A NORTHERN Province school principal has pleaded guilty in the Calcutta Magistrate’s Court to raping a 13-year-old pupil on his office floor. Deck Mabudze (42) who heads Harvest Rock Combined School in Kildare trust in Calcutta, Bushbuckridge, was remanded in custody on Monday and the case was postponed to September 18 for judgement and sentencing. […]
THE Rwandan government has unveiled plans for a new flag, new national anthem and new emblem, the pro-government newspaper New Times has revealed. The new flag will be yellow, green and blue, the newspaper said on Monday, quoting Joseph Nsengimana, an advisor to President Paul Kagame. Rwanda’s current flag is red, yellow and green. Nsengimana […]
Durban | Thursday THE pollution hits your lungs and nostrils as soon as you enter Wentworth, a mixed-race community and apartheid-era dumping ground south of the Indian Ocean port city of Durban. Towering above “Noddy-town” as its known locally because of the small, box-like houses, are two huge oil refineries and a host of other […]
Ireland | Thursday UP to one third of children in southern and east Africa countries could be orphaned by HIV/Aids by 2010, the head of a South African charity told a conference in Ireland on Wednesday. Orphanhood is the most critical issue affecting children in southern Africa and will remain so for some time, according […]
Harare | Wednesday ZIMBABWE’S main opposition, the Movement for Democratic Change (MDC), vowed on Tuesday to revive the collapsing economy if voted into the presidency next year, and unveiled a 1 000-page scheme on how it would run the economy through 2004. The economic scheme was the most specific proposal yet of how the two-year-old […]
POLITICAL turmoil and a cholera outbreak scared international tourists away from the small southern African kingdom of Swaziland last year, a new Central Bank report indicates. The disruptions sparked a flood of cancellations in the second half of 2000, resulting in a 4% drop in bed nights sold at major hotels. The Central Bank report […]
AN Mpumalanga convict who shot and killed a prison warder and escaped last Friday may have been given the gun by a girlfriend. Witbank police are trying to trace the woman who was seen speaking to escapee Francois Johannes Bloem (36) outside the Germiston Magistrate’s Court on Friday. Bloem then got into a car with […]
BRITAIN is due to launch a huge campaign in Morocco aimed at boosting trade between the two countries. Key areas to be targeted during the campaign, the first of its type, include “new information technologies, financial services and the exploration and distribution of oil,” an official source said. The three-year campaign has a budget of […]
Washington | Wednesday RESEARCHERS who said on Tuesday that most regions of the world would likely reduce child malnutrition by 2020 cited one glaring exception sub-Saharan Africa. “If current trends continue, sub-Saharan Africa is the only region in the world where child malnutrition will rise the next 20 years,” the International Food Policy Research Institute […]
ANGOLA’S rebel Unita movement claims to have killed 148 government and six Namibian soldiers in operations in nine of Angola’s 18 provinces, the Lusa news agency said in Lisbon. The National Union for the Total Independence of Angola (Unita) said it had attacked a “coalition of Angolan-Namibian troops” on August 19 in southern Kuando Kubango […]
TANZANIAN police have arrested three local journalists in an apparent attempt to prevent media coverage of ethnic clashes that have left over 40 people dead. The journalists were reportedly arrested in the isolated northern region of Mara on August 22 while investigating claims that victims of tribal clashes were being buried in mass graves. Mwanza […]
ILDA JACOBS, Washington | Tuesday SOUTH African aupair Nambuso Ntuli has finally been granted bail and released from an American jail where she was being held on child abuse charges. The 23-year-old from KwaMashu near Durban was arrested by police in the US capital Washington DC three weeks ago after allegedly locking two young boys […]
THOUSANDS of bare-breasted Swazi maidens have begun congregating at the Ludzidzini Royal Palace for the Swaziland’s most sacred kingship rite, the weeklong Umhlanga Reed Dance. Swaziland’s absolute monarchs traditionally take a new wife at the annual ceremony. Unmarried maidens, most of whom are still school pupils, will trek more than 40km on foot to cut […]
POPE John Paul II has urged African leaders to give their policies “a human face”, in a message sent to a conference of West African bishops, Radio Nigeria said Monday. In the message to the week-long conference in the southeast Nigerian city of Enugu, the pontiff said African leaders should restore human dignity and bring […]
NINETY-nine oil workers, including 19 foreigners, were released on Monday after being held hostage by unemployed youths for five days on an oil rig offshore Nigeria, a Shell oil company representative said. Among those released by the youths were at least five Britons, five Americans, one South African, three Australians and one Trinidadian, the spokesman […]
Johannesburg | Wednesday THE Southern African Development Community (SADC) warned on Wednesday that nine of its 14 member states are facing cereal shortages. “Cereal deficits are expected in Botswana, Lesotho, Malawi, Mozambique, Namibia, Swaziland, Tanzania, Zambia and Zimbabwe,” executive secretary Prega Ramsamy told journalists. Zambia, with maize production down 39%, has launched an international appeal […]
Harare | Tuesday THE Zimbabwe government on Monday hit out at South African central bank governor Tito Mboweni for blaming the fall of the rand on instability in neighbouring Zimbabwe. Information Minister Jonathan Moyo said that for South Africa to ascribe every fall of the rand to Zimbabwe “has now become so childish as to […]
A NORTHERN Province mother and her three children were found murdered in their house on Monday night, ten days after the Warmbaths Magistrate’s Court granted a protection order against the children’s father. Concerned neighbours alerted police that it had been quiet all day at the house in Extension 6 of Bela Bela, said a police […]
THE Nigerian telecoms company Nitel has cut off most emergency lines to the police in Lagos over their unpaid bills. Lagos, home to more than 10-_million people, is one of Nigeria’s most violent cities and the under-funded police have now had most of their lines cut off, said deputy police commissioner Emmanuel Adebayo. Fewer than […]
ZENZELE KUHLASE, Nelspruit | Tuesday A FORMER Roman Catholic Church priest has been charged with sodomising two boys at a child care centre in Mpumalanga, a year after completing a suspended sentence for molesting five other children. Father Joseph Michel Barrette was first sentenced in 1997 for sodomising five boys aged between 14 and 16 […]
OLOFINDJI Akande, a failed candidate in Benin’s last presidential elections, is working overtime to construct a common tomb to repatriate the souls of former slaves back to Africa. “It may seem to be a little bit of a mystical phenomenon but we in Africa know secrets like that. I once saw my parents bring back […]
Maputo | Tuesday A MAJOR summit involving six regional heads of state will be held in Harare next month on the land crisis in Zimbabwe, Malawi president Bakili Muluzi announced on Monday. A decision to hold the summit was taken during a meeting between presidents Bakili Muluzi of Malawi, Joaquim Chissano of Mozambique and Robert […]
MORE than 95 000 people have been affected by drought in Djibouti, the World Food Programme (WFP) said this week .The WFP will supply a further 11 000 tonnes of food to 95 900 affected people, the UN food agency said in a statement. “Several consecutive years of drought have led to an influx into […]
Omar Badsha’s Grey Street in black-and-white.
CARNAGE continued on the Nigerian roads this weekend when 61 people died in two separate accidents as buses plunged off bridges, witnesses and reports said. Forty-nine people were killed and 23 were recovering in hospital on Sunday after an overnight bus, travelling from Lagos to the northern city of Kano, blew a tyre and plunged […]
MORE than 170 Tanzanian Muslims were being held in police cells on Saturday after being arrested on Friday while protesting the jailing of a preacher convicted of disparaging Christianity, police said. Dar es Salaam Regional Police Commander Alfred Tibaigana said that 145 men and 26 women were taken into custody during the demonstration. He added […]
ZIMBABWE is to import 100_000 tons of maize from neighbouring South Africa in a bid to avert a looming food shortage, Zimbabwean Agriculture Minister Joseph Made said on Monday. The 100_000 tons will be stored away until April or May 2002, when the county’s maize stocks are expected to run out, the minister said in […]
Johannesburg | Monday THE Zimbabwe government on Sunday said a story in the British Sunday Telegraph alleging that President Robert Mugabe had hatched a plan to expel white farmers from the country before next year’s presidential polls amounted to “idiocy”. Information Minister Jonathan Moyo said he preferred not to comment on such “idiocy” because doing […]
Lisbon | Sunday AN attack by armed men against a bus carrying about 100 passengers caused an undetermined number of fatalities and left about 12 people injured, Portugal’s Lusa news agency said on Sunday. The attack took place on Friday near Cacolo, about 30 kilometres from the town of Malange, capital of the province of […]
TUNISIAN human rights activist and torture victim Said Ferjani on Saturday condemned the appointment of General Habib Ammar as head of the committee organising the Mediterranean Games as “an insult to all victims of his torture.” “It is an insult to all honest people, to all victims, that a torturer could head such an organization,” […]
Johannesburg | Monday THE National Union of Metalworkers of South Africa (Numsa) on Sunday suspended “until further notice” a crippling three-week strike in the automobile industry, after employers agreed to raise wages by nine percent. Numsa’s secretary general Silumko Nondwangu told a press conference that “substantive progress has been made in reaching an agreement”. Nondwangu […]
NILE floods in Sudan have destroyed hundreds of homes and left thousands of families homeless this flood season. The worst affected area was River Nile State in northern Sudan where 1 102 families were left without shelter when floods tore down 577 homes in 55 villages and partially damaged 811 others, the civil defence report […]