Category Archives: South Africa

FW de Klerk, the last president of apartheid South Africa, dies aged 85

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Office issues posthumous video in which De Klerk apologies for ‘damage that apartheid has done’

South Africa’s last white president, FW de Klerk, who with Nelson Mandela oversaw the end of apartheid, has died in Cape Town aged 85, with his office issuing a prerecorded posthumous video apology for the country’s discriminatory system of white minority rule.

“I, without qualification, apologise for the pain and the hurt and the indignity and the damage that apartheid has done to Black, Brown and Indians in South Africa,” a gaunt De Klerk said in the recording.

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Angeliena review – car park worker dreams of getaway in cartoonish South African drama

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Thin characterisation and a superficial critique of wealth inequality post-apartheid keep Uga Carlini’s fiction in first gear

The colourful opening of Uga Carlini’s Angeliena suggests a giddy ride awaits: the camera follows a suitcase plastered with travel stickers moving along a conveyor belt at an airport. But such vibrant detail only points up the film’s lack of emotional substance. A parking attendant for a posh hospital in South Africa, Angeliena (Euodia Samson) dreams of travelling the world, she adorns her little shack with tourist posters from faraway lands. At work, Angeliena brings a glow to the austere parking lot, pinning red roses that she grows herself to the windscreen wipers of fancy SUVs.

Such sweet-natured actions are presumably intended to endear Angeliena to us, yet reduce her to a unidimensional worker with a heart of gold. The thinness of the characterisation is made more pronounced by the cartoonishly evil Dr Mitchell (Colin Moss), the hospital owner and Angeliena’s antagonist, a spewer of Trumpian one-liners. Ludicrously, the film takes a tone-deaf turn when Angeliena is revealed to be suffering from an unnamed muscular atrophy that motivates her to finally embark on her world trip. Out of the blue, she develops facial tics. The only affecting sequences are the few-and-far-between gatherings between Angeliena and her eccentric female friends.

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Global climate strike: thousands join coordinated action across world

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Rally to demand government action on climate crisis is first worldwide since start of pandemic

Hundreds of thousands of people in 99 countries have taken part in a coordinated global climate strike demanding urgent action to tackle the ecological crisis.

The strike on Friday, the first worldwide climate action since the coronavirus pandemic hit, is taking place weeks before the Cop26 climate summit in Glasgow, UK.

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‘It helped me get away from crime’: Cape Town’s College of Magic – a photo essay

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Photographer Tommy Trenchard documents students whose stories of transformation at the Hogwarts of South Africa are more than just fairytales

To fans of JK Rowling’s books, the story may sound somewhat familiar: a young boy living in difficult circumstances is enrolled in a mysterious school far from home, where his life is changed for ever by the transformative power of magic.

Anele Dyasi’s story is no fairytale, though, and the school in question is not Hogwarts, but the College of Magic in Cape Town, a unique institution that has been training some of the continent’s most skilled illusionists since the 1980s.

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The murder of Fikile: the woman who took on a coal mine

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Fikile Ntshangase was involved in a legal dispute over the extension of an opencast mine when she was shot dead in her home. Her daughter Malungelo Kakaza tells her story to Rachel Humphreys

In October last year, Fikile Ntshangase, 65, was at her home in Ophondweni in South Africa when three men burst in and she was shot dead. The murder was witnessed by her 13-year-old grandson. No one has so far been charged with any part in the crime.

Ntshangase’s daughter Malungelo Kakaza tells Rachel Humphreys that her mother had been involved in a legal dispute over the extension of an opencast mine operated by Tendele Coal near Somkhele, close to Hluhluwe–Imfolozi park, the oldest nature reserve in Africa. She campaigned as part of the Mfolozi Community Environmental Justice Organisation.

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‘Swazi gold’: grandmothers in Eswatini growing cannabis to make ends meet

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In the poverty-stricken kingdom, an older generation rely on growing marijuana to feed children orphaned by Aids epidemic

In Nhlangano, in the south of Eswatini (formerly Swaziland), the illegal farming of the mountainous kingdom’s famous “Swazi gold” is a risk many grandmothers are ready to take.

In what is known locally as the “gardens of Eden”, a generation of grandparents are growing cannabis, many of them sole carers for some of the many children orphaned by the HIV/Aids epidemic that gripped southern Africa.

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What is C.1.2, the new Covid variant in South Africa, and should we be worried?

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The C.1.2 strain has scientists’ attention because it possesses mutations within the genome similar to those seen in variants of interest, like Delta

A new Covid variant detected in South Africa has made headlines around the world.

On Monday the National Institute for Communicable Diseases in South Africa issued an alert about the “C.1.2 lineage”, saying it had been detected in all provinces in the country, but at a relatively low rate.

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‘I was on a list to be terminated’ – Sue Dobson, the spy who helped to end apartheid

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She risked arrest, torture and jail to fight racism in 1980s South Africa, and her story is being made into a film

As a white South African, Sue Dobson risked arrest, torture and imprisonment spying for the black nationalist cause during the latter days of the brutal apartheid regime. She was a middle-class woman in her 20s when she joined the African National Congress (ANC) and infiltrated the white minority government – even having a honey-pot affair with a police official to obtain information, with the full support of her husband, a fellow activist. When her cover was blown in 1989, she fled to Britain, where she sought political asylum after threats to her life.

Now, for the first time in 30 years, she is ready to talk publicly about her story – that of a “very ordinary” woman who played an extraordinary part in fighting racism.

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Africa’s park tourism crash is a wake-up call. Can we find new ways to finance conservation? | Peter Muiruri

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As Covid continues to curb visits to see our iconic wildlife, now is the time to move away from western-led funding models

That African governments have failed to mobilise funds to conserve their vast protected areas is not in doubt. Countries were just about managing to pay basic salaries to rangers who barely had enough to put fuel in their patrol vehicles. Covid has exacerbated this already dire situation, with the loss of income from foreign tourism.

The continent has more than 8,500 protected areas, described by the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) as government-led national parks, areas jointly governed by state agencies, communities, privately owned wildlife reserves, and public-private partnerships between governments, companies and NGOs. Included too, are what the IUCN calls “indigenous peoples and communities conserved territories and areas”.

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‘An economic calamity’: Africa faces years of post-Covid instability

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Damage from pandemic could quash ambitions, exacerbate tensions and deepen repression in parts of continent

Analysts and experts are warning of many years of instability across Africa, possibly leading to wars and political upheavals, as the economic impact of the Covid-19 pandemic deepens across the continent.

Though many of the likely consequences are yet to become evident, recent unrest in southern Africa, increased extremist violence in the Sahel and growing instability in parts of west Africa can all be attributed in part to the outbreak, observers say.

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‘They thought Covid only kills white people’: myths and fear hinder jabs in DRC

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Mutant strain may emerge amid vaccine hesitancy, experts say, as even medics reject jabs in DR Congo

Dr Christian Mayala and Dr Rodin Nzembuni Nduku sit together on a bench outside the Covid ward at Kinshasa’s Mama Yemo hospital.

They are discussing the health of their father, Noel Kalouda, who contracted coronavirus weeks before, and is now lying in a hospital bed, breathing through an oxygen mask.

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‘Eid was very different’: my fortnight watching South Africa descend into chaos

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Durbanites expected another lockdown, not isolation enforced by violence and looting. But as the city I love turned to ruin, I saw fear change to bravery and community spirit

The past week has been one of the most difficult of my life. My home descended into chaos. Durban, a holiday city with a melting pot of cultures and a diverse range of people who live and work here, came to a standstill as rioters took to the streets to spread chaos after the arrest of former president Jacob Zuma.

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What sparked the mass violence in South Africa – video explainer

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South Africa has recently experienced its worst violence since the end of the apartheid regime 27 years ago. More than 200 people were killed and thousands arrested in a week of civil unrest during which hundreds of shops were looted, factories set ablaze and government infrastructure destroyed. The Guardian's Africa correspondent, Jason Burke, explains how the violence was sparked by more than just the jailing of the former president Jacob Zuma, and what impact it could have on a country where more than half of the population lives in poverty

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The Guardian view on Covid and the world: the pandemic’s impact is growing | Editorial

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Cases are soaring in many countries, and the social and political effects are becoming clearer

“At the root of every pandemic is an encounter between a disease-causing microorganism and a human being … It is a social phenomenon as much as it is a biological one,” writes Laura Spinney in her book Pale Rider, arguing that Spanish flu “pushed India closer to independence, South Africa closer to apartheid, and Switzerland to the brink of civil war”.

It will be a long time before we, or our descendants, can fully assess Covid’s impact. But its social and political effects are emerging more clearly. It has played a role in extraordinary turmoil in places from Colombia to Cuba to South Africa, exacerbating poverty and frustration. The unrest is rooted in longstanding social and economic problems. In South Africa, where 10,000 troops have now been deployed, it is the furious response to the jailing of the divisive former president Jacob Zuma, who faces a slew of corruption charges; authorities suspect his followers of orchestrating the violence. But Covid’s erosion of social and economic wellbeing and trust in leaders has surely contributed.

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Gross inequality stoked the violence in South Africa. It’s a warning to us all | Kenan Malik

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The country’s social contract has broken, fuelled by corruption and extreme poverty

‘It feels qualitatively different this time.” There are few people I know in South Africa who don’t think this about the carnage now engulfing the nation. Violence was institutionalised during the years of apartheid. In the post-apartheid years, it has rarely been far from the surface – police violence, gangster violence, the violence of protest. What is being exposed now, however, is just how far the social contract that has held the nation together since the end of apartheid has eroded.

Many aspects of the disorder are peculiar to South Africa. There are also themes with wider resonance. Events in the country demonstrate in a particularly acute fashion a phenomenon we are witnessing in different ways and in degrees of severity across the globe: the old order breaking down, with little to fill the void but sectarian movements or identity politics.

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South Africa’s leaders fear fresh wave of violence by Zuma loyalists

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Attacks by supporters of jailed former president ‘are bid for pardon or to unseat government’

South African authorities fear a new wave of attacks aimed at undermining the economy, investment and the rule of law as networks loyal to former president Jacob Zuma seek to force his return to power.

Investigators believe the unrest last week, which killed more than 200 and caused massive damage across a swath of the country, was deliberately provoked as part of a broader strategy by political opponents to force president Cyril Ramaphosa to pardon Zuma or even step down.

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South Africa: 10,000 troops deployed and reservists called up to quell unrest

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Warnings of looming humanitarian crisis as looting and violence hits food, fuel and medicine chains

South Africa says it has put 10,000 soldiers on the streets and is calling up reservists for the first time for decades following days of looting and violence that have threatened food and fuel supplies across the country.

The death toll stands at 117, and more than 3,000 people have been arrested according to official figures, since the former president Jacob Zuma began a 15-month jail term, sparking protests that rapidly turned into a wave of looting of shops, malls and warehouses.

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South African mother describes throwing baby from burning building – video

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A young mother from Durban has described throwing her two-year-old daughter from a burning building. Naledi Manyoni said she had no choice but to release her grip on her daughter and hope that she was caught by people waiting below.'They kept screaming "throw her",' she said. Manyoni and her fiance lived on the 16th floor of building set ablaze by looters at ground level amid widespread violence in parts of South Africa

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Vigilante groups form in South Africa to tackle looting and violence

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Officials warn citizens not to take law into own hands to protect homes and business from protests

Senior officials in South Africa have appealed to ordinary citizens not to take the law into their own hands as vigilante groups form following days of unchecked looting and violent protests across a swath of the country.

Though thousands of soldiers have joined police on the streets, law enforcement agencies still appear unable to stem ongoing attacks by crowds on warehouses, supermarkets, shopping malls, clinics and factories.

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