History > 2006 > South Africa

Port Elizabeth Journal

Poachers’ Way of Life

Is Endangering the Abalone’s

November 3, 2006
By MICHAEL WINES
The New York Times

PORT ELIZABETH, South Africa — The way Harry Crouse sees it, plucking abalone from the Indian Ocean floor and selling them to smugglers is not poaching. Far from it: it is an act of desperation, a last resort to which a poor out-of-work panel beater like himself and his friends have been driven to keep the wolves from the family doors.

“We just take a small amount, maybe five kilos — just enough to survive,” Mr. Crouse said sorrowfully. “Just enough for the wife and kids.”

Standing on the beach in his wetsuit, beside a beat-up sedan with more rust than Joe Namath’s throwing arm, he paints a convincing portrait of destitution. Or he does until Inspector Sandor Nagy of the South African Police Service observes that his real car is a hopped-up Volkswagen with a top-of-the-line engine. The rust bucket, the inspector says, is a throwaway, a painless loss should the police seize it.

“They all say that,” Inspector Nagy said of Mr. Crouse’s protestations. “But they all drive BMWs. Look at the cars they’re driving and the life they’re living. I don’t think it’s for the family.”

Drugs or fake Nikes may be the contraband of choice in many places. In Port Elizabeth, it is Haliotis midae — abalone — poached from the ocean bed, shucked from its curlicue shell and spirited out by the ton to connoisseurs across Asia.

Mr. Crouse is indeed a poacher, and has the papers to prove it: a suspended 10-month jail sentence handed down in June for possession of perlemoen, as abalone here is called.

He also has lots of friends. Inspector Nagy counts at least 120 known poachers in the small strip of Port Elizabeth beach that he and a fellow officer patrol. That does not count the professionals, equipped with scuba gear and high-powered skiffs, who work farther offshore.

“You’re looking at at least 15 people per boat,” he said, “and on a good day like this there’ll be 7, 10 boats out there.”

Abalone smuggling is not just a huge — and as the inspector might agree, almost uncontrollable — business. It is also a peephole into post-apartheid society and the economics and genealogy of a particular criminal class in modern South Africa.

That class, some experts say, is about to kill the golden gastropod that sustains it. Abalone poaching has become so widespread, dwarfing the take by the licensed abalone industry, that it threatens to wipe the species from the southern tip of Africa. Indeed, the government recently slashed the legal abalone take by nearly 45 percent, to a measly 125 tons, saying the cut was vital to preserve the species.

Poaching starts, quite naturally, with demand. Many Chinese view abalone as an aphrodisiac. Across the Far East, people believe it is good luck to eat them. More than that, it is good to eat them, period. They are a delicacy, and grilled, baked, steamed or batter-fried, an illicit mollusk is as sweet as a legal one.

Especially Haliotis midae, the beige abalone of South Africa’s warm Indian Ocean waters. As poachers hunted California’s white abalone to near extinction, the South African variety has become increasingly prized by abalone gourmets.

Still, the experts say, poaching was negligible for decades after the South African government first imposed limits on abalone catches in 1970. That all went out the window when political change, economics and chance conspired against the poor snail in the 1990s.

The political change, of course, was the end of apartheid. As the South African writer and law enforcement expert Jonny Steinberg reported in a 2005 study, apartheid not only kept South Africa’s nonwhites off prized land but swept them out of the seas as well. That was particularly true of the nation’s mixed-race, or colored community, which once fished much of the southern beachfront.

“The colored fishing communities along the coastline always regarded what was in the seas as theirs, and they were blocked from getting it by apartheid,” Mr. Steinberg said.

But mixed-race South Africans were also deeply fearful that a black majority would oppress them just as the white minority had. So when a black government came to power in 1994, mixed-race fishermen streamed to the seas to reclaim their so-called heritage — and to sell it before anyone tried to stop them.

A steep drop in the value of South Africa’s currency between 1992 and 2001 only accelerated poaching, making the sale of abalone, which is generally conducted in dollars, an immensely lucrative business.

Still, smuggling might never have taken off without someone to bring the snails to Asian buyers. By coincidence, Chinese organized crime was already rooted in the country, dealing in shark fins, drugs and people. By 1993 the police were finding abalone canning and drying factories in large Chinese-owned homes in Durban, Johannesburg and the Cape Town area.

South Africa’s porous borders permit smugglers to move most of the abalone to neighboring countries, where it can be shipped legally to the Far East. Precisely how much is guesswork, but in the 18 months that ended in June 2003, Mr. Steinberg reported, Hong Kong’s port received 1,200 tons of South African abalone, fresh and dried. The legal catch during the same period was 350 tons.

Since then poaching seems to have gotten worse. In January, the police hauled 120 suspected abalone divers out of the ocean outside Port Elizabeth. In July, the Cape Town police seized a Chinese man and two others with $1.7 million in poached abalone being readied for export. In mid-September, a police raid netted 3,000 pounds worth $200,000 in an upscale Port Elizabeth house.

In October, the police in central South Africa stopped a pickup and found abalone with a street value of $140,000 in its bed, while raids in the west bagged 30,000 poached abalone and 24 suspects, one of them Chinese.

Despite the interceptions, the price paid to poachers has dropped markedly — from about $125 a kilogram, or $57 a pound, to roughly $50 a kilo, or $23 a pound. That suggests that the market is glutted by rampant poaching, government sales of seized abalone, or both.

The government has deployed police and marine forces against the poachers, but apparently to little avail. The Marine and Coastal Management agency recently stepped up its enforcement efforts with the purchase of a cigarette-style skiff that can outrun any poacher’s boat. But the poachers monitor the skiff’s berth and alert divers by cellphone whenever it leaves port.

“It’s very organized — national syndicates, with international links,” M. Dlulane, the deputy compliance officer for the government’s Environmental Affairs Department, said as his officers set out in their skiff to search for poachers.

On an October day, as the skiff neared port after a fruitless two hours at sea, the officers spotted a boat racing away from them. Their skiff gave high-speed chase — and arrived just in time to see the boat dart beneath a bridge into a shallow river. There, safely out of reach, the boat performed an unmistakable victory dance, zipping several times from one riverbank to the other, before turning away and disappearing.

“Look at him,” one antipoaching officer said. “He’s mocking us.”

    Poachers’ Way of Life Is Endangering the Abalone’s, NYT, 3.11.2006, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/11/03/world/africa/03abalone.html?hp&ex=1162616400&en=edaefa401866471a&ei=5094&partner=homepage

PW Botha dies

Friday November 3, 2006
The Herald Online
Herald Correspondent
PORT ELIZABETH

APARTHEID strongman P W Botha, commonly known as the Groot Krokodil, died last night at his Die Anker home near Wilderness. He was 90.

“At 8.10pm tonight (last night) he died suddenly, peacefully,” said Dr Jan Maritz, a son-in-law of the former National Party president.

“He was feeling fine, got up, but then life just left him.”

Botha was a hawk, his belligerent approach characterised by finger- wagging and smirking during public appearances. But it was he who first met the then-imprisoned Nelson Mandela to set the ball rolling for the current democratic dispensation.

Maritz said the family, having witnessed Botha‘s passing away an hour earlier, was coming to terms with it.

“But we must emphasise his passing was peaceful, and we accept that. We don‘t know what is going to happen next, and we will release a full statement in the morning.”

A friend of Botha‘s, Hein Marx, said there had been no indication during yesterday that anything was amiss with Botha. His wife, Barbara, had found him dead in bed just after 8pm.

He said Botha‘s death was “a shock to us. He was very, very healthy, except two weeks ago when he felt a bit sick and a bit bad.”

He said Botha‘s eldest daughter Elanza Maritz who lives in George with her doctor husband, and his son Rossouw, who lives on a smallholding in the area, were with Mrs Botha last night along with an NG Church minister. He said he assumed Botha‘s daughter Rozanne, who lives in Cape Town, and other son, Pieter, from Pretoria, would also be making their way to Wilderness.

Botha‘s first wife Elize is buried in a graveyard at an NG Church on a hilltop above Wilderness.

Pieter Willem Botha was born on January 12, 1916. He was prime minister of South Africa from 1978 to 1984 and state president from 1984 to 1989. He was a long-time supporter of the National Party and of the apartheid system. However, in the early 1980s he engineered a loosening of some of the government‘s most stringent racial policies.

Botha was the archetype “kragdadige” Afrikaner and a worthy successor to John Vorster, whom he replaced as prime minister in the wake of the Information scandal in late 1978. It was he who coined the phrases “Total Onslaught” and “Total Strategy” to justify the ever-greater use of force to suppress growing black resistance to whites-only rule.

He was the “Imperial President” who petulantly clung to power when it was time to go. Botha was only pried loose after a power struggle with FW de Klerk. A career politician, he then retired, a bitter man, to the appropriately named Wilderness.

He started his career in 1936 when he became a party organiser for the Cape National Party – a task that occupied him for the next decade – along with selling books for Nasionale Pers as they were paying his salary. He was said to be highly efficient in both recruiting new members and disrupting the meetings of other political parties.

Botha found time for romance, wooing Anna Elizabeth (Elize) Rossouw, whom he married on March 13, 1943.

He was elected MP for George in the landslide that brought the NP to power in 1948 and made DF Malan prime minister. Botha would hold that seat until 1984: a total of 36 years.

He became Prime Minister on September 28, 1978, after defeating challenges by Connie Mulder and Pik Botha.

Botha became State President in September 1984 but the elections to fill the racial parliaments of the Tricameral parliament he introduced in 1983 – which many in the coloured and Indian communities did not want – triggered a new wave of violent resistance to continued white control and saw the rise of the United Democratic Front. This new phase of the struggle against apartheid would continue throughout the turbulent eighties.

Botha suffered a light stroke on January 18, 1989 and was succeeded as leader of the NP by De Klerk. At a caucus meeting on August 14, 1989, he was asked to resign, and De Klerk became acting State President the next day. He immediately embarked on a reform process which culminated in the February 2, 1990, unbanning of the ANC and other organisations and the release of Mandela a few days later.

A tribute came from an unexpected quarter in late 1999 when Mandela said Botha as well as De Klerk had played a “critical role” in the peaceful transition to non-racial democracy.

After Elize died he was again briefly in the news while dating a Graaff-Reinet socialite. The relationship was short but soon after he did indeed remarry and spent his last years with his British-born wife, Barbara Robertson. – Sapa

    PW Botha dies, The Herald Online, 3.11.2006, http://www.theherald.co.za/herald/news/n01_01112006.htm

How history will treat PW Botha

02 November 2006
09:25
Mail & Guardian Online
Dries van Heerden

PW Botha will probably always be remembered as a "black hat" man. He and Magnus Malan loved wearing those ridiculous homburgs when they inspected their beloved troepies -- whether in the "operational area" or south of the border, down Voortrekkerhoogte way.

In South African politics he also wore the symbolic black hat -- as the bully-boy face of apartheid and the enforcer behind successive states of emergency aimed at keeping the lid on the boiling pot of black resistance.

I believe the hindsight of history will treat Botha much kinder than the quick appraisals following his death this week at his home in the Wilderness. For the image of a finger-wagging, self-righteous, smirking Groot Krokodil who defiantly refused to appear before the Truth and Reconciliation Commission to account for the excesses of his administration is still too vivid in our collective memory.

However, Botha also deserves credit for the process of change he initiated in a period of history when white society was at its paranoiac and intransigent worst. During his reign the dismantling of the apartheid edifice gathered speed -- first with the abolition of the largely inconsequential mixed-marriages and immorality acts, and later with the scrapping of the Group Areas Act and the noxious influx-control measures.

It can be argued that these changes came about not through the design of Botha but as a result of an inevitable chain of small events. At least it happened during Botha's watch, and he had to suffer a right-wing revolt in his own ranks and the break-up of his beloved National Party as a result of this.

With the right-wing breakaway of Andries Treurnicht and his conservative cohorts in 1982, Botha effectively split the entire Afrikaner edifice from the Broederbond through the Afrikaans churches into cultural organisations, sporting bodies and school committees.

He broke the mould of whites-only politics with his limited reforms around the three-chamber Parliament, and towards the end of his career he strongly hinted at the scrapping of the "independent" homeland concept.

And although he only scratched the surface of political reform, he did prepare the ground within broader white society that enabled FW de Klerk to plunge into the February 1991 initiative, the eventual unbanning of the African National Congress (ANC) and the release of Nelson Mandela and other leaders.

For more than half a century Botha had a Siamese-twin relationship with the National Party. He dropped out of Free State University to join the Cape party machinery as an organiser, quickly earning a reputation as a rabble-rousing orator and an enforcing thug who broke up the meetings of their United Party opponents.

He was rewarded with a parliamentary seat for the George constituency at the young age of 32 and a deputy ministership (coloured affairs) a decade later, and in the early Sixties his long relationship with the military started when he was appointed minister of defence.

The National Party had a habit of picking its leadership from the right wing of the party, but it still came as a surprise when, in 1978, the Cape hard-liner easily disposed of the softer options of Pik Botha and Connie Mulder when John Vorster fell on hard times because of the information scandal.

PW Botha's world view was strongly influenced by his relationship with men in uniforms. Via Magnus Malan and other top defence brass who were trained by the French forces in Algeria he became convinced that there was a "total onslaught" waged against South Africa, which could only be countered by a "total strategy". His obsession with military solutions for diplomatic problems affected an entire generation of South Africans -- both the whites who were conscripted into a meaningless border war and blacks who were on the sharp end of uniformed actions in townships and in the front-line countries.

He surrounded himself with "securocrats" who wore similar blinkers and introduced the national security-management system to the country at a time when the majority of the population had started to run out of patience with the process of cosmetic reforms. The irresistible forces of revolution were met with the immovable objects of Botha's state of emergency.

Botha and the "Rubicon speech" will always be mentioned in the same sentence. The real story of what happened on the night of August 15 1985 when Botha addressed the Natal congress of the Nats will still be told. What is known is that Botha originally intended to deliver a major reformist speech, carefully crafted by a group of policy wonks in the office of constitutional affairs minister Chris Heunis.

Pik Botha was dispatched to inform foreign governments and embassies to prepare themselves for big announcements, and the local media received carefully leaked previews of the speech. For PW Botha, with his notorious disdain for the media (except Die Burger), the weight of expectations became too much and he baulked at the last moment. In the end Botha launched into a tirade against his favourite enemies -- foreign interference in local affairs, the communist conspiracy and the media. All that remained of the original speech was a pathetic one-liner that South Africa had crossed the Rubicon of political reform.

The speech and the global reaction marked the effective end of his political career. International reaction was devastating, the rand plummeted to unprecedented lows and the ANC's campaign to isolate the Botha regime and introduce global sanctions received an unexpected shot in the arm.

His hold on to the levers of power became increasingly tenuous, but it was not until he suffered a minor stroke four years later that the feeble-hearted reformers in his party could summon the courage to plunge the knives in. With a trembling hand and a quivering lower lip Botha cut a sad and forlorn figure as he tried to fight the internal coup orchestrated by FW de Klerk and Pik Botha.

His final years were spent in both the physical and symbolic Wilderness, trying to stay out of politics but often unable to resist the temptation to snipe at his old foes -- most notably De Klerk and the TRC's Archbishop Desmond Tutu.

PW Botha can hardly be described as a reformer. But he did start a process -- the end of which he could hardly foresee when he started scratching the ugly warts of petty apartheid.

Dries van Heerden is a former political reporter

    How history will treat PW Botha, Mail & Guardian Online, 2.11.2006, http://www.mg.co.za/articlePage.aspx?articleid=288645&area=/insight/insight__comment_and_analysis/#

Zuma fights back from oblivion in climate of conspiracy and fear

September 23, 2006
The Times
From Jonathan Clayton in Johannesburg

WITH one foot off the ground and an arm stretched towards ranks of adoring supporters, a jubilant Jacob Zuma was well into yet another refrain of Umshini Wam (Bring Me My Machinegun), his trademark song, when the mock coffin appeared.

The surrounding crowd, celebrating a South African High Court dismissal of corruption charges against their hero, jeered as a poster of President Mbeki was held above a plastic shroud in the glinting black, green and gold colours of the ruling African National Congress (ANC).

Ever the professional politician, Mr Zuma, a controversial former Deputy President, was one of the first to spot it. He quickly brought the show to an end and hurriedly left the stage, surrounded by a phalanx of burly bodyguards.

Rally organisers moved in and angrily ordered the impromptu display to end. “Take it down, take it down, stop it NOW . . . this is no time to be disrespectful. This is a time of partying and rejoicing. It must not be spoilt — our detractors, our enemies, will seize on this disrespect,” a leading member of the ANC militant youth wing yelled.

The incident, in which the poster was gleefully torn apart by the crowd, briefly highlighted what the ANC has been at pains to deny but can no longer disguise: the movement that brought an end to white oppression is bitterly, some say even terminally, divided.

Mr Zuma’s elated supporters were celebrating a significant victory: the decision on Wednesday by Judge Herbert Msimang to deny a prosecution request for a postponement in a long-awaited corruption trial arising out of alleged paybacks, organised by Schabir Schaik, Mr Zuma’s former financial adviser, from Thales, the French arms company.

In a stunning setback for the State, the judge, sitting in Pietermaritzburg, a town in the centre of Mr Zuma’s Zulu heartland, not only struck the case off the rolls, but also lambasted state prosecutors for incompetence, laziness and inefficiency. He said that the National Prosecuting Authority had “limped from one disaster to another”.

The judge’s decision placed Mr Zuma, 64, firmly back on track to be, in 2009, the country’s third black — and first Zulu — President. Mr Zuma’s supporters were ecstatic. They have always maintained that he was the victim of a high-level political conspiracy by an elite determined to keep hold of power, scared of his radical roots and dominated by anti-Zulu sentiments.

About 10,000 gathered outside the courthouse immediately grasped the significance of the judge’s ruling. Zulu chiefs punched the air and shouted: “My president, my president.” Women, some in battle fatigues and waving wooden cut-out AK47s, danced and sang.

Such scenes terrify South Africa’s middle class, black and white — the natural constituency of the cautious, pro-capitalist Mr Mbeki — who fear a Zuma presidency would herald an era of African “Big Man”-style rule in the continent’s wealthiest country, scare off investors and destroy the gains of the past 12 years.

The crisis began last year when President Mbeki dismissed Mr Zuma after he was implicated in the multimillion-pound arms scandal, but has its roots in long-simmering feuds over deeply divergent political and economic policies. These have all coalesced over the question of the succession to Mr Mbeki, who steps down in 2009.

Sipho Seepe, an academic at the South African branch of Henley Management College, said: “For the first time the ANC is attacking its own comrades. This is a struggle for power, not for ideals.”

Professor Seepe blamed Mr Mbeki, saying that his well-known refusal to accept divergent opinions within the ANC was at the root of the crisis. “He is opposed to anyone more popular, and determined to choose his own successor.”

Unlike others opposed to Mr Mbeki, Mr Zuma has impeccable liberation struggle credentials. A former leader of the ANC’s military wing, he was imprisoned on Robben Island alongside Nelson Mandela for more than ten years.

Faced with political oblivion, he fought back. He mobilised support among the party’s radical grass roots and leftist union movement and capitalised on the academic Mr Mbeki’s unpopularity with the masses who have received little benefit from the end of apartheid. In May the tables began to turn. Mr Zuma was acquitted, in a separate trial, of raping an HIV-positive family friend, but again outraged modern South Africa by admitting that he had had sex with her without using a condom.

Throughout the crisis Mr Zuma has always retained his post as Deputy President of the ANC, and is backed by its grass roots. Many commentators say that he is on course to win the ANC presidency, which falls vacant in December.

The ANC president has previously always been the party’s automatic choice as candidate for the presidency of the country, which would, in effect, assure Mr Zuma the top job. But the NPA must now decide whether to bring fresh charges against him. If it does, it will split the ANC further. If it does not, it will be accused of leaving a man who it says is guilty a free run to the top post.

The ANC has other candidates in waiting, such as Cyril Ramaphosa, the former head of the National Union of Mineworkers, who quit politics for business after losing out to Mr Mbeki in the struggle to succeed Mr Mandela.

“The climate is now so full of conspiracy and fear, it will take a very brave man to come out and oppose Zuma publicly,” Aubrey Matshiqi, of the Centre for Policy Studies in Johannesburg, said. Meanwhile, Mr Zuma is expected to start courting the country’s powerful business community.

    Zuma fights back from oblivion in climate of conspiracy and fear, Ts, 23.9.2006, http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,3-2371168,00.html

Contender used common touch to revive ambitions

September 23, 2006 
The Times
From Jonathan Clayton

IT IS a testimony to Jacob Zuma’s mastery of South African politics that he is still considered to be a serious contender for the country’s presidency.

After he was acquitted last May of raping an HIV-positive family friend, most commentators, particularly white liberals, declared that damaging courtroom revelations had destroyed any lingering political ambitions.

How could a 64-year-old man who admitted he had knowingly had sex with an HIV-positive woman less than half his age without using a condom aspire to lead a country with one of the highest HIV/Aids infection rates in the world, they argued.

The former Deputy President and former leader of the country’s Moral Regeneration Committee also outraged Aids activists by saying that to prevent infection he had showered afterwards.

Not for the first time was Mr Zuma, his common touch and assiduous use of loyalty seriously underestimated.

Immediately after his acquittal, he apologised to the nation and asked the people to forgive him. The approach attracted more support than criticism.

Business Day, the influential financial newspaper, drew favourable comparisons with other leading politicians, most notably President Mbeki, whose response to criticism over his own controversial views on Aids was to refuse any further discussion of the issue.

But Mr Zuma, a former head of intelligence of Umkhonto we Sizwe (Spear of the Nation), the military wing of the African National Congress (ANC), has never shied away from a fight.

A man steeped in the history of the liberation struggle, Mr Zuma has an instinctive feel for the ANC’s grass roots. His common touch has left him deeply popular with ordinary people, in sharp contrast to many of the top government figures who grew up in exile and, like President Mbeki, are seen by the masses as cold intellectuals.

When Mr Zuma was first charged with corruption last year, he was able to draw on a lifetime of support within the ANC and deeply held convictions of the part of ordinary activists that he was a victim of a conspiracy by the elite to prevent a champion of the poor reaching the levers of power.

Born in 1942, Mr Zuma — a Zulu — was raised by his widowed mother.

From the 1960s through to the 1980s, he was an active member of the ANC underground. That led to 10 years’ imprisonment alongside Nelson Mandela on Robben Island.

When the ANC finally took power, Mr Zuma served for five years in the provincial government before being selected as Deputy President when Thabo Mbeki took office in 1999.

    Contender used common touch to revive ambitions, Ts, 23.9.2006, http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,3-2371374,00.html

Electricity beyond reach for millions

September 23, 2006
The Times
By Angela Jameson, Industrial Correspondent

A TELEVISION and an iron are the first domestic appliances that poor black South African families buy when they first receive electricity. Fridges are deemed a luxury in a country where many cannot afford the 65 rand (£5) that it costs to connect a shantytown house to the national grid.

In the fast-developing South African economy about 40 per cent of the population is still not connected to the grid.

Demand for electricity is increasing at nearly 3 per cent a year and the republic is close to exhausting its capacity to meet its energy needs from domestic sources. Eskom, the state-owned electricity generator and supplier, expects to run out of capacity by 2007.

Under the ANC, South Africa has made great progress in dismantling its old economic system. But many people have been excluded in the rush for private enterprise, with unemployment at about 25 per cent.

Economic growth has improved but created relatively few jobs. The Government is trying to achieve annual growth of 4.5 per cent until 2010 to reach its goal of halving the country’s high levels of unemployment by 2014.

    Electricity beyond reach for millions, Ts, 23.9.2006, http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,3-2371375,00.html

A Stormy Test for Democracy in South Africa

September 23, 2006
The New York Times
By MICHAEL WINES

JOHANNESBURG, Sept. 22 — South Africa’s first democratic president was a foregone conclusion. Its second was anointed with odometer-like predictability. Now for something completely different: a bare-knuckled succession struggle, replete with mudslinging, grandstanding, ideological splits and all the other earmarks of a robust democracy.

A struggle, some here say, that could foretell just how robust South Africa’s young democracy is.

The successor to President Thabo Mbeki will not be chosen until 2009, but few doubt that the campaigning began this week in Pietermaritzburg. There, a judge threw out public corruption charges against Jacob Zuma, the deputy president of the African National Congress who had been former deputy president of South Africa and, until he became mired in scandal, Mr. Mbeki’s heir apparent.

Inside the courtroom, Mr. Zuma’s jubilant supporters began chanting, “My president.” Outside, a small group in the throngs of celebrants carried aloft a yellow plastic coffin. On it was a picture of Mr. Mbeki.

Never has this young democracy’s political leadership been so deeply split. Newspapers and analysts often say that Mr. Mbeki and Mr. Zuma do not speak to each other, and although their camps deny it, incidents like the coffin’s display speak volumes about the state of their relationship.

No one is certain whether this presages a healthy breeze of dissent and competition in what is essentially a one-party system, or a hurricane that could destroy the political order of the last dozen years.

The African National Congress, South Africa’s dominant political party, insists it is the same united movement that threw off apartheid’s yoke and elected two liberation heroes, Nelson Mandela and Mr. Mbeki, to South Africa’s top office.

But with Mr. Mbeki midway through his second and final term as the nation’s president, the divides between his camp and Mr. Zuma’s are South Africa’s central political issue — and the metaphor for a bubbling conflict over which route the country should take next.

Mr. Mbeki, lately a clean-government crusader, fired Mr. Zuma as deputy president last year after he became ensnared in a bribery scandal involving a contract for naval vessels. Mr. Zuma says he is the victim of a government conspiracy — and now that a court has cleared him, at least temporarily, he almost surely will try to unseat Mr. Mbeki as president of the African National Congress next year. Mr. Mbeki is eligible to run for the party presidency again, but should Mr. Zuma win, he will be the heavy favorite to follow Mr. Mbeki as the nation’s president in 2009.

The underlying question is how the party and the government it commands will resolve the conflict between the two sides. In many ways, Mr. Zuma is leading a grass-roots movement against the nation’s authorities, and nobody is quite sure where he plans to take it — or how the system will accommodate it.

“We do need to realize that the stakes are high,” Steven Friedman, a political analyst with the Institute for Democracy in South Africa here, said this month at a Pretoria seminar. “The potential for both democratic closing and democratic opening are extremely high.”

The political order may well weather this storm, as it has others. The African National Congress, or A.N.C., has long been a dog’s breakfast of Marxists and capitalists, among other opposites, joined by the single goal of erasing apartheid’s legacy. The party swept more than two-thirds of Parliament’s seats in 2004, and such overwhelming dominance gives dissenters a powerful reason to remain in the fold.

“The A.N.C.’s overriding trump card is its tradition of consensus,” said Jonathan Faull, a political researcher at the Institute for Democracy in South Africa. What appears to be a pitched battle for power, he said, could be settled by finding a compromise candidate.

In fact, the party’s leaders — and thus, South Africa’s leaders — have traditionally been picked by party bigwigs behind closed doors, a custom that dilutes the value of Mr. Zuma’s megawatt charisma. In that tight circle of insiders, the dark horses to succeed Mr. Mbeki include the party’s national chairman, Mosiuoa Lekota, and a business tycoon, Cyril Ramaphosa.

What distinguishes the latest battle, however, is that it is not being waged in a smoke-filled room, but in convention halls and on newspaper pages. South African democracy has never been tossed by this many crosscurrents. And its leadership has never been contested by a figure as polarizing as Mr. Zuma, whose ethical problems and bread-and-circuses political style resonate like a fire alarm among the ruling elite.

Mr. Mbeki is a distant technocrat; Mr. Zuma is a populist. Mr. Mbeki follows a cautious, pro-business policy; Mr. Zuma has cemented his support among the socialist trade unions. Mr. Mbeki is respected, but hardly beloved. Mr. Zuma is nobody’s role model, but 3 in 10 South Africans say in polls that he would make a good president.

Mr. Zuma is making his run for power at an opportune time, for disenchantment with Mr. Mbeki among the party’s supporters is at flood tide. Since taking the presidency in 1999, Mr. Mbeki has run South Africa by Alan Greenspan’s economic rules, smothering inflation and giving business a fairly free rein. It has brought stability and growth, but not nearly enough to control unemployment and poverty in a fast-growing population.

That reality, along with Mr. Mbeki’s reputation as a prickly and close-minded leader, has bred unhappiness among the trade unions and Communists, who are allied in a loose power-sharing accord with the A.N.C.

In recent weeks, the South African Communist Party has made noise about leaving the alliance, arguing that Mr. Mbeki has jilted the common worker to bed down with big business. The Congress of South African Trade Unions, the alliance’s other member, professes loyalty to the A.N.C., but accuses Mr. Mbeki of concentrating power and leaving unions “systematically marginalized.”

Mr. Zuma, 64, is the empty vessel for their discontent. Neither corruption charges nor an accusation last November that he had raped the daughter of a family friend — he has since been acquitted — has much diminished their support.

The trade unions have yet to back Mr. Zuma for the party leadership or the nation’s presidency, but there seems little doubt. Mr. Zuma addressed the trade unions’ national meeting this week to wild adulation. Mr. Mbeki was conspicuously absent — the first A.N.C. president to miss the union convention since the ban on the party was revoked in 1990.

Mr. Zuma “comes from a very poor background, and we hope that he will better understand the problems facing ordinary people,” said Patrick Craven, the unions’ spokesman.

As for Mr. Zuma’s legal and ethical problems, “It’s quite clear he’s not a saintlike figure,” Mr. Craven said, “but what politician is? You’re familiar with the Bill Clinton case, aren’t you?”

For his part, Mr. Zuma has pledged to give the Communists and unions a greater say in forming policy. But just how those policies would change is a mystery. Mr. Zuma has spent this week repositioning himself as a moderate who does not envision radical economic change.

“There has been a leap of logic in portraying Zuma as a class ally of the left, because nothing in his policy orientation supports this view,” said Aubrey Matshiqi, a senior political scholar at the Center for Policy Studies here.

“The explanation” for the left’s support, he said, “could be as simple as the fact that Zuma is not Mbeki.“

For Mr. Zuma, that could be enough. Recent polls suggest that his support among the A.N.C.’s 450,000-odd members to become the country’s next president is double that of any other likely candidate from within the party, even after the scandals.

Mr. Zuma’s résumé is in the presidential mold of Mr. Mbeki and Mr. Mandela before him — a liberation fighter, a prisoner on Robben Island for a decade, an exile who organized the fight against apartheid from Zambia. But Mr. Zuma’s public life since liberation has made him anathema to many of South Africa’s decision-makers today.

A charismatic politician whose trademark is a liberation song called “Bring Me My Machine Gun,” Mr. Zuma has always played to the masses, especially among his ethnic Zulu base in South Africa’s deeply traditional east. Privately, he demonstrated a taste for luxury cars and designer suits that his government salary could not sustain.

Last year, a Durban court convicted his financial adviser of maintaining a “generally corrupt“ relationship with Mr. Zuma, funneling money and gifts to him in exchange for favors for outsiders, including a French military contractor. Not much later, Mr. Mbeki dismissed Mr. Zuma as deputy president. And not long after that, Mr. Zuma — a recent chairman of South Africa’s AIDS council — was arrested on charges of raping the H.I.V.-positive daughter of a family friend.

Mr. Zuma’s explanation — that the woman had asked for sex by wearing a skirt and that he had minimized the risk of contracting H.I.V. by showering later — outraged many in South Africa’s educated society. Equally dismaying to some was the public face of his defense — supporters who burned photographs of his accuser and asserted that his trial was an exercise in character assassination.

Similar crowds gathered at his court hearing on the corruption charges this week, and their jubilation over the dismissal was unrestrained. But while Mr. Zuma has called the ruling a vindication, the case was voided only on procedural grounds. Experts say that the charges are likely to be filed again, probably as Mr. Zuma’s campaign for political office is in full swing.

Much of the visceral opposition to Mr. Zuma is rooted in fear of his checkered history. Mr. Mbeki has spent seven years burnishing South Africa’s global image as the African democracy that works. Mr. Zuma, critics fear, is not just a populist but a demagogue, and will undo all that.

“There’s an attempt to construct a particular dichotomy according to which Mbeki represents good government and Zuma represents the collapse of good government,” Mr. Matshiqi said. That view, he said, prevails among the politicians, journalists and business leaders who are South Africa’s intellectual elite.

But that elite does not choose the leader of the African National Congress — and by extension, the next president of South Africa. The party’s 3,400 or so delegates do. And here, for the moment, Mr. Zuma may possess an early and decisive lead.

    A Stormy Test for Democracy in South Africa, NYT, 23.9.2006, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/09/23/world/africa/23africa.html?hp&ex=1159070400&en=7e479c220b37b12a&ei=5094&partner=homepage

Cartels Battle for Supremacy in South Africa’s Taxi Wars

September 17, 2006
The New York Times
By MICHAEL WINES

KHAYELITSHA, South Africa — When the gunmen materialized out of a soaking downpour on a Friday evening in August, weapons crackling, the taxi owner tried to run.

“Unfortunately,” he said, “I was late.”

The taxi owner is 54, a beefy man with a shaved head, propped in a chair beside his bed at Groote Schuur Hospital in Cape Town. The seven bullet wounds in his legs are shrouded in a blanket. He may yet lose a foot, but he has other worries. “Do not put my name on any paper,” he said. “If I see my name, I will hold you responsible for my death.”

Melodramatic, maybe. Or maybe not. After a few years of relative calm, this nation’s so-called taxi wars have flared up again in earnest.

In the last two decades, thousands of South African taxi owners, drivers and passengers have been killed and many more have been wounded in one of the strangest guerrilla wars to bedevil any nation. The combatants are rival cartels that control thousands of low-cost minibuses, or “combis,” that haul a large share of South Africa’s urban commuters and much of the nation’s intercity traffic. Combi drivers are mostly poor, and competition is fierce. Many operate illegally, and even legitimate ones may poach others’ routes to grab as many fares as possible.

The cartels have fought for years over control of lucrative routes and the drivers who serve them. In upscale Cape Town and poor suburbs like Khayelitsha, a vast sprawl of small homes and shanties, taxi violence has claimed about 25 lives this year and stirred a growing political outcry.

The Friday ambush, at a taxi stand in a Khayelitsha neighborhood called Kuwait, left one taxi owner, Khonzani Mono, dead and seven people wounded. The stand is served by the Congress for Democratic Taxi Associations, or Codeta. Just a week earlier, an executive of the rival Cape Amalgamated Taxi Association, or Cata, was fatally shot.

Violence here is the worst, but the taxi wars are a national problem. In the last 18 months, taxi shootouts have also occurred in Johannesburg and Durban. Last year, three taxi operators were killed in rural Eastern Cape Province, their Toyota sprayed with 40 bullets as they drove to a meeting to discuss taxi routes.

Indisputably, control of routes is at the core of the violence. The latest surge in Cape Peninsula killings, for example, can be traced to the opening of a shopping mall near Kraaifontein, a Cape Town suburb, which employs many workers from Khayelitsha, in the south.

Codeta taxis want to take the workers directly to the mall. Cata officials insist that the approved route runs through a taxi stand at Bellville which they dominate, and that the passengers must transfer to their taxis there.

“If you try to operate from Bellville to Kraaifontein, then your vehicle is shot at and your passengers are intimidated,” Mangalisa Nakani, the secretary of Codeta, said in an interview at the group’s Khayelitsha office.

Cata officials are unimpressed. “When they were building the interchange at Bellville, all those coming from outside were supposed to drop their passengers off, and those inside would take them on,” Nelson Mbekufhe, Cata’s vice secretary, said. “If they worked according to the rules of the interchange, we would not be fighting now.”

But were the taxi wars that simple, peace would have come years ago. In fact, overlays of politics, race and crime have so muddied the cartels’ rivalries that they are beyond easy resolution.

South Africa’s apartheid government deregulated the combis in 1987, prompting thousands of poor blacks to leap into the business. But as competition soared, apartheid agents fomented violence among drivers, hoping to sow discord that would slow the drive toward liberation. They succeeded; the early violence killed a number of liberation leaders, sharpened political divisions among blacks and destroyed entire black neighborhoods.

After apartheid ended in 1994, the violence acquired a life of its own. Lacking government regulation, taxi owners banded into groups, and the groups mushroomed into cartels, using gangland tactics to expand their turf.

More than 2,000 people died as a result of taxi-related violence during the 1990’s, according to official statistics. Unofficially, the toll may be much higher, said Jackie Dugard, a senior researcher at the Center for Applied Legal Studies at the University of the Witwatersrand and an expert on the taxi wars.

South Africa’s new government, she said, was powerless to bring the taxi cartels to heel. “The industry actually requires a lot of coordination,” she said. “You need to be able to disperse the right kinds of taxis to the right places, and there are peak and nonpeak hours. Where the state doesn’t control it, other bodies are likely to.”

In an analysis published in 2001, Ms. Dugard wrote that the taxi cartels had escalated from random violence, hiring street gangs for protection and then deploying squads of hit men, “with gangsterlike names such as Smiley, Rasta and S’Boy-S’Boy,” against rivals. Soon they were shaking down their own members for protection money, feeding what had become multimillion-dollar criminal enterprises.

A wave of assassinations in the late 1990’s sapped the cartels’ criminal prowess, and cut the annual death toll to tens from hundreds. But rivalries die hard: Cape Town’s current battle dates to 1994, when Cata split from Codeta, then violently muscled it into second-tier status.

Mafia tactics still abound, the government says. A provincial government report in 2005 identified 62 people suspected of being crime lords in the Cape area taxi industry alone, including taxi owners and cartel officials, as well as police officers and provincial officials responsible for issuing taxi permits.

Among August’s homicide victims was Ronnie Eiman, a former chairman of Codeta who had defected to Cata and gave evidence of industry corruption to a provincial legislator.

The cartels say they are shocked, shocked to be accused of a role in the violence.

“Cata is a peaceful association,” said Mr. Mbekufhe, the group’s vice secretary. “It’s not involved in violence.”

“See our emblem,” he said, offering an association letterhead with a bird in a blue circle. “We have a white dove flying there.”

Codeta’s emblem also boasts a white dove, this one holding an olive branch, above the slogan “Catch the dove for peace of mind.”

After the August attack, both groups asked the provincial and national governments to end the conflict. And indeed, the government has proposed a program to issue new licenses, impose new rules and require drivers to scrap their ancient minibuses for new, more capacious ones.

The idea is to wrest leadership from the cartels. “It’s an attempt by the government to reregulate the industry, to almost start it from scratch again,” Ms. Dugard said.

Previous attempts have failed dismally, because of a lack of money, competence and political will. The latest plan, the most ambitious, had seemed well on track — until early August, when the deputy director of the Transport Ministry in charge of it, Lucky Montana, abruptly resigned.

In June, gun-wielding assailants attacked him at his home, and since then he received death threats.

    Cartels Battle for Supremacy in South Africa’s Taxi Wars, NYT, 17.9.2006, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/09/17/world/africa/17africa.html?hp&ex=1158552000&en=42130606a2568d1e&ei=5094&partner=homepage

HIV-positive South Africans seek asylum in Canada

· 130 women stay on after UN Aids conference
· President criticised for controversial drug policy

Monday September 4, 2006
Guardian
Andrew Meldrum in Johannesburg

More than 130 HIV-positive South African women are seeking asylum in Canada after attending the Toronto Aids conference last month, apparently claiming that they cannot get adequate treatment at home.

The case draws more attention to the deepening controversy over whether President Thabo Mbeki's government is providing appropriate medical treatment to millions of people with Aids and HIV.

The women have not yet spoken about why they do not want to return home. But it is thought that they will argue that the stigma and discrimination they face as HIV-positive people in South Africa, not to mention the problems in securing proper medical treatment, amount to persecution.

People with HIV in South Africa have faced an uphill battle to gain access to anti-retroviral drugs, which have only been provided since 2002, when the country's Treatment Action Campaign brought a legal challenge to force the government of President Thabo Mbeki to offer the drugs.

The government has more than 140,000 people on the drugs, the largest such programme in the world. A further 80,000 South Africans pay for the drugs themselves at a cost of about £150 a year.

But such figures are dwarfed by the 700,000 South Africans in urgent need of anti-retroviral drugs. Critics say people are dying because the government has delayed making the drugs available.

"We are aware of a group of about 140 women seeking asylum in Canada," South Africa's foreign affairs spokesman, Ronnie Momoepa, told the Guardian yesterday. He said said the high commissioner in Canada, Eddie Nkomo, was in touch with the Canadian authorities to ascertain among other things the nationalities of the individuals.

The South Africans applying for asylum in Canada are part of a 150-strong group with HIV who have refused to leave Canada after the conference. They are seeking refugee status to live there permanently, the Toronto Sun newspaper reported. Others seeking asylum are from El Salvador, Eritrea, Uganda and Zimbabwe.

Canadian officials said it might take a year for officials to rule on the cases. About one in two applications for asylum in Canada is successful.

The Eritrean Aids activist Amanuel Tesfamichael, 32, spoke of his decision to seek asylum. "I was only allowed to leave my homeland for 10 days. It feels so good to be free," he told the Toronto Sun.

Mr Tesfamichael is the founder of Eritrea's 6,000-member association for people living with Aids. He said he was allowed to travel to Canada on condition that he surrender his passport to two government minders.

Last week the South African Medical Research Council said more than 330,000 South Africans had died of Aids-related ailments in the past 12 months. About 947 South Africans die from Aids-related illnesses every day, while 1,443 become newly infected with HIV, according to a separate study also released last week.

At the Toronto conference, the UN envoy on Aids, Stephen Lewis, made a scathing attack on the South African government, calling it "obtuse, dilatory and negligent about rolling out [anti-Aids] treatment". Mr Lewis attacked the Mbeki government's policies as "wrong, immoral and indefensible". He called the government's theories "more worthy of a lunatic fringe than of a concerned and compassionate state".

Background: Aids crisis

With some 5.5 million people who are HIV positive, South Africa has the second largest number in the world after India. Yet its government only started providing anti-retroviral drugs four years ago.

President Thabo Mbeki has expressed doubts as to whether HIV causes Aids, while his health minister, Manto Tshabalala-Msimang, has said she had more faith in lemon, beetroot and garlic to treat Aids. The country's stand at the Toronto conference included garlic, beetroot, and potatoes. Some boxes of anti-retroviral drugs were added, but these were apparently borrowed.

Mark Heywood, of the Aids Law Project at the University of the Witwatersrand and the Treatment Action Campaign said South Africa was only treating 17% of its Aids sufferers. It has 200,000 people on anti-retroviral drugs for Aids, of whom 130,000 are treated in the public sector. But about 700,000 people with HIV need the drugs and will soon die without them.

    HIV-positive South Africans seek asylum in Canada, G, 4.9.2006, http://www.guardian.co.uk/southafrica/story/0,,1864291,00.html

Mbeki under pressure over luxury house purchase

Monday September 4, 2006
Guardian
David Beresford in Johannesburg


The struggle for the future leadership of South Africa heated up at the weekend when, for the first time, the former deputy president Jacob Zuma launched an open attack on President Thabo Mbeki, accusing him of over-centralising power.

The attack by the man Mr Mbeki fired came amid concern that the president might have a heart problem after his admission to a clinic for tests last week.

The president's woes were compounded when it was disclosed that he had bought an expensive house in Johannesburg, giving the impression that he was preparing for his retirement.

Mr Zuma laid into Mr Mbeki in a speech to the country's largest teachers' union in which he also criticised the government's HIV-Aids policy. The speech was described as a turning point in Mr Zuma's campaign to win the ANC presidency next year. A spokesman for Mr Mbeki said he was in good health and would be at work this week.

Mr Mbeki's wife, Zanele, threatened to sue the Democratic Alliance for invasion of privacy after they turned up with a group of journalists in tow to inspect the family's new house, said to be worth about 22m rand (£1.6m), in the luxurious suburb of Houghton. The chief whip of the alliance, Douglas Gibson, asked where he had got the money to afford the house. Suspicions were raised when it emerged that Mrs Mbeki had used a pseudonym when hiring a building contractor.

The only comeback against his chief tormentor from Mr Mbeki was in the form of a rebuke to those he described as the "children" of the Congress of South African Students for an attack they had made on Archbishop Desmond Tutu. The retired archbishop had advised Mr Zuma not to stand for the post of ANC president at next year's party congress. In an online column Mr Mbeki writes, he demanded, almost with pathos: "What is it that gives the very young the audacity to repudiate what our senior citizens say?"

Mr Zuma faces a court appearance this week on corruption charges. If he is acquitted, his drive for power could create a crisis of confidence for South Africa.

    Mbeki under pressure over luxury house purchase, G, 4.9.2006, http://www.guardian.co.uk/southafrica/story/0,,1864302,00.html

Apartheid-era minister in act of contrition

Monday August 28, 2006
Guardian
Andrew Meldrum in Pretoria

A former South African cabinet minister has performed an extraordinary act of contrition - by washing the feet of an anti-apartheid activist he allegedly tried to have murdered.

Presumably in imitation of Christ, who washed the feet of his guests after the Last Supper, Adriaan Vlok chose to perform his act of atonement on the Rev Frank Chikane, a senior official in the South African presidency.

The ceremony took place in private earlier this month and was disclosed at the weekend by Mr Chikane. It immediately reignited debate in South Africa over whether South African whites have gone far enough to show repentance for the abuses of apartheid.

Mr Vlok has been accused of responsibility for an attempt to kill Mr Chikane in an incident in which his clothes and baggage were impregnated with poison while travelling in the US in May 1989. Mr Chikane headed the South African Council of Churches (SACC) when it was one of apartheid's fiercest critics.

The former minister of law and order has previously admitted responsibility for blowing up the offices of the South African council of churches and has received an amnesty for the incident.

Mr Chikane, who is now director general of President Thabo Mbeki's office, said he was surprised and uncomfortable when Mr Vlok got down on the floor and washed his feet. Mr Vlok had sought a meeting to discuss "a personal matter".

He had blamed apartheid for generating hatred which derived from "lack of love and pride and the belief that some in our country were superior to human beings of another race", according to the South African Press Association.

    Apartheid-era minister in act of contrition, G, 28.8.2006, http://www.guardian.co.uk/southafrica/story/0,,1859724,00.html

Apartheid killer finds religion but not remorse

Case of freed racist murderer highlights refusal of whites to take responsibility for the past

Friday August 4, 2006
Guardian
Rory Carroll in East London

South Africa's most prolific mass murderer takes another sip of coffee, eases back in his chair and pauses when asked if it is true he shot more than 100 black people. "I can't argue with that," says Louis van Schoor. "I never kept count."

Seated at a restaurant terrace in East London, a seaside town in the Eastern Cape, the former security guard is a picture of relaxed confidence, soaking up sunshine while reminiscing about his days as an apartheid folk hero.

Hired to protect white-owned businesses in the 1980s, he is thought to have shot 101 people, killing 39, in a three-year spree. Some were burglars; others were passers-by dragged in from the street. All were black or coloured, the term for those of mixed race.

Convicted of murder but released from jail after 12 years, Van Schoor is unrepentant. "I was doing my job - I was paid to protect property. I never apologised for what I did."

He is not the only one. The whites in East London who turned a blind eye to his killing spree have not apologised and whites in general, according to black clerics and politicians, have not owned up to apartheid-era atrocities.

That reluctance to atone has been laid bare in a book published last week, The Colour of Murder, by Heidi Holland, which investigates the bloodsoaked trail not only of Van Schoor but also his daughter, Sabrina, who hired a hitman to murder her mother.

The macabre tale is likely to reignite debate about those whites who shun the spirit of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission and mock rainbow nation rhetoric. "The story is of a family but it is also the story of a divided country and of the people of that country trying to find new ways to live with each other," says Ms Holland.

Since his release two years ago, after benefiting from a sentence reduction for all convicts issued by Nelson Mandela when he was president, Van Schoor, 55, has slimmed down, shaved off his beard and kept a low profile, working as a cattle farm foreman outside East London. During his 1992 trial white residents displayed "I Love Louis" stickers decorated with three bullet holes through a bleeding heart. Sympathy endures, says Van Schoor. "The reaction is 90% positive. Strangers say, 'Hey, it's good to see you.'"

Magistrates and the police, grateful for the terror instilled in black people, covered his tracks until local journalists and human rights campaigners exposed the carnage as apartheid crumbled. Van Schoor was convicted of seven murders and two attempted murders.

Upon his release in 2004, Van Schoor said he had found God and, when prompted, expressed sorrow to his victims' relatives. "I apologise if any of my actions caused them hurt."

In an interview this week, he tried to clarify his position. "I never apologised for what I did. I apologised for any hurt or pain that I caused through my actions during the course of my work."

Thanks to his changed appearance and low profile he has faced no backlash. Few black people recognise him, including the bookseller who took his order for The Colour of Murder. When Van Schoor gave his name the penny dropped. "She nearly fell off her chair," he says, smiling.

Married four times and now engaged to a local woman, Van Schoor, speaking softly and warily, says he is "happy and content". But he does not seem to approve of the new South Africa. "Everything has changed - people's attitudes, the service in shops, it's not the same."

On the contrary, lament black leaders, one crucial thing has stayed the same: the refusal of many whites to admit past sins. Archbishop Desmond Tutu, a Nobel peace laureate, recently said the privileged minority that once feared retribution had not shown enough gratitude for peaceful inclusion in a multi-racial democracy. Nkosinathi Biko, the son of the murdered anti-apartheid activist Steve Biko, noted the dearth of white voices during last month's commemorations of the June 1976 Soweto uprising, when police slaughtered black schoolchildren. A liberal white commentator, Max du Preez, called the silence embarrassing.

Nowhere is it more deafening than East London. Van Schoor's rampage was made possible by a white establishment that made no outcry as his victims piled up, many of them impoverished children such as Liefie Peters, 13, gunned down while hiding in the toilet of a Wimpy restaurant after breaking in to steal cash.

This week, eating a burger yards from where Van Schoor cornered his prey, Jacques Durandt, a 33-year-old white former member of the security forces, defended the killer. "I won't say he's a murderer. For him it was a job."

Wannitta Kindness, a 36-year-old white taxi driver parked outside the restaurant, says the security guard might have fired even if the intruder was white. "But you don't find white people breaking into places."

Others echoed the refrain: denied jobs reserved for black people, targeted by criminals, harassed in the street, victims in South Africa these days have pale skin and they see no reason to apologise. "The blacks don't want equality," says Ms Kindness. "They want to be on top."

East London does boast at least one white advocate of racial harmony: Van Schoor's daughter, Sabrina, 25. While her father was in jail she shocked the white community by dating black men and giving birth to a mixed-race child.

In 2002, in a grisly irony, she hired a black man to slit her mother's throat, claiming she was a racist bully.

Convicted of murder and sent to the same prison as her father, Sabrina van Schoor is seen as a martyr by some black people. She seems popular among fellow inmates at Fort Glamorgan jail. "That girl, she's not like the whites outside of here. She's OK," says one inmate.

Speaking through iron bars, Sabrina van Schoor, powerfully built like her father, says she is nervous about her family history coming under public scrutiny again because of the book. "I'm afraid it might open old wounds."

Blame game goes on in a society dogged by murder and violence

Each time someone is murdered in South Africa - which happens about 50 times more often than it does in Europe - 2010 flashes through the minds of football administrators and politicians. That year, when the country stages the World Cup, has become as much of a test of South Africa's ability to rule itself as the 1994 election which introduced majority rule.

While most World Cup hosts get nervous at some stage of preparations, about the capacity of stadiums or transport systems, in South Africa the worry is murder. Just as violence threatened to derail the peace train heading for majority rule 12 years ago, so there are fears that it is about to humiliate the country.

One of the most puzzling aspects is that the violence, long associated with tensions arising from racial divisions, has failed to disappear with apartheid. The statistics are unreliable; the police and government do not like releasing them because of their impact on tourism. But it is believed that the only country to rival South Africa in the crime stakes over recent years has been Colombia. The issue is intrinsic to life in South Africa.

Blame tends to be coloured by political perspective. The government blames illegal immigrants and organised crime. Farmers who see neighbours killed on lonely homesteads blame the ANC, which they claim is after their land. The rich blame the poor and, of course, whites blame black people. Crime replaces the weather in small talk - until an incident of particular savagery, such as the recent case of a white farmer who threw a black farmworker into a lions' cage, to be eaten alive.

The South African author André Brink fell victim to crime when gunmen raided a country restaurant where he was having dinner with his family, assaulted them and locked them in a storeroom. He said he received a flood of letters in response to an article he wrote about the experience.

"Each one of them has encountered, either personally or through family and close friends, examples of the violence which has come not only to cloud all the laudable achievements of our young democracy but to threaten the very likelihood of success for this democracy," Brink said.

David Beresford

    Apartheid killer finds religion but not remorse, G, 4.8.2006, http://www.guardian.co.uk/southafrica/story/0,,1836912,00.html

River is border between poverty and humiliation

Faced with a torrent of illegal immigration, South Africa is losing patience with Zimbabwe

July 24, 2006
The Times
By Jonathan Clayton

DARKNESS falls early and swiftly over the Limpopo River, marking the border between South Africa and Zimbabwe.

Each night it also brings hope to dozens of impoverished Zimbabweans who emerge from thick bushes along its banks, slip into crocodile-infested waters and slowly wade across to the other side in search of a better life.

In recent months, as President Robert Mugabe’s Zimbabwe has teetered close to economic collapse, the steady stream of illegal immigrants has turned into a torrent that the South African authorities are struggling to contain.

South Africa deports about 265 Zimbabweans a day. Countless more slip through undetected or simply wait a day or two before trying again and, more often than not, succeeding.

More than 51,000 illegal Zimbabwean immigrants were deported between January and June this year, the Johannesburg-based Sunday Times newspaper reported yesterday.

“Last year, 97,433 Zimbabweans were deported compared with 72,112 in 2004 . . . as floods of people fled economic collapse,” the paper said.

Zimbabwe is in the grip of a seven-year recession. Inflation has rocketed to nearly 1,200 per cent and the economy has shrunk by more than a third.

The country is also grappling with severe fuel shortages and a lack of foreign currency. Every day ordinary Zimbabweans struggle to find basic essentials in a country that, only seven years ago, was known as southern Africa’s bread basket.

The influx from Zimbabwe is having an enormous effect on its southern neighbour’s budget. Pretoria spent a total of £15 million on immigration control last year — more than double the figure for 2004.

Few illegal immigrants find the good life. A report from the Crisis Coalition of Zimbabwe said that refugees suffer from destitution and harassment. Many women turn to prostitution or are paid a pittance working illegally.

Mr Mugabe has in the past blamed Western sanctions and drought for the crisis. Critics largely point the finger at Harare’s economic policies, particularly land reform. About 4,000 white commercial farmers have lost their land since Mr Mugabe introduced his fast-track land reform programme in 2000. The new owners — most of them cronies from the ruling party — have failed to maintain the farms.

South Africa has in recent months shown signs of increasing exasperation with Mr Mugabe. Aziz Pahad, Deputy Foreign Minister, has spoken of the danger of a “failed state on our doorstep” and has called for “fundamental changes” to Mr Mugabe’s economic policies. Official figures issued in Harare suggest that about 3.4 million people — a quarter of the population — are now living abroad. Some 1.2 million are believed to have fled to South Africa, more than any other country.

    River is border between poverty and humiliation, Ts, 24.7.2006, http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,3-2282924,00.html

3.15pm

South Africans protest over crime

Tuesday June 20, 2006
Guardian
Rory Carroll in Johannesburg

Crime victims staged an angry protest in South Africa on Tuesday after the government suggested those who "whinged" about levels of murder and rape should emigrate.

Demonstrators said the number of assaults and armed robberies was unacceptable and had turned daily life into a lottery, with 51 murders and 151 rapes recorded daily.

They were responding to the safety and security minister, Charles Nqakula, who implied in a parliamentary debate this month that those who complained about crime were unpatriotic moaners.

"They can continue to whinge until they're blue in the face, be as negative as they want to, or they can simply leave this country so that all of the peace-loving South Africans, good South African people who want to make this a successful country, can continue with their work."

The comments provoked outrage from relatives of murder victims and survivors of assaults who filled newspapers and airwaves with tales of violence and incompetent policing. "Where, honourable minister, do you propose I go?" asked a letter writer to a newspaper, saying she had been raped and mugged and was now paralysed by fear.

Tuesday's protest was held outside a court where nine men were on trial charged with bludgeoning a 78-year-old woman to death in her home and raping her 25-year-old pregnant neighbour. The attacks, which took place last month at Gordon's Bay, a beauty spot in the Western Cape, followed a series of high-profile incidents, including the killing of a judge's granddaughter and the rape of her nanny.

Dozens of people held placards urging the minister to apologise for his remarks. Fanie le Roux, a relative of the murdered pensioner, said he had not beeb placated by Mr Nqakula's explanation that the whingeing reference was directed at opposition members of parliament and not South Africans in general.

International comparisons are difficult but there is no doubt South Africa is one of the world's most violent countries. A United Nations survey suggested it had the third highest murder rate, after Colombia and Swaziland.

Experts blame poverty, unemployment, overstretched policing and the legacy of white minority rule, which damaged the social structure of the black majority. The government says South Africa is becoming safer and cites official statistics that the murder rate has fallen from more than 20,000 a year to 18,615. Critics say the figures are unreliable.

There have been calls for South Africa to reinstate the death penalty, which was abolished with apartheid.

    South Africans protest over crime, G, 20.6.2006, http://www.guardian.co.uk/southafrica/story/0,,1801990,00.html

South Africa celebrates 30th anniversary of Soweto uprising

June 16, 2006
Times Online
From Jonathan Clayton of The Times in Soweto

The streets of Soweto echoed once again today to the songs and chants of the liberation struggle as South Africans marked the 30th anniversary of the Soweto uprising, a defining moment of the anti-apartheid movement.

Thabo Mbeki, the President of South Africa, led hundreds on an emotional march retracing the steps of scores of black schoolchildren who were demonstrating on June 16, 1976 against the imposition of a law forcing them to study in Afrikaans, the language of the oppressor.

Relatives of children killed when police opened fire wept openly as wreaths were laid in their memory. The ceremony took place at Soweto’s memorial to Hector Pieterson, the first and youngest victim of a brutal response from the security forces which outraged international opinion.

The picture of the dying 13-year-old Hector being carried away in the arms of a fellow student came to symbolise the sacrifices of young people in the fight against white minority rule and for democracy.

It was shown on newspaper front pages around the world and signalled a turning-point in the world’s attitude to apartheid.

Sam Nzima, the photographer who took that picture, was overcome with emotion and unable to speak as he embraced President Mbeki near the scene of the shooting. "He took a great picture, but it is still hurting inside him today," Mr Mbeki told The Times.

It is estimated that more than 500 others, many young schoolchildren, were killed in the student uprising and its aftermath as it quickly spread to other townships. The event galvanised a largely dormant liberation movement weakened by the jailing of its leaders and recruitment of black collaborators.

Thousands of young people joined the underground movement, hundreds were detained and tortured and many others fled into exile.

"I went to China for military training. I never finished my education," said Trofomo Sono, 49. "But it was worth it. We have a great society today, a great democracy — many problems, but life is getting better slowly for everyone."

The two-hour march began at Morris Isaacson school, where the initial protest was planned, and ended at the memorial. As old comrades embraced and the crowd sang a Zulu struggle song Senzeni na (We are Crying), Hector’s mother Dorothy Molefi, accompanied by Mr Mbeki, laid her wreath.

"I am so happy he did not die for nothing," Isabel Boto, 70, said of her nephew, Tsietsi Mashinini, one of the leaders of 1976 who died in exile in Guinea 14 years later, either of Aids or assassination. Earlier, a collage was unveiled in his honour.

In a sombre speech, Mr Mbeki told a crowd of 20,000 people at the FNB stadium that young South Africans were confronted by poverty, unemployment, alcohol and drug abuse, and Aids.

He accepted that a lot still had to be done to improve the education system, but called on the youth of today to emulate the determination of the generation of 1976 in fighting for a better society.

But today was a day of remembrance, and few people wanted to dwell on the challenges of the future.

Phala Modise, 47, said that he was proud to have been one of the original protesters. "We were just people of our time, but we throw a pebble in the water and its ripples just grew and grew. We realised then our enemy was not so strong," he said.

His friend Franklin Tlhoaele, now a manager with the city council, agreed. "For us at the time it was a short walk, but it began that long march towards liberty," he said.

    South Africa celebrates 30th anniversary of Soweto uprising, Ts Online, 17.6.2006, http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,3-2229224,00.html

Why Dickens was the hero of Soweto

How a writer who had been dead 100 years inspired the children of South Africa to rise up against apartheid, Thirty years ago the children of South Africa rose up against apartheid. But their inspiration, Carol Lee reveals, was a writer who had been dead 100 years

June 10 2006
The Times
 

HECTOR PIETERSON WAS 12 when he died. Today a museum bearing his name commemorates his death — and hundreds of others — which occurred 30 years ago next week at a place whose name has come to symbolise uprising against oppression: Soweto.

Hector was one of thousands of black children who took to the streets on June 16, 1976, in protest about schooling under the apartheid regime in South Africa. When police opened fire on the march it brought the word Soweto to the attention of the world. But less well known is the role that Charles Dickens played in events.

The march was in protest at a government edict making Afrikaans compulsory in schools. From January 1976, half of subjects were to be taught in it, including ones in which difficulties of translation were often an issue.

To pupils accustomed to being educated in English, and staff trained to teach in it, the Afrikaans policy was the last of a line of insults delivered in the name of “Bantu” or “native education”. They thought being taught in Afrikaans, the language of a regime that had tried to “unpeople” them, would cost them their last remaining freedom — that of thinking for themselves, using their minds.

That is where Dickens came in. Many books were banned under apartheid but not the classics of English literature. Pupils arriving hungry at school every day were captivated by the story of a frail but courageous boy named Oliver Twist.

The book was a revelation. Systemised oppression of children happened in England too! They were not alone. Slave labour, thin rations and cruel taunts were part of a child’s life in the world outside as well.

One former pupil, now in his forties, says of Dickens: “Four or five of us would be together and discuss the stories. And to think he wasn’t banned! The authorities didn’t know what was in these books, how they helped us to be strong, to think that we were not forgotten.”

Not being forgotten was particularly crucial. The apartheid regime had tried to “vanish” black people. Feeling abandoned and isolated, people turned to Dickens as someone who understood their plight.

But there were not enough books to go round. Few of the crateloads of Shakespeare, Hardy and Dickens shipped from Britain reached the townships. Instead, they came to Soweto in parcels from charities. They were read by candlelight, often out loud, shared in a circle, or passed from hand to hand.

At Morris Isaacson School, one of the moving forces behind the Soweto protest, which produced two of its leaders, Murphy Morobe, “Shakespeare’s best friend in Africa”, and Tsietsi Mashinini, there were 1,500 pupils and three copies of Oliver Twist in 1976. The former pupil recalls waiting months for his turn, with a similar wait for Nicholas Nickleby.

But it was Oliver that they took to heart: students at one of the country’s leading black colleges, Lovedale, formed a committee to ask for more.

Calling it the Board, after Dickens’s Board of Guardians, they asked for more lessons, more food — and more and better books. Their reward was to be charged with public violence. All 152 “board” members were expelled from the college and some were jailed,.

They felt that Dickens was obviously on their side. Descriptions of Gamfield’s “ugly leer”, Bumble’s “repulsive countenance” and Oliver being beaten by Mrs Sowerberry and shoved “but nothing daunted” into the dust cellar were evidence that this English author understood the ugliness of the apartheid regime and the need to stand up to it.

Dickens’s compassion for the poor linked the people of Soweto to a worldwide literature of tremendous importance.

The veteran trumpeter Hugh Masekela later chose Nicholas Nickleby as his book on Desert Island Discs, telling the presenter, Sue Lawley, what its author did for people in the townships: “He taught us suffering is the same everywhere.”

The love of books that enabled an author dead for more than 100 years to inspire thousands of schoolchildren came mainly from grandmothers who had educated their families orally, then urged them to read widely and learn all that they could.

It also came from people such as Steve Biko, whose own mentor, the Brazilian educator Paulo Freire, spent a lifetime working with forest people who had no formal education, teaching them to “name the world their own way”.

That is what the youth of Soweto wanted — a future in their own words. And they got it. “Africans are not dustbins,” declared some of the June 16 placards; and “Beware of Afrikaans, the most dangerous drug for our future.” By the following year, the language had been withdrawn from classrooms as unworkable.

Today the name of Charles Dickens still draws a warm response from the people of Soweto as they describe how his understanding of their “human situation” helped their children to be brave.


A Child Called Freedom by Carol Lee is published by Century

    Why Dickens was the hero of Soweto, Ts, 10.6.2006, http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,3-2229224,00.html

'I saw blood on the street'

Dorian Lynskey meets Zola, the South African star who put his own experience of gang warfare to good use in Tsotsi

Thursday March 16, 2006
Guardian
Dorian Lynskey

If you watch Oscar-winning township drama Tsotsi as a non-South African, then the commandingly charismatic man playing local gang boss Fela will probably be no more familiar than any of the cast's novice actors. But back home, says actor, TV host and musician Bonginkosi "Zola" Dlamini, it is a different matter.

"How famous am I in South Africa?" he says, roaring with mirth. "I'm more famous than the Cullinan Diamond! And I have no bodyguards. A top celebrity like me can walk into a party and of course I'll sign a few autographs, but there's no trouble. Everybody's happy you're there and wants to love you." He ponders how best to explain his position in South African society. "Like your piece of bread in the morning, that's how close people feel to me."

Next to Zola, even Kanye West would seem paralysingly modest, but this 28-year-old from Soweto is not alone in considering himself a national treasure; one South African newspaper recently dubbed him "a social commentator, a saviour of the people, a symbol of hope for the hopeless". The chunky diamond on his ring finger ("I support the South African miners") and the two BMWs, which he mentions more than once, attest to his superstar status. When we meet in London, he talks like a skilled politician, in torrents of on-message rhetoric flecked with references to his own achievements. Simply asking him questions requires more interrupting than John Humphrys might do.

Zola was the obvious choice to compose Tsotsi's soundtrack. He is the leading light of kwaito, the lively hybrid of hip-hop, house and traditional African rhythms that rivals gospel as South Africa's most popular form of music. The brand of kwaito that Zola introduced on his triple-platinum debut album, 2000's Umdlwembe, was a particularly potent cocktail, adding politically conscious lyrics and a dash of gospel to please his mother.

"I didn't know then what I was doing. Little did I know the markets that I was opening. So I had young kids listening to kwaito and I had their brothers listening to Zulu hip-hop and I had mums willing to buy the album because of the gospel song. It was like a family meal - everybody had something to eat."

The music's roots are a matter for debate. "All the old boys want to argue about who started it first," says Zola. "When you hear them on the radio, it's like watching these silly ads on TV where every insurance company claims they're number one in the country. You know when dust starts collecting and in a couple of billion years it's a planet and before you know it the planet is alive? That's how kwaito came to be."

The dust began collecting in the 1980s with a South African strand of disco called bubblegum. As bubblegum's popularity waned in the early 1990s, producers began combining its melodies with decelerated house beats, rap vocals and South African rhythms dating back to the 1920s. Vocals were delivered in a mixture of English, Zulu, Sesotho and the street slang Isicamtho. This unique fusion caught the mood of post-apartheid South Africa, spawning stars such as Arthur, Boom Shaka and TKZee. Alongside Zola, the current crop includes Mandoza and Brown Dash.

Barring occasional hits such as Arthur's Don't Call Me Kaffir, it was largely apolitical. While South African rappers such as Cape Town's Prophets of da City emulated the militant rhetoric of Public Enemy, kwaito promised bawdy, good-time escapism that reflected the nation's newly buoyant mood. By its very nature, however, it was a radical phenomenon. After the strictures of apartheid were lifted, kwaito artists were the first to enjoy both financial equality and the liberating potential of affordable technology. "No more white guy leading your music," whoops Zola. "Own your own record label, all the intellectual rights, all the royalties and then own your own studio! So it became the ultimate accessible black empowerment voice on the street."

Zola was a teenager when kwaito exploded. He takes his stage name from the violent, impoverished area of Soweto in which he was raised, near where Tsotsi (the word means "thug" was filmed. "It's a 20-minute walk from my mother's house. Every corner we shot on I'd been there as a kid. Some of the people we used as extras were from the same neighbourhood and I saw them getting emotional because they were doing a movie about what they were going through in real life."

Despite the efforts of his mother, a priest, he fell in with the local tsotsis. Since the 1930s, Soweto had been home to rival gangs with colourful names such as the Black Swines and the Pirates; the novel on which Tsotsi was based was written in the late 1950s. "Zola was the most aggressive township," says its most famous son. "I saw some serious gangsters come out of my neighbourhood. I saw blood on the street."

He doesn't mind the fact that most of his screen roles are mobsters; his first acting role was in Yizo Yizo II, a sensationally popular TV drama so provocative that it sparked three days of debate in the South African parliament. "I've got a chance to portray what I could have been, and kids who know me can say, 'Hey, hold up. He made different decisions, so maybe we follow him.' I took Zola as a stage name to make a point: I may come from Zola but I am a man apart."

He attributes much of the violence to the frustration of living under apartheid. When the regime ended, the gangs dwindled and kwaito offered Zola a more productive outlet for his youthful energies. "God knows what would have happened if I didn't have my freedom then. I lived half my life as an oppressed black person and then I leapt into freedom. Lucky me. My grandmother never saw that; she died a few weeks before the first democratic election [in 1994]. A lot of people never even dreamed of being able to sit in a restaurant with black and white people. We couldn't sit like this and talk. You'd be arrested for a few hours and I'd be tortured."

Zola likes to remind young South Africans about apartheid - "I think part of my duty is to collect those stories as a constant reminder that we need to make sense of this freedom because a hell of a lot of people laid down their lives for it" - but he also raps about the country's current problems. His recent album, Ibutho, tackled such hot-button issues as statutory rape and the responsibilities of young fathers. He claims that African listeners have no time for rappers who imitate American styles. "If you rap about having 22-inch [wheel] rims and a mansion on the hill, they'll probably laugh at you and throw cans at you," he cackles.

Although Zola describes Tsotsi as "a wake-up call", he is quick to emphasise that it reflects only a narrow tranche of South African society. Indeed, his enthusiasm for the country's education system is so hyperbolic that he sounds as if he is bidding for a post in Thabo Mbeki's government. He makes the perfect cultural ambassador: conscious of the past yet passionate about the future, proud of his African heritage yet international in outlook, and colossally upbeat. He seems more worried about the state of Britain than that of his homeland. "Compared to your standards of living, we're living like gods," he declares. "Yes, there are problems, but you guys, how geographically you live - an ordinary South African wouldn't tolerate that. We have space, my brother, like you cannot imagine!"

At least this cramped, overpriced island has one asset. "Back home I have a show that's like Jim'll Fix It," says Zola. "That's why I'm dying to meet the old man. Is he still alive?" Jimmy Savile? Yes, he's still with us. "I'd like to meet him," South Africa's saviour of the people says with a megawatt smile. "I need to get some ideas from him."

· Tsotsi goes on general release tomorrow. The soundtrack is out now on Milan Records.

    'I saw blood on the street' , G, 16.3.2006, http://film.guardian.co.uk/features/featurepages/0,,1731922,00.html

Dry-cleaning murders expose racial tensions

January 28, 2006
The Times
From Jonathan Clayton in Vereeniging

THEY lived a grim life and suffered a barbaric death: three black laundry workers who earned £50 a month for a 13-hour shift were bundled into a dry-cleaning machine, doused in chemicals and left to die.

They were discovered by police who went to the shop to look for the women and were overcome by the stench. Joyce Lesito, 24, one of the murdered women, was five months’ pregnant. Before her death she had been urging her workmates to join a trade union.

Two black gardeners were arrested by police under suspicion of murder. But as the investigation unfolded the focus switched to the owner of the dry-cleaning business. Now three members of a white family await trial for the murders that have exposed the racial tensions that still exist in small- town South Africa, 11 years after the end of apartheid.

Charl Colyn, 53, the owner of the laundry, his daughter, Isabel, 22, and son-in-law, Jacques Smit, 25, have been charged with the murders of Ms Lesito and her colleagues Victoria Ndweni and Constance Moeletsi.

Ruan Swanepoel, a family friend, has also been charged with murder. The accused, who have been remanded in custody, have all pleaded not guilty.

The killings have shocked crime-weary South Africans and cast a spotlight on the town of Vereeniging.

Set on the huge Vaal plateau southwest of Johannesburg, Vereeniging is like many small Afrikaner towns — an unremarkable place of grey concrete office buildings and fast- food outlets. Broad streets, with names such as Voortrekker and Pretorious, testify to its history as one of the bastions of the Boers — the hardy descendants of the Dutch settlers who trekked into South Africa’s vast interior to escape British colonial rule.

Until the murders, the town’s only claim to fame was as the place where the peace treaty that ended the Anglo-Boer War in 1902 was signed. The killings have brought racial tensions to the surface and reopened old wounds. They have also emphasised how deep racial divisions remain in South Africa.

In places like Vereeniging — far from Johannesburg or Cape Town — the end of white minority rule did not see the arrival of South Africa’s famed “Rainbow Nation”. On the surface, nothing much changed.

“They do their thing and we do ours,” said Colin, a young activist with the ruling African National Congress. “Both communities were happy about that.” There was a sort of pact not to dwell too much on the past, but focus on the future.

The discovery of the three bodies shattered that uneasy coexistence and brought the hostility with which both sides regard each other to the surface. Felicia Mohoakoane, a superviser at the laundry claimed that the owners were racists, “They have done bad things in the past, and thought they could get away with it,” she said.

The case could take several years to reach court. In the meantime, Vereeniging is getting on with life: the Colyns’s dry-cleaning shop has re-opened, and family friends are filling in for black employees who refuse to return to work.

The town’s whites maintain that the killings were a result of “black on black” violence. “It was a dispute over other issues, but it is easy to blame the white man. They have taken the wrong people but they don’t care,” said a woman who asked not to be named. “Nowadays they have everything on their side.” In court Dorothy Moeletsi, mother of Constance, wept as Mr Colyn embraced his daughter in the dock.

    Dry-cleaning murders expose racial tensions, Ts, 28.1.2006, http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,3-2012937,00.html

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