Category Archives: South Africa

Love Corbyn, hate Brexit? Labour’s EU elections dilemma – podcast

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Jeremy Corbyn launched Labour’s European elections manifesto with a renewed promise to back a second Brexit referendum in certain circumstances – but to also respect the result of the first. Yet for ardently pro-Corbyn Europhiles such as Momentum’s Laura Parker, it has been a tough balancing act to support. Also today: Jason Burke on the South African election and the ANC

Jeremy Corbyn launched Labour’s European elections campaign with a renewed commitment to hold a second referendum on Brexit if a “sensible” deal cannot be agreed and there is not a general election. The pledge maintains the party’s precarious balancing act between promising to respect the initial vote and calling for a fresh one.

One of Labour’s MEP candidates is Laura Parker, who joins Anushka Asthana in the studio. Formerly a private secretary in Corbyn’s office, she is now national coordinator for the Labour pressure group Momentum and is campaigning for another public vote. Like many leftwingers who backed Corbyn from the beginning, she is desperate for Labour to commit to stopping Brexit.

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South Africa election: early results point to reduced ANC majority

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Party expected to retain power with 56% of vote, its lowest share in democratic era

Early results in South Africa’s general election suggest the ruling African National Congress party (ANC) is heading for a historic low but with enough votes to retain power.

With about half the votes counted, the ANC was on 56%, enough for a majority but a sign President Cyril Ramaphosa has failed to slow the accelerating decline in the party’s popularity 25 years after the country’s first free elections ushered in a new democratic era.

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ANC corruption is a major cause of South Africa’s failure – and the polls will show it | William Gumede

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The post-apartheid consensus has collapsed. The ANC must renew itself, or become a spent force

When South Africans go to the polls today, it could be the last time the governing ANC wins an overall majority, unless the party renews itself and starts delivering on its promises to increasingly disgruntled supporters. The ANC is likely to win the national elections but its majority will take a hit and it may struggle to win, or have to share power in some of the provinces. After 25 years in power, the party’s popularity is lower than the personal popularity enjoyed by President Cyril Ramaphosa. If Ramaphosa was not also the head of the ANC, it is very likely that it would be heading for defeat this week. Large numbers of ANC supporters have entirely given up hope, both on the party of liberation being able to deliver a better life for them and on South Africa’s post-apartheid democratic institutions.

Even if the ANC wins today’s election, it will be unable to deliver a better life for those who voted for it

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Caster Semenya ruling ‘tramples on dignity’ of athletes, South Africa says

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Olympian receives strong backing from South African government and fellow athletes

South Africans have expressed widespread support for the double Olympic champion Caster Semenya, who will run her last 800m on Friday before the imposition of controversial new rules limiting testosterone in female athletes.

Tokozile Xasa, the sports minister, said on Thursday that the South African government was disappointed with the ruling by the court of arbitration for sport that women with unusually high testosterone levels, such as Semenya, would have to take medication to significantly reduce their testosterone before they were permitted to compete internationally at distances between 400m and a mile.

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‘They don’t get it’: South Africa’s scarred ANC faces voter anger

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Divided party faces ‘deep moral crisis’ despite anticipated victory in election in May

Major Mgxaji, a retired union official in the poor township of Khayelitsha near Cape Town, was repeatedly jailed and tortured by apartheid authorities for his political activism with the ANC in the 1970s and 80s.

“It is not the same party as back then,” the 67-year-old said in an interview in Khayelitsha, where rolling power cuts in recent months have been widely blamed on corruption at the national electricity provider. “The ANC people have developed the struggle of the belly instead of the struggle to better the lives of our people. That is very dangerous.”

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Suspects in murder of ex-Rwandan spy chief ‘directly linked to Kigali’ – inquest

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Lawyer for Patrick Karegeya’s family says South African police failures point to abuse of process


The family of the murdered former Rwandan intelligence chief Patrick Karegeya celebrated on Thursday after a South African magistrate said the identities of four suspects were known and police said they were “directly linked” to Rwanda’s government.

At the end of a 20-minute inquest in Johannesburg, the magistrate Mashiane Mathopa said there was a prima facie case to answer and he was sending the matter to South Africa’s National Prosecuting Authority (NPA). Karegeya was found strangled in a Johannesburg hotel room in January 2014.

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South African police seize 167 rhino horns after tipoff

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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.

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Mandela’s sketch of his Robben Island cell door to be sold at auction

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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.

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‘You often get sick’: the deadly toll of illegal gold mining in South Africa | Christopher Clark

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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.

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Rhino poacher killed by an elephant and then ‘devoured’ by lions

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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”.

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The murder of Raymond Buys: ‘I think they knew they were going to kill my boy’

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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.

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The final indignity for ‘El Negro’, laid to rest in wrong country

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Body stolen from grave for ‘shameful’ display reburied far from his South African home

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.

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Resurrection Challenge – South Africans mock pastor for ‘resurrection stunt’ on social media – video

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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

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Nelson Mandela’s personal artefacts go on show in London

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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.

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Students killed in walkway collapse at South African school, say officials

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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.

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Shark attacks around world fell by about one-quarter in 2018

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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.

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Cape Town: wild fire engulfs Lion’s Head mountain and threatens suburbs

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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.

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Ex-mercenary claims South African group tried to spread Aids

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New documentary details unit’s disturbing obsession with HIV

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.

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Coups and murder: the sinister world of apartheid’s secret mercenaries

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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.

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