Justin Pearce

Cazombo sprawls along both sides of the single street that runs from the airstrip, past an echoing school and hospital building, to the oldest part of town where tile-roofed colonial villas are screened by the tortured shapes and thick scent of frangipani trees. Beyond lay a small open field of dry grass with a water tower and a vast satellite dish.

Thursday was No Car Day in Jo’burg, an initiative by the Metro Council that was greeted with incredulity by the car-owning classes.Writing this on Tuesday, I don’t know whether I’ll use public transport on Thursday. I’ll walk to work, as always — and if I have to go to my Richmond office or to Braamfontein or the city, I’ll jump on a minibus taxi, writes Justn Pearce.

"I am not separated from my husband — we were separated only by the police." Matilda* (59) has spent the past month in a village amid the dry bush of Matabeleland North. She is one of thousands of Zimbabweans to be dumped in the countryside in the past two months.

As police officer Simangaliso Patrick Simelane went on trial this week over the alleged torture last year of four Landless People’s Movement activists, questions remained about the identity of others involved in the incident and why the alleged victims were never given the opportunity to identify the assailants at an identity parade.

The continuing flow of arms from neighbouring countries into the east of the Democratic Republic of Congo threatens the fragile peace in that region, Amnesty International recently. Also, the International Court of Justice in The Hague began hearing a case brought by the DRC, accusing Rwanda of armed aggression between 1998 and the present. Rwanda has rejected the allegations.

Like Bill Clinton and the Starr Commission during the Monica Lewinsky affair, this week’s dispute between AngloGold Ashanti (AGA) and Human Rights Watch (HRW) turned on what constitutes a relationship. "If you put the meetings, the financial support and the house together, clearly it’s a relationship," Anneke van Woudenberg, author of the Human Rights Watch report, <i>The Curse of Gold.</i>

When Domingos Silva left the Angolan army, he returned to his home village and enrolled for classes. At the age of 36, he says, ‘I decided to take the opportunity to learn to read.” Silva was conscripted into the Angolan Armed Forces at the age of 16. He had had little schooling before, and none […]

As the death toll from the Marburg epidemic in Angola passed 200, it emerged that cases of the deadly haemorrhagic fever had been present in the country since October last year. The disease was identified only last month. A spokesperson for the United Nations Transitional Coordination Unit in Luanda said the high levels of child mortality common in every rainy season had masked the presence of a new disease.

Mozambique’s highest constitutional body this week rejected on technical grounds an opposition request to reconsider the results of the December general election, which the ruling Frelimo party won by a large majority. The decision follows mounting evidence of electoral malpractice, though not on a scale that could sway the overall result.

"It is dark. We have taken five days to get here from Johannesburg, and our arrival in Cuito Cuanavale is going to be delayed by another day. The plan is to drive to the site of the last battle fought by the old South African Defence Force against Angola." The Battle for Cuito Cuanavale was a turning point in the history of apartheid, and is soon to be revisited in a tourism initiative.

"We need Renamo to see what they will bring," says Asahel Bin Dando Ossene who, along with most other people on Mozambique Island, survives by fishing. "For 20 years we had Frelimo and they brought us nothing." Mozambique Island is closer to Zanzibar than to Maputo and its dhows and mosques emphasise the point. As Mozambique goes to the polls, a remote area in the "forgotten" north of the country raises its voice.

When former Unita soldier Pedro da Silva disembarked from an army truck at Kituma, he thought it was going to be an overnight stop. That was in January and he is still there.

Trying to get at the separatist rebels in Cabinda, the Angolan army has been using rape and torture against the residents of the area. For the past six months the Angolan Armed Forces have been waging an intensified campaign against this rag-tag rebel movement, which has spent more than 25 years fighting for the independence.

Three months ago Calala was just a forest. Now it is home to 4 500 people living in solidly constructed huts. Calala is one of the 34 quartering centres set up around the country as the central feature of the peace plan signed by Unita and the Angolan Armed Forces (FAA) on April 4.