 1990s, the US will urge the commission to adopt a resolution condemning Cuba’s human rights record.
Miss Lucy Mangan’s case for using the title Miss instead of Ms (”The meaning of Ms”) is that she’s run out of the requisite adolescent fervour to sustain the practice into adulthood. Mangan’s mother clearly was not one of the ”British feminists in the 1970s and early 1980s” to whom she refers. I grew up with the idea that Ms was the norm. And so it should be.