Nicole Johnston

The religious right claims that the bulk of South Africans are God-fearing, devout believers, with 85% belonging to some kind of organised religion. If this is true, what are we to make of our world-beating statistics for child abuse, domestic violence, rape and murder?

Imagine that once every three years your home is washed away, all your possessions are destroyed and your children miss months of school. You have no insurance and you have to start your life from scratch. Until it happens again. Welcome to life in the Zambezi River valley. The rural areas of Zambezia province are Mozambique’s poorest and most densely populated.

"Charity is a very Victorian notion — the further away people are, the more charitable we feel towards them," says Thompson with not a little asperity. "By my thirties I was thoroughly disenchanted by celebrity charity stuff — I just can’t bear it!" she says with a groan. Loathing the lunches-‘n-launches celebrity circuit, Thompson was looking for a way to make a more meaningful contribution.

The wave of floods hammering southern Africa, from Angola in the west to Madagascar in the east, has displaced hundreds of thousands, destroying homes and schools and creating fears of disease outbreak. That’s the bad news. The good news is that governments and aid organisations operating in the region have learned from the devastating floods of 2000/01.

Every year tens of thousands of children walk across borders and swim across rivers to escape poverty, abandonment and a lack of hope. Children as young as nine undertake terrifying journeys to cross borders illegally, convinced that life must be better elsewhere. For many, the dream is short-lived and they find themselves battling for survival, exploited and abused.

The road to Dowa could be any road in rural Malawi. Subsistence farmers scratch out a living from desiccated, exhausted soil and pray for the rains to arrive soon. The blackened stubs of trees are mournful witnesses that this area was verdant indigenous woodland not so long ago. Now their function as recyclers of moisture is lost and the water that evaporates simply disappears. Rainfall has diminished and the rivers have shrunk to muddy trickles.

It is predicted that by the end of the century, a barrel of water will cost more than a barrel of oil. In cities such as Dar es Salaam and Delhi, the taps often run dry and women spend hours every day looking for water to buy from tankers and vendors. In the rural areas this is often not an option, and available water must be harvested from rainfall or rivers without wasting a precious drop.

Superintendent Joe Odendaal’s old-fashioned courtesy and gentle air belie his track record as a tough cop who gets things done. "What does safe mean? One incident is one too many," he retorts dismissively. "We are not interested in sitting around patting ourselves on the back. Our goal is to achieve a crime-free area, and we need to improve continuously to get there."

Imported French ingredients, fine wine and rare cigars are to the political and business elite what diamond-encrusted platinum pendants the size of hubcaps are to rappers: a way to flash your newly acquired squillions and your exquisite taste –the culinary equivalent of bling.

At an age when most people are enjoying a quiet retirement, Reshoketswe Mabulelong has started not just a new career but one which finds her wading across muddy building sites in a hard hat, shouting orders at men. "No, no, you can’t ask my age, just say I am a senior citizen," says Mabulelong sternly.

‘Whenever we see a picture of a refugee it is always someone lying on the ground with flies on their face!" exclaims Dosso Ndessomin. Ndessomin (42) is tired of the portrayal of refugees as passive victims, with endless needs and nothing to offer. The reality is vastly different, he says, and he should know: he came to South Africa from Côte d’Ivoire as an asylum seeker in 1994.

The advent of democracy saw Franschhoek, the model Afrikaner village of apartheid mythology, ill prepared to deal with transformation. Under apartheid the dream of a "pure" white town had seen the forced removal of 40 coloured families who had owned homes there, and the creation of a separate coloured municipality, with a buffer zone of farms in between.

No sooner had we gotten used to the idea of high-priced "anti-ageing" creams containing the placenta of Tibetan yak than the Botox fad hit and Hollywood has-beens and local socialites alike froze their faces into immobility with artfully placed shots of what is, essentially, muscle paralysing poison.