Two suspects arrested in sting operation in North West province
South African police have seized 167 rhino horns believed to have been destined for Asia.
Two suspects were arrested in the sting operation in the North West province on Saturday, which followed a tipoff. Police said it was one of the biggest hauls of rhino horns in the country.
Continue reading...Drawing is one of 22 works made in 2002 as therapeutic activity about his incarceration
Of all the sketches he made about his 27-year incarceration, this was the one Nelson Mandela wanted to keep. A depiction of his Robben Island cell door with a key in it – a powerful symbol of hope and resilience.
Now the previously unseen drawing – one of 22 sketches Mandela made in 2002 as therapeutic activity – is to be sold, according to the auction house Bonhams.
Continue reading...Driven by need, tens of thousands of women are risking death, disease and sexual violence to scrape a living in the country’s informal mining sector
On the outskirts of Durban Deep, an abandoned mining town with a labyrinth of underground tunnels long since abandoned by the big gold companies, Elizabeth goes rhythmically about her work.
Grinding piles of rough stones into white, gold-flecked silt on a large concrete slab, the 40-year-old is one of the ghostly dust-covered zama zamas – artisanal miners, mostly illegal – who have turned to scavenging in disused gold and diamond mines across South Africa.
Continue reading...Police say the man entered the park with a group intending to shoot and kill rhinos
A rhino poacher is believed to have been attacked by an elephant and then eaten by a pride of lions during an incident in South Africa’s Kruger national park.
Police brigadier Leonard Hlathi said police received information that a group of men had gone into the park on 1 April in order to hunt rhino, “when suddenly an elephant attacked and killed one of them”.
Continue reading...The South African teenager was 15 when he was enrolled in a training camp that claimed to ‘make men out of boys’. Was the resurgence of the far right to blame for his death?
In their final family photograph, Raymond Buys looks as awkward as any 15-year-old boy standing next to his mother. He’s nearly 6ft tall and the harsh South African sun glints off his newly cropped blond hair. Despite the heat, he wears teen regulation black. Soon he’ll be in khaki.
Wilna Buys pulls her son close, knowing there are only minutes before she must send him through the gates behind them into Echo Wild Game Rangers camp. An electric fence almost seems to buzz in the background. Giant fake tusks guard the gates, giving the impression of a mouth. Raymond narrows his eyes, maybe at the sun, maybe at the man taking the picture – Gys Nezar, his mother’s boyfriend. Nobody smiles for the camera.
Continue reading...For more than a century, the stuffed body of an African man was displayed as a grotesque exhibit in European museums. His body had been stolen from his grave by a pair of French taxidermists who dug him up in the dead of night and had him shipped to France, along with a collection of similarly preserved animals.
In 2000, following a vociferous campaign for common decency to prevail, the man’s remains were reburied in African soil.
Continue reading...A pastor in South Africa who claimed to have performed a resurrection has sparked a social media craze as users took to the web mockingly mimicking his miraculous powers. A video of Alleluia Ministries International pastor Alph Lukau ‘reviving’ a supposedly dead man emerged over the weekend and quickly went viral. Within hours, the hashtag ResurrectionChallenge was trending on Twitter as users posted wry images of their own dramatic ‘revivals’ alongside screenshots of Lukau’s supposed miracle.
‘Resurrection’ pastor sparks storm of parody on Twitter
Former South African president’s letters to family and Robben Island sleeping mat form part of exhibition
On 1 June 1970, Nelson Mandela wrote a letter to his young daughters Zeni and Zindzi from his prison cell on Robben Island. “My darlings,” he wrote. “It is more than eight years since I last saw you …”
The girls’ mother Winnie had also been imprisoned the previous year, and their father had no idea, he wrote, who was looking after them in the school holidays, who fed them, bought them clothing or paid their school fees. He had written two letters to the pre-teenage girls the previous year, he told them, but had learned neither had reached them.
Continue reading...At least three dead and scores trapped at Hoërskool Driehoek school near Johannesburg
At least three students have died and scores are trapped in rubble after a walkway collapsed at a school near Johannesburg, South African officials have said.
Panyaza Lesufi, the head of education for Gauteng province, gave details of the incident on Twitter shortly after the collapse at Hoërskool Driehoek high school in Vanderbijlpark.
Continue reading...Four fatalities recorded, with the US and Australia experiencing the most attacks
The number of shark attacks around the world fell by about one-quarter last year, with the US and Australia reporting the highest number of them.
There were four fatalities worldwide, in line with the long-term average of six, according to the annual release of the Florida-based International Shark Attack File.
Continue reading...Blazes whipped up by a strong, dry wind have sent black smoke across the city and forced residents to evacuate
A wild fire that swept across Cape Town’s famous Lion’s Head mountain moved towards residential neighbourhoods on Sunday, prompting several people to evacuate their homes.
A Cape Town fire service spokesman told News 24 that 70 firefighters and 20 trucks were fighting the blaze. Local media reported that the firefighting effort was expected to last all night.
Continue reading...A South Africa-based mercenary group has been accused by one of its former members of trying to intentionally spread Aids in southern Africa in the 1980s and 1990s.
The claims are made by Alexander Jones in a documentary that premieres this weekend at the Sundance film festival. He says he spent years as an intelligence officer with the South African Institute for Maritime Research (SAIMR), three decades ago, when it was masterminding coups and other violence across Africa.
Continue reading...A South African militia that claimed to be behind the murder of a UN chief was involved in deadly work across the continent, its members say
Keith Maxwell, the self-declared “commodore” of the South African Institute for Maritime Research (SAIMR), liked to dress up on special occasions in the garish costume of a 18th-century admiral, with a three-cornered hat, brass buttons and a cutlass. Ordinary members of his organisation were expected to show up in crisp naval whites.
Gathered together in upmarket restaurants, or the quiet of the Wemmer Pan naval base in south-central Johannesburg, they had the air of eccentric history buffs. Maxwell talked about the group’s roots in a Napoleonic-era treasure-hunting syndicate, and told outsiders it was still focused on deep-sea exploration.
Continue reading...Lawyer claims prominent dissident Patrick Karegeya was assassinated in South Africa
A South African inquest into the killing of the prominent Rwandan dissident Patrick Karegeya has opened in the suburbs of Johannesburg with a lawyer telling the court the former intelligence chief’s death was a political assassination.
“We are dealing with an assassination of a Rwandan citizen in this country,” said Gerrie Nel, the lawyer for AfriForum, a South African NGO representing minority interests and a group of local Rwandan exiles in the case. “We will be arguing that this assassination is intrinsically linked to the political situation in Rwanda.”
Continue reading...After a tumultous week, the streets of the cities of the Democratic Republic of the Congo are likely to be quiet on Sunday as congregations file into churches to hear priests and preachers call for the Lord’s blessing on a troubled land.
Few doubt that the DRC is at a critical moment. The long-delayed elections that were finally held on 30 December could still be a turning point, leading the resource-rich nation to a better future. Or they could send the vast central African country, which has not known a peaceful transfer of power since it gained independence from Belgium in 1960, back into anarchy.
Continue reading...Settlement with limited traces was sophisticated and thriving metropolis, lasers reveal
From close up, all that is visible are some broken walls among the scrubby brush, a mound covered by parched grass, a dry river gully.
But to Professor Karim Sadr and his team of archaeologists from Johannesburg’s University of Witwatersrand, the ruins at Kweneng tell an extraordinary story of a long-lost city.
Continue reading...Album of apartheid-era songs sung by ex-president labelled a waste of taxpayers’ money
The former South African president Jacob Zuma’s plan to record an album of apartheid-era struggle songs has provoked a political row as opposition politicians labelled the project a taxpayer-funded waste of money.
Zuma, ousted last year amid multiple fraud scandals, is famed for his baritone singing voice and regularly bursts into song at rallies for the ruling African National Congress party (ANC) and at public events.
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