History > 2007 > South Africa (I)

Survivor Is Poised

to Lead South Africa

December 20, 2007
The New York Times
By MICHAEL WINES

POLOKWANE, South Africa — When Jacob Gedleyihlekisa Zuma, the man who is likely to be South Africa’s next president, was 21 years old, South Africa’s apartheid government condemned him to 10 years imprisonment on Robben Island, in a cell not far from that of Nelson Mandela.

It was 1963, the nadir of the liberation movement: the jail was overcrowded, conditions were execrable, and freedom, much less national liberation, was a distant dream.

Mr. Zuma set up a prison choral group to sing liberation songs, and organized weekend traditional dances. He told Zulu stories at night and delivered political lectures each week. Mr. Zuma received few if any visitors during a decade in jail, said Ebrahim Ebrahim, his cellmate, yet he was the self-appointed morale officer for his block. “The prison conditions were such that they wanted to break our morale and spirit,” said Mr. Ebrahim, who later followed Mr. Zuma into politics. “He wouldn’t be broken.”

It could be his epitaph. Mr. Zuma, 65, has faced a hardscrabble childhood, illiteracy, war, a decade in jail and, most recently, a string of government prosecutions on charges of corruption and rape. Lazarus-like, he has surmounted them all.

On Tuesday, more than 3,900 delegates of South Africa’s governing party, the African National Congress, chose him as their president, ousting Thabo Mbeki, who is also the leader of the country. In this democracy dominated by one party, Mr. Zuma’s win means he very likely will succeed Mr. Mbeki in early 2009 as president of South Africa, when a new Parliament will choose the next president.

Mr. Zuma, a Zulu, was born in 1942 in a rural area, KwaZulu Natal, then called Natal. His father died when Mr. Zuma was an infant, and his mother moved the family to Durban to work as a maid.

He grew up impoverished and without formal education. He joined the then-banned African National Congress at 17 and its military wing at 18. Apartheid forces arrested him in 1963 as he tried to leave the country and put him in prison, where he learned to read and write English.

After his release from prison in 1973, Mr. Zuma left the country and returned when a ban on the A.N.C. was lifted in 1990. He became a close ally of Mr. Mbeki, and worked under him to end a bloody war between supporters of the A.N.C. and the rival Inkatha Freedom Party.

“He had incredible patience,” said Blade Nzimande, who worked on the conflict with Mr. Zuma and now leads the Communist Party in South Africa. “If Zuma disagrees with you, he will not jump into the middle of your sentence and correct you. He’s a very persuasive character.”

Others say Mr. Zuma’s crucial role was to make Mangosuthu Buthelezi, the Zulu chief who led the Freedom Party, feel that he was being taken seriously.

In 1999, Mr. Mbeki appointed him deputy president. But early this decade, Mr. Mbeki suspected a political plot against him and confronted Mr. Zuma. Mr. Zuma denied any role, but the succeeding rift never healed.

In 2005, Mr. Mbeki forced Mr. Zuma to resign after Mr. Zuma’s financial adviser was convicted of bribing Mr. Zuma in exchange for help with a contract for a French manufacturer. Mr. Zuma fended off a related corruption charge on procedural grounds, but the charges are likely to be refiled next year.

Mr. Zuma’s fortunes dipped again in late 2005, when the H.I.V.-positive daughter of a family friend accused him of rape. Mr. Zuma, who is married, was acquitted, but his reputation was muddied after he suggested that the woman had seduced him by wearing a short skirt and sitting in a provocative manner. AIDS activists were scandalized when Mr. Zuma, who once headed South Africa’s AIDS-prevention efforts, said he had tried to avoid H.I.V. infection by showering after having sex with the woman.

Curiously, the spectacle of the corruption and sex allegations proved a boon to Mr. Zuma’s political career. His vigorous denials of guilt drew broad support from ethnic Zulus, and his broad hints that Mr. Mbeki’s prosecutors had plotted to end his political career drew more support from leftists and poor people.

Analysts say that Mr. Zuma became a magnet for a spectrum of groups unhappy with Mr. Mbeki’s aloof leadership, and that he deftly marshaled their discontent into a powerful movement.

There is much discussion about what he will do with his mandate. Mr. Mbeki’s technocratic rule has produced a humming economy and approval from foreign investors, but fewer visible benefits for the poor. A widespread fear among both Mr. Mbeki’s supporters and many foreigners is that Mr. Zuma will heed his poor, leftist supporters and undo the economic policies of the last decade.

But most people interviewed for this article, including political analysts, said that Mr. Zuma was no revolutionary and that South Africa was unlikely to swerve dramatically from the course that Mr. Mbeki has set. Nor do most of them fear that Mr. Zuma’s own legal problems presage a relaxed attitude toward corruption.

Jeremy Gordin, a South African journalist and author, is writing a biography of Mr. Zuma. He said that outsiders may have inflated the importance of Mr. Zuma’s scandals beyond that felt by ordinary South Africans. Indeed, he said, Mr. Zuma’s political strength is that he is an ordinary South African.

“He’s not an angel,” he said. “He’s just very human.” For South Africans who have lived under Mr. Mandela’s saintly rule and Mr. Mbeki’s antiseptic one, he said, Mr. Zuma’s fallibility is proving a powerful attraction.

Survivor Is Poised to Lead South Africa, NYT, 20.12.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/2007/12/20/world/africa/20zuma.html

Op-Ed Contributor

South Africa Grows Up

December 12, 2007
The New York Times
By MARK GEVISSER

Johannesburg

THIS weekend, 5,000 delegates of South Africa’s ruling African National Congress will gather in the dusty northern town of Polokwane to elect their next leader. They are faced with the choice of two bitter rivals who were once, as successors to Nelson Mandela, the closest of allies: the incumbent president, Thabo Mbeki, and his former deputy, Jacob Zuma.

Mr. Mbeki is constitutionally precluded from serving again when his term ends in 2009, but if he were to win the party leadership, he could select his own successor. A victory by Mr. Zuma would be a radical changing of the guard.

At preparatory provincial nomination conferences in November, A.N.C. delegates selected Mr. Zuma by a nearly 2-to-1 margin. Though there is a chance that some votes will swing to Mr. Mbeki, Mr. Zuma clearly has the advantage.

This is perplexing to many outsiders, given that Mr. Mbeki has earned an international reputation as a voice for progress and prosperity on the African continent — a reputation that was enhanced two years ago when he fired Mr. Zuma, then implicated in a corruption scandal. Mr. Mbeki’s supporters say Mr. Zuma has little respect for the rule of law, that he has dodgy friends and a tendency toward demagoguery, and that he lacks the judgment required for highest office. Under Mr. Zuma, they say, their young democracy could degenerate into another neocolonial African kleptocracy.

Is there any foundation to this anxiety? Will the Polokwane conference set in motion a tragic final act to one of the world’s greatest liberation narratives? Not necessarily. Instead, the current contest is mainly an indicator that South Africa’s democracy has matured and is ready for meaningful political debate.

Mr. Mbeki and Mr. Zuma, allies for more than two decades, share credit for bringing South Africa to a peaceful settlement after apartheid and transforming it into a stable market economy. They also share blame for an inability to separate party and state, which has inevitably led to patronage and corruption.

At first, their split was personal. Mr. Zuma felt ostracized by Mr. Mbeki, while Mr. Mbeki came to feel threatened by Mr. Zuma, and even accused him of participating in a coup plot in 2001. Around that same time, evidence emerged implicating Mr. Zuma in a scandal relating to arms procurement. The firing came in 2005, when a court found Mr. Zuma’s financial adviser, Schabir Shaik, guilty of soliciting a bribe on Mr. Zuma’s behalf.

Mr. Zuma and his supporters responded by accusing Mr. Mbeki of abusing the organs of state to wage a political campaign against him, driven by an unseemly desire to hold onto power.

Soon enough, the two men found themselves on either side of a deeper divide. Mr. Zuma found common cause with those on the party’s left flank, who felt shut out by the president’s policies of fiscal conservatism and his aloof style.

The leaders of the Congress of South African Trade Unions and the South African Communist Party are now the primary architects of Mr. Zuma’s campaign. They believe that as a canny but uneducated son of the soil, he is more in touch with the aspirations of South Africa’s masses, whose lives have barely changed since apartheid. Mr. Mbeki’s supporters, for their part, worry that a Zuma presidency might undo the meticulous stitching of the country into the global economy undertaken over the past 15 years.

That a majority of A.N.C. members have put their faith in Mr. Zuma is an indictment of Mr. Mbeki’s abilities to bridge the widening class divide. There is no guarantee that Mr. Zuma could do any better, but he is renowned as a consensus-building politician, and at least he would be required to try.

Even if he is elected party leader next week, there is no certainty that Mr. Zuma will be the next president. The authorities are gearing up to charge him with corruption, and if he were to be found guilty, he would be disqualified from holding office.

But whatever happens, the fissure in the A.N.C. brings a long-overdue logic to South African politics. Since the early 1990s, the left and center have been held together by the skein of a joint struggle for freedom — and, of course, the allure of power. One of the best possible legacies of the current political turmoil would be the collapse of the de facto one-party state — and its replacement by a real choice for South African voters.

Already the split in the A.N.C. has opened up space for robust criticism of hitherto untouchable South African leaders. And it has forced a healthy challenge to the deathtrap of African democracy: the ruler-for-life syndrome.

Gone, too, is that beguiling myth of the Mandela era: that the A.N.C. is a cathedral of morality. The truth is that it is a rowdy hall of competing interests, driven by patronage and riven by personality, grubby with politics. It is no longer a liberation movement but the ruling party of a young and healthy — messy and unpredictable — democracy.

Mark Gevisser is the author, most recently,

of “Thabo Mbeki: The Dream Deferred.”

    South Africa Grows Up, NYT, 12.12.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/2007/12/12/opinion/12gevisser.html

Blunkett

and the mission to South Africa

that inspired the strategy

of 'super-prisons'

Published: 06 December 2007
The Independent
By James Macintyre

In 2003, Martin Narey, Britain's first commissioner for correctional services and former head of the Prison Service, flew to South Africa to "think the unthinkable" on prisons. He was reporting to the Home Secretary of the day, David Blunkett, who was known to be frustrated by the inability of his department to counter headlines about prison overcrowding.

Completing his tour of a faceless, sprawling 3,000-space jail run by Group 4 at Bloemfontein, Mr Narey declared: "The prison I saw is much bigger than anything we have tried to build. I think the traditional view is that a prison of that size will be too big to be safe and decent."

But Mr Narey was "converted". And for Mr Blunkett, the South African example represented a welcome chance to break with a mainstream view both at the Home Office and in western Europe that jails on that scale were impossible to manage, and impersonal to the point of cutting people off from their previous lives. He drew up an "investment strategy" paper to be presented to the Cabinet, calling for the introduction of two super-size jails, each holding 1,500 inmates – a thousand fewer than those announced yesterday – as part of a package introducing some 5,400 new places for inmates.

Intriguingly, however, the plans fizzled out before gaining Treasury approval. Gordon Brown, it seems, was not convinced. Yesterday's announcement – designed to increase prison places from 81,000 to 96,000 by 2014 – shows the Treasury, armed with billions more to spend, has been convinced by the concept.

"This is an idea that has been considered for the past 10 years or more, " said Rob Allen, the director of the Institute for the Centre for Prisons Studies. "There is an issue about whether people are close to home, and have links with the local community," Mr Allen said last night. "This is very much based on the American model, of great penitentiaries." The US has since 2000 held the highest number of prisoners in the world – last year 2.2 million were incarcerated – with China and Russia following close behind.

But super-prisons are "unusual" in the rest of Europe, according to Mr Allen. "One outside Paris houses almost 3,000 – but for the bulk of western Europe they are unusual," he said. "In Scandinavia prisons of 60-80 places are much closer to communities." And in the UK, the only large-scale prison built since Mr Blunkett's attempt at breaking the mould was one with 840 beds, in Peterborough. Britain's largest prison is at Wandsworth in south London, which holds about 1,400 inmates. The average size is around 1,000 places.

Despite what critics describe as an inherently "illiberal" culture at the Home Office since Douglas Hurd left the department – boosted by Michael Howard's subsequent declaration that "prison works" – successive governments have until recently never quite embraced mass prisons.

But since Mr Brown became Prime Minister the ground for a fresh start has been prepared. In October Jack Straw, Tony Blair's first home secretary in 1997, said in a speech to the Prison Governors Association that " returning to the [prisons] brief as Justice Secretary, I recognise the different set of pressures that the current prison population creates... [of] maintaining order and control, of continuing to house prisoners with decency... difficulties around cell-sharing, risk assessments – all practical manifestations of prison population pressures."

Yesterday, the Government presented its solution. But if the new announcement represents a victory for elements within the new Ministry of Justice, another group will also be celebrating today: the private sector. Under Mr Blunkett's aborted proposals, the large-scale jails would have been designed, financed and directed by the private sector, for which the proposals would provide thousands of jobs.

Blunkett and the mission to South Africa that inspired the strategy of 'super-prisons', I, 6.12.2007, http://news.independent.co.uk/uk/crime/article3226394.ece

S. Africa Puts TB Patients

Behind Fences

November 11, 2007
Filed at 4:25 p.m. ET
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
The New York Times

CAPE TOWN, South Africa (AP) -- Behind high fences patrolled by guards to prevent escape, a drab building once used for smallpox victims houses patients with a new, virtually uncurable strain of tuberculosis.

Patients sleep or sit listlessly in the 12-bed women's ward, which is equipped with a TV, a fridge and a table with a couple of loaves of bread. It's a similar scenario in the men's ward, home to a minibus taxi driver who reluctantly agreed to be admitted after exposing hundreds of people every day to his potentially lethal germs.

Critics say enforced quarantine is a violation of medical ethics and individual human rights. Health authorities -- who earlier this year resorted to the courts to compel four patients to stay at the hospital -- say they have no choice.

''We are dealing with very depressed people. They feel like they are in prison, but it's the only way,'' said senior nurse Joan Blackburn.

Andrew Speaker, an Atlanta attorney with drug-resistant tuberculosis, was held under a federal isolation order in May after he went on a European wedding trip and refused health officials' directives that he not take any commercial jets back to the U.S.

''At least our patients won't be able to get on a plane and fly around the world,'' said Simon Moeti, medical superintendent of the Brooklyn Chest Hospital.

South Africa's AIDS epidemic has brought a related upsurge in TB cases, including multi-drug-resistant and extremely drug-resistant strains.

South Africa reported 343,000 TB cases in 2006, of which an estimated 6,000 were multi-drug-resistant. South Africa's first official case of extremely drug-resistant tuberculosis, or XDR-TB, was reported last year. The government says that there have been about 400 cases, but groups like Doctors Without Borders say this is a big underestimate.

Testing methods are hopelessly slow and out of date -- and it is particularly difficult to diagnose TB in HIV-positive people. Nearly 60 percent of South African TB patients have the AIDS virus. Many people with drug-resistant TB die before they are tested and treated -- having probably infected other people in the meantime.

''There are challenges without answers,'' Moeti said. ''There are people who are refusing treatment, people who want to abscond,'' he told journalists visiting the 308-bed clinic on the sidelines of an international TB conference that ends Monday.

Treatments are also woefully outdated and inadequate. The Global Alliance for TB Drug Development told the conference that trials of two possible drugs were promising. One of them, antibiotic moxifloxacin, could shorten treatment time and the other, PA-824, had potential for drug-resistant strains. But even if clinical trials are successful, it may take years for the drugs to reach the market.

''We can't wait that long. We need new drugs now,'' said Winston Zulu, a Zambian AIDS and TB activist who lost four brothers to TB.

Experts worry that the drug-resistant strains will continue to spread -- largely the result of people not sticking to the six-month course of treatment for normal TB.

In the Western Cape province that includes Cape Town, 64 cases of XDR-TB have been identified this year, according to local health officials. Twenty of the patients have died and 39 of the survivors are currently being treated at Brooklyn -- 24 in the fenced-off ward and others elsewhere in the hospital.

They will be there for at least six months. If they are declared clear of the disease they will be free to leave. But, with treatment of XDR-TB still in its infancy in South Africa, their longer-term prospects are unclear.

The youngest patient is just a year old. Her mother died last year, before local authorities started testing for XDR-TB, although that was most likely the cause, Moeti said.

''But she's doing OK,'' he added, picking up the child, who was sitting with other infants. He refused to divulge identities because of confidentiality, and journalists were not allowed to speak to patients in the clinic.

The scattered collection of small buildings was purchased from a farmer in 1872 because of its isolation. It was initially used for smallpox, then for the big influenza epidemic and now for TB. Structurally there have been few changes in the past century. Although the clinic is in dire need of a coat of paint, Moeti says its design allows for good ventilation -- TB thrives in closed spaces.

Hospital authorities reluctantly decided to erect the fence around the XDR-TB unit after four patients absconded. Two guards, both wearing protective face masks, stand by the fence. Any patient wanting to go to another part of the hospital has to be accompanied. Family visits are allowed but are strictly controlled.

Patients hate going there -- because of the stigma of TB and its association with AIDS. The hospital constantly struggles to get staff. It was bad enough before, but the arrival of XDR-TB has made it even worse, said Moeti.

The minibus taxi driver initially refused to be admitted, saying he couldn't afford the loss in earnings. But he eventually accepted Moeti's arguments that he was endangering the lives of countless passengers.

    S. Africa Puts TB Patients Behind Fences, NYT, 11.11.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/world/AP-South-Africa-TB-Quarantine.html

South Africa Bids Farewell

to Murdered Reggae Star

Lucky Dube

October 28, 2007
Filed at 7:51 a.m. ET
By REUTERS
The New York Times

INGOGO VILLAGE, South Africa (Reuters) - Thousands of fans bade an emotional farewell on Sunday to South Africa's top reggae star Lucky Dube, whose murder in an apparent botched carjacking stunned even a nation hardened to violent crime.

Rastafarians and members of the African Shembe Christian church to which Dube belonged were prominent in the crowds who thronged to his rural home for his funeral.

Local musicians and fans from across Africa sang hymns and paid tribute to South Africa's biggest-selling reggae singer and one of the country's most successful artistes.

His wife Zanele and children broke down in tears as one of Dube's best-known songs played over the loudspeaker at the public ceremony on his farm near the remote village of Ingogo, about 250 km (160 miles) southeast of Johannesburg.

The internationally acclaimed singer, who recorded 22 albums in English, Zulu and Afrikaans and won more than 20 awards in a 25-year entertainment career, was then buried in his garden in a private family ceremony.

The 43-year-old was shot dead in front of his children in a Johannesburg suburb on October 18. Five men have been arrested.

The high-profile killing prompted new calls for a crackdown on violent crime in South Africa, which has one of the highest crime rates in the world.

Police figures show there were nearly 20,000 murders in the year to the end of March, 2.4 percent up on the year before. The number of rapes, carjackings and assaults also remained high.

    South Africa Bids Farewell to Murdered Reggae Star Lucky Dube, NYT, 28.10.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/arts/entertainment-safrica-dube-funeral.html

11.30am

African reggae legend Lucky Dube

shot dead

Friday October 19, 2007
Guardian
David Beresford in Johannesburg

The South Africa musical world was in mourning yesterday after the murder of "reggae king" Lucky Dube, who was shot dead in an attempted car hijacking in Johannesburg.

The murder was carried out by two or three youths who seemingly gave no warning and made no demands. Dube tried to drive away, but lost control of his grey Chrysler and crashed into a tree.

His son, who had just got out of the car, ran for help. His 16-year old daughter, who was also in the vehicle, was unharmed.

The poet and fellow musician, Mzwakhe Mbuli, who was present at the scene of the killing, was distraught: "Shattered, shattered, seeing Lucky Dube's lifeless body was something else. Lucky is gone, someone who was not sick, who was healthy is gone. People used a finger to pull a trigger to just blow his life away in front of his children. We are meant to be marketing the country for [the World Cup in] 2010. What is this, what are we saying?"

Dube's killing follows the murder in downtown Johannesburg of the famous bass guitarist, Gito Baloi. He was killed in similar circumstances in April 2004. The killers took Baloi's wallet after shooting him through the window of his car.

The head of the Gallo music group, Ivor Haarburger, was among the first to pay tribute to Dube. Describing the murdered star as the best reggae performer in the world, he said Dube was even more famous internationally than in South Africa. "He was huge," said Mr Haarburger. "He could draw 40,000 to 50,000 to a concert."

Aged 43, Dube was born in a township outside the small mining town of Ermelo. He was named "Lucky" because he was considered fortunate to have survived ill heath as a child.

He started his musical career as a traditional musician in 1979 and switched to reggae in 1984, cutting more

than 20 albums and winning numerous musical awards.

South Africa is considered the murder capital of the world, with some 20,000 murders committed each year nationwide, and the centre of Johannesburg is probably the most dangerous part of the country.

Stunned fans crowded South Africa's airwaves on chat shows to express their grief and anger, and issue demands for the restoration of the death penalty.

    African reggae legend Lucky Dube shot dead, G, 19.10.2007, http://www.guardian.co.uk/international/story/0,,2195039,00.html

South Africa Closes

Mine That Trapped 3,200

October 5, 2007
The New York Times
By MICHAEL WINES

JOHANNESBURG, Oct. 4 — A day after an accident stranded 3,200 gold miners more than a mile underground, South African officials said Thursday that they had suspended operations at the huge Elandsrand mine for up to six weeks to determine the cause.

The mine’s owner, Harmony Gold, had lifted all of the miners to safety by about 9 p.m. Thursday, The Associated Press reported, using an undamaged auxiliary elevator in a ventilation shaft.

One miner fell while awaiting rescue and was carried out on a stretcher, but no one else was injured, said Amelia Soares, a Harmony spokeswoman.

The thousands of miners, including hundreds of women, were trapped about 10 a.m. on Wednesday when a 50-foot section of compressed-air pipe and its concrete base broke loose and fell down the main shaft of the mine. The pipe severely damaged the shaft’s steel frame and cut power cables to the main working area.

Harmony did not announce the accident until Wednesday evening, about 10 hours after it occurred, said Lizelle du Toit, a second spokeswoman. The company waited because it initially believed that the workers would be brought out quickly, she said.

The Elandsrand mine, about 40 miles southwest of Johannesburg, is like many old mines on South Africa’s Witwatersrand, the biggest and most heavily mined gold deposit on earth.

Gold production had dwindled sharply when Harmony bought it in 2001 and began digging a new mine beneath the old one. Harmony has said that it is investing about $90 million in improvements to tap the nearly seven million ounces of gold that are known to exist.

South Africa’s Minerals and Energy Department closed the mine Thursday after the National Union of Metalworkers of South Africa charged that the accident was the result of poor safety standards and Harmony’s practice of operating the mine around the clock.

“We suspect negligence,” Senzeni Zokwana, the union president, said.

Harmony officials rejected both charges, and said the mine shaft passed a required weekly safety inspection on Saturday. But the company’s chairman, Patrice Motsepe, said the accident underscored the need for more stringent safety efforts.

“Our safety records, both as a company and as a country, leave much to be desired,” Mr. Motsepe said.

The government has set a goal of reducing mine deaths by 20 percent annually. But roughly 200 of South Africa’s 400,000 mine workers died in 2005 and in 2006, and the pace this year has been about the same.

South Africa Closes Mine That Trapped 3,200, NYT, 5.10.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/2007/10/05/world/africa/05safrica.html

2,000 Rescued

at South African Mine

October 4, 2007
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Filed at 8:20 a.m. ET
The New York Times

CARLETONVILLE, South Africa (AP) -- More than 2,000 trapped gold miners were rescued in a dramatic all-night operation, and efforts gathered speed Thursday to bring hundreds more to the surface.

There were no casualties when a pressurized air pipe snapped at the mine near Johannesburg and tumbled down a shaft Wednesday, causing extensive damage to an elevator and stranding more than 3,000 miners more than a mile underground.

The mine owner and South Africa's minerals and energy minister vowed to improve safety in one of the country's most important industries.

The accident prompted allegations of the industry cutting safety corners in the name of profit -- and accusations from the government that mine owner Harmony Gold Mining Co. did not bother to inform it of the potentially devastating crisis.

Minerals and Energy Minister Buyelwa Sonjica complained that she found out from the late evening news about the accident, which happened just after 6 a.m. She said President Thabo Mbeki also found out from the news bulletin.

Sonjica said during a visit to the Elandsrand mine at Carletonville -- a town in South Africa's mining heartland near Johannesburg -- that health and safety legislation would be ''tightened up.''

Last year, 199 mineworkers died in accidents, mostly rock falls, the government Mine Health and Safety Council reported in September. One worker was killed last week in a mine adjacent to Elandsrand.

''We have to recommit ourselves to refocus on safety in this country; our safety record both as a company and an industry leave much to be desired,'' Harmony Gold Mining Co. chairman Patrice Motsepe said according to the South African Press Association, as union officials accused the industry of taking short cuts on safety in the interest of profit.

The hundreds of workers who remained underground were all near a ventilation shaft and had been given water -- though no food for fear of provoking a scramble among hungry miners, according to Peter Bailey, health and safety chairman for the National Mineworkers Union.

Mine general manager Stan Bierschenk said that most of the miners complained of heat exhaustion and fatigue.

Bierschenk said the company hoped to complete the rescue by lunchtime, although Bailey said this was optimistic and that late-afternoon was more realistic.

Sethiri Thibile, who was in the first batch of miners rescued about 19 hours after the accident, clutched a cold beef sandwich and a bottle of water he was given when he reached the surface.

''I was hungry, though we were all hungry,'' said Thibile, 32, an engineering assistant who had been underground since early Wednesday morning. He said there was no food or water in the mine.

''Most of the people are scared and we also have some women miners there underground,'' said Thibile.

Rescued miners emerged from the shaft with their faces etched with dust and the lamps on their hardhats still lit. ''We are still all right. I am a bit relieved but very, very hungry,'' miner Jerry Lepolese said after.

As dawn broke over Carletonville, a town near Johannesburg, there were scenes of relief and despair. A woman put her arm around her sobbing daughter, who was apparently distraught at the lack of news about her husband.

Disgruntled family members stood outside the mine offices, complaining that they had not been given enough information about their loved ones.

''I am very traumatized, exhausted, not knowing what is going on,'' said Sam Ramohanoe, whose wife, Flora, 31, was among the trapped. ''It is very unfair to us, not knowing what is going one with our beloved ones.''

Deon Boqwana, regional chairman for the union, said officials were in contact with the men below ground by a telephone line in the mine.

Boqwana said the smaller cage being used to bring miners out can hold about 75 miners at a time. He said it normally takes three minutes to reach the surface but would be slower because rescuers were being careful.

Bailey, the union health chairman, said the miners were ''very afraid,'' hungry and thirsty after being underground for hours.

''Some of these mineworkers started duty on Tuesday evening. It is now Wednesday night and they are still underground,'' he said.

A spokesman for the union, Lesiba Seshoka, said that the mine was not properly maintained.

''Our guys there tell us that they have raised concerns about the whole issue of maintenance of shafts with the mine (managers) but they have not been attended to,'' he said.

Company spokeswoman Amelia Soares said the mine had won a number of safety awards and had never witnessed any fatal accidents. She said the company was likely to suffer considerable loss in output during the closure, but was unable to give a precise estimate, saying that attention for now was concentrated on the rescue operation.

Senzeni Zokwana, the president of the National Mineworkers Union, said the accident should be a wake-up call for the industry.

''We are very much concerned. We believe that this should be a call to the industry that secondary exits underground be mandated,'' said Zokwana.

Motsepe said he had been in the mining business since the 1980s and could not remember an another incident were so many miners had been trapped below ground.

2,000 Rescued at South African Mine, NYT, 4.10.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/world/AP-South-Africa-Mine.html?hp

Mandela Opens

Shopping Mall in Soweto

September 27, 2007
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Filed at 9:34 a.m. ET
The New York Times

SOWETO, South Africa (AP) -- Former President Nelson Mandela opened the largest shopping center in Soweto on Thursday, more evidence of the business boom that is transforming South Africa's most famous township.

The 699,654-square-foot, $86 million Maponya Mall is the latest venture by Richard Maponya, a close associate of Mandela and one of Soweto's oldest entrepreneurs.

''With this action, we declare this mall open,'' said a beaming Mandela after cutting a large gold ribbon.

Soweto, the sprawling township in the southwest of Johannesburg, was envisioned by apartheid's architects as merely a warehouse for workers. Since the end of apartheid more than a decade ago, it has increasingly established itself as a community -- where people live, work and shop, and where business sees opportunity.

Shopping malls, once chiefly associated with Johannesburg's wealthy northern suburbs, are sprouting up across Soweto, as black South Africans reap the benefits of a growing economy.

''There are big changes in Soweto,'' Sowetan Cecile Daubanes said at Maponya Mall's opening, struggling to push a shopping trolley loaded with groceries.

Soweto is the most populous black urban residential area in the country with about 1 million people, nearly a third of Johannesburg's total population.

It was at the center of the anti-apartheid struggle and home to the country's most important political figures, such as Mandela and fellow Nobel peace laureate Archbishop Desmond Tutu. Today, its cosmopolitan residents continue to define black urban style in South Africa.

''I have been one of the sons of this town for a very long time. I have seen it grow,'' Maponya said at the opening, standing in front of a statue inspired by an iconic photograph of a dying Hector Pieterson, the youngest victim of the 1976 Soweto student uprising against apartheid.

Maponya, dubbed the ''father of black retail,'' spoke about how he battled to access business financing as he tried to build up a career as an entrepreneur.

''I refused to listen and kept on knocking on doors. Today, I deliver to you my dream of 28 years,'' he said as people poured into the mall, eager to take advantage of the many opening sales.

Johannesburg Mayor Amos Masondo said a 2004 study showed that Sowetans spent $611 million on retail goods, but only 25 percent of this was spent in the township due to a lack of retail outlets. Since then, there has been an ''explosion'' of new shops in Soweto, including the Maponya Mall, he said.

''Soweto is not just undergoing a face lift,'' he said. ''It is undergoing a radical reconstruction and the mood is one of excitement.''

Sowetan Susan Lebitso, laden with sheets and pillows at Maponya Mall Thursday, embodied that mood.

She said: ''The mall has come to us.''

Mandela Opens Shopping Mall in Soweto, NYT, 27.9.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/world/AP-South-Africa-Soweto-Mall.html

The Saturday Profile

Taking On Apartheid,

Then a Nation’s Stance on AIDS

September 8, 2007
The New York Times
By MICHAEL WINES

CAPE TOWN

NOZIZWE MADLALA-ROUTLEDGE, one of the most talked-about figures in South Africa these days, wanted to be a scientist. She says she sacrificed her ambition on the altar of principle.

Ms. Madlala, as she was then known, was pursuing a science degree at the University of Fort Hare, an apartheid-era haven for black scholars that counts Nelson Mandela among its alumni. It was 1972, and after the government barred black parents from commencement ceremonies at another university, Fort Hare students mounted a boycott, which Ms. Madlala joined.

The school administration expelled her, and said she could be readmitted only if she apologized. She refused.

“I didn’t see what I had to apologize for,” she said. “So I lost my place at Fort Hare.”

Thirty-five years later, Ms. Madlala-Routledge has been expelled again — this time, from her post as South Africa’s deputy health minister — and once again, she sees no reason to apologize. Since President Thabo Mbeki dismissed her in mid-August, citing a list of political and managerial lapses, both she and South Africa’s beleaguered Health Ministry have been the subjects of fierce debate.

Ms. Madlala-Routledge’s supporters say she was the lone voice of principle in a Health Ministry sullied by its lackadaisical response to South Africa’s AIDS crisis. When the government finally adopted an aggressive anti-AIDS strategy in December, after years of international criticism, Ms. Madlala-Routledge was among the principal authors.

To her supporters, the dismissal is fresh evidence of a deep antipathy toward AIDS science on the part of both Mr. Mbeki and his political ally, the much-maligned health minister, Manto Tshabalala-Msimang.

On the other hand, Ms. Madlala-Routledge’s critics say she is a headline-grabbing gadfly. In mid-August, Mr. Mbeki devoted his weekly Internet essay to a harsh attack on Ms. Madlala-Routledge, calling her a “lone ranger” who willfully ignored orders. Any suggestion that her dismissal will affect South Africa’s AIDS strategy, he wrote, is “extraordinarily absurd.”

Ms. Madlala-Routledge does not directly contest that. Deputy President Phumzile Mlambo-Ngcuka, Ms. Madlala-Routledge’s friend for 20 years, continues to oversee the strategy, she said. But without leadership from the Health Ministry, she said, the strategy will fail. And that leadership was lacking, she said, even before she was fired.

Asked why, Ms. Madlala-Routledge replied: “It puzzles me. It truly puzzles me.”

Ms. Madlala-Routledge is not easy to pigeonhole. At 55, she is a veteran of South Africa’s liberation struggle, a Communist, a Quaker, a fairly canny politician with a seat in South Africa’s Parliament and, by training, a medical technician with an interest in immunology.

The Communist Party sees her as a rising star, though that compliment is tempered by the party’s minuscule size. She has grabbed her share of headlines, but seldom by straying beyond her official mandate. Tall, hefty and soft spoken, she is nobody’s vision of a rabble-rouser.

But both political analysts and health experts say she also is no pushover. At a Cape Town news conference in August, she invoked a Quaker aphorism to explain her dismissal, saying that one “must never be afraid to speak truth to power.”

LIKE any black woman in apartheid South Africa, Ms. Madlala-Routledge did not have an easy youth. As a child in Umzumbe, a small town south of Durban, she lived within walking distance of pristine Indian Ocean beaches from which she was banned, and attended a missionary school because blacks were not allowed a standard education.

Ms. Madlala-Routledge dreamed of being a doctor but left the University of Natal after a year because of poor grades. “Steve Biko had taken me under his wing,” she said of the student activist who was later murdered by the South African police, “and I guess I spent more time at meetings than doing my studies.” Then came Fort Hare and expulsion, followed by four years of training in medical technology at a government laboratory.

In 1980 she took a job in a Durban hospital lab, alternately fascinated by the science and appalled by apartheid’s impact on blacks’ health. A year earlier, she had secretly joined the banned African National Congress, running a cell of activists and — her Quaker beliefs aside — sheltering members of the group’s military wing.

Her political involvements grew, and in 1993 she won a seat in democratic South Africa’s new Parliament. Then in 1999, the new president, Thabo Mbeki, asked that she join his administration — as deputy defense minister. She was shocked. “Are you sure you aren’t looking for somebody else?” she recalled saying.

But she accepted, and in 2004, Mr. Mbeki moved her to the Health Ministry’s No. 2 slot. In ministry meetings, she said, she pushed for a more forceful approach to South Africa’s H.I.V. crisis, which kills 800 people a day and infects 1,000 more — and was met, she said, by growing resistance from the health minister, Dr. Tshabalala-Msimang. Called Garlic Manto by her detractors, Dr. Tshabalala-Msimang emphasized so-called African solutions to H.I.V., the virus that causes AIDS, including diets of garlic, beetroot and African potatoes. She also suggested that anti-AIDS drugs were dangerous.

Ms. Madlala-Routledge suggested that public officials take AIDS tests, then backtracked to make clear that she was not prodding Mr. Mbeki. Increasingly, she said, Dr. Tshabalala-Msimang confined her to tasks with scant political dimension, like managing mortuaries. In 2005, after publicly disagreeing with her boss over the primacy of nutrition as a defense against H.I.V., Ms. Madlala-Routledge was summoned to Mr. Mbeki for the woodshed treatment.

SHE remained in the shadows until late 2006, when Dr. Tshabalala-Msimang exhibited baskets of garlic and other supposed anti-AIDS foods at an international conference on H.I.V., raising a global outcry. Shortly afterward, the minister fell ill, and during her absence Ms. Madlala-Routledge’s old ally, the deputy president, summoned her to rewrite South Africa’s AIDS strategy.

That strategy remains in force, but Ms. Madlala-Routledge no longer helps direct it. Late in 2006, she said, she heard rumors that her time in Mr. Mbeki’s government was near an end. In July, she raised eyebrows when she accompanied a journalist to a rural hospital with a high rate of infant deaths, then called conditions there a national emergency. Dr. Tshabalala-Msimang publicly and vigorously disagreed — although others did not — and a few weeks later, Ms. Madlala-Routledge was unemployed.

Mr. Mbeki cited other reasons for the firing, including Ms. Madlala-Routledge’s decision to attend a Madrid conference on H.I.V. vaccines after receiving routine, but informal approval from his office. (Mr. Mbeki rejected the trip after she arrived.)

Most analysts say, however, that Mr. Mbeki was extracting a thorn from his side and that of his close ally, Ms. Tshabalala-Msimang, whose husband is the powerful treasurer of the African National Congress. Some wonder why Ms. Madlala-Routledge did not see it coming.

“In the last few months, I’ve been rather shocked at how reckless she has been in her public statements,” said Kerry Cullinan, a veteran reporter on medical issues for the South African Web site Health-e. “If you know you’re under scrutiny, you have to be very, very careful. You don’t go off with journalists.”

    Taking On Apartheid, Then a Nation’s Stance on AIDS, NYT, 8.9.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/2007/09/08/world/africa/08madlala.html

Memo From Johannesburg

South Africa Lowers Voice

on Human Rights

March 24, 2007
The New York Times
By MICHAEL WINES

JOHANNESBURG, March 23 — Modern South Africa came about, historians agree, in part because of the United Nations’ unrelenting stance against apartheid. The United Nations affirmed that South African racism was not merely an internal political problem, but a threat to southern Africa. It banned arms shipments to South Africa. It demanded fair treatment of black dissidents.

It worked. This month a democratic South Africa sits as president of the United Nations Security Council. It was a remarkable, even poignant affirmation of the power of morality in global diplomacy.

Or so it might seem. After just three months as one of the Security Council’s nonpermanent members, South Africa is mired in controversy over what could be its great strength: the moral weight it can bring to diplomatic deliberations.

In January, South Africa surprised many, and outraged some, when it voted against allowing the Security Council to consider a relatively mild resolution on human rights issues in Myanmar, whose government is widely seen as one of the most repressive on earth.

Last week the government again angered human rights advocates when it said it would oppose a request to brief the Security Council on the deteriorating situation in Zimbabwe, where the government is pursuing a violent crackdown on its only political opposition. South Africa later changed its stance, but only after dismissing the briefing as a minor event that did not belong on the Council’s agenda.

This week South Africa endangered a delicate compromise among nations often at odds — the United States, China, Russia, France, Britain and Germany — to rein in Iran’s nuclear program.

The major powers agreed on an arms embargo, freezing of assets and other sanctions against Iran, but South Africa proposed dropping the arms and financial sanctions and placing a 90-day “timeout” on other punishments, which critics said would have rendered the sanctions toothless.

“I’m not gutting the resolution,” Dumisani S. Kumalo, South Africa’s ambassador to the United Nations, told news agency reporters this week. “I’m improving it.”

Granted, none of these positions by themselves have been fatal to the efforts at hand. The Myanmar resolution was dead on arrival anyway, condemned by vetoes from China, which backs that nation’s dictatorship, and Russia. Nor could South Africa have single-handedly blocked a Zimbabwe briefing.

South Africa’s wrench in the Iran sanctions effort has complicated things, but mostly because the great powers would like Iran’s defiance to be met with unanimous disapproval.

Rather, what has left some of South Africa’s admirers slack-jawed is the apparent incongruity of its positions. It is not merely that South Africa’s current leaders are withholding the same sorts of international condemnations that sustained them when they were battling oppression.

When apartheid’s evils came to the fore in the Security Council in the early 1980s, it was newly independent Zimbabwe that occupied one of the Council’s nonpermanent seats and voted to condemn South African racism. Myanmar, then known as Burma, joined in denouncing apartheid from its seat in the General Assembly.

Moreover, South Africa may now oppose sanctions against Iran’s nuclear program, but the white apartheid government voluntarily renounced its own atomic bomb in the early 1990s, and the democratic government that followed has ardently continued along that same path. In fact, South Africa remains the only nation in history to have given up its nuclear program of its own accord.

Given that backdrop, a columnist in The Johannesburg Star fretted last week over what he called a “fundamental misunderstanding” of the role of human rights in a nation’s development.

The nation’s second-largest political party, the Democratic Alliance, was more brutal: “Instead of furthering an agenda based on the protection and promotion of human rights,” the party stated, “we are more concerned with using bureaucratic excuses to shield tyrants and despots from international scrutiny.”

South African officials have responded with wounded indignation. On Friday, Deputy Foreign Minister Aziz Pahad said that the government was committed to resolving the crisis in Zimbabwe through dialogue, but added that “it is not our intention to make militant statements to make us feel good, or to satisfy governments outside the African continent,” Reuters reported.

Apartheid, the South African government contends, was a crime against humanity. In contrast, it argues that human rights abuses in Myanmar do not fall within the mandate of the Security Council. Indeed, the South African government says, the Council’s encroachment on issues better left to lesser agencies like the Human Rights Council undermines the organization’s global nature.

Seasoned scholars may and do differ, but to many analysts here the real question is why, given its standing as a beacon of human rights, South Africa has taken such positions at all. Perhaps nobody outside Pretoria knows, but there are plenty of theories.

One, advanced by a committed advocate of Burmese freedom, is that South Africa is feathering its strategic relationship with China, which largely controls Myanmar, supports Zimbabwe’s authoritarian government and has assiduously courted President Thabo Mbeki of South Africa. China has big investments, a decent-size immigrant population and great ambitions in South Africa. South Africa has a similarly close relationship with Iran, an oil supplier.

But even during its struggle for liberation, the African National Congress, or A.N.C., now the governing party, maintained ties to supporters with questionable human rights records, like the Soviet Union, China and Libya.

Another explanation is that South Africa is playing the role of bad boy on the Security Council to underscore its demand that the Council be overhauled to reflect new global realities.

South Africa and many other developing nations deeply resent the great powers’ veto over major United Nations actions, often against developing countries like Zimbabwe and North Korea. They want the emerging Southern Hemisphere to have more sway in the body’s policies and actions.

“South Africa wants reform of the Security Council, come hell or high water,” said Thomas Wheeler, a longtime diplomat for South Africa who now is chief executive at the South Africa Institute of International Affairs, a research group. “And they’re using practically any means to do it. They’ve got almost a bee in their bonnet — that this is the way to go, to force the issue in this way.”

A third theory, a hybrid of those two, is that South Africa’s leaders have yet to decide whether they are democrats or the revolutionaries of two decades ago, railing against seemingly immovable establishments on behalf of seemingly lost causes. The powers in those days were the United States and Britain, powers inimical to the Communists who were the financiers of black liberation movements in the 1980s.

“What you have here is the continuing, ongoing tussle over whether the A.N.C. is still a protest movement or the governing party of a responsible member of the international community,” said a retired American diplomat with decades of Africa experience. “They’re reflexively against anything we’re for — we in the States, we and the British, we in the North. It’s more Chinese than the Chinese.”

    South Africa Lowers Voice on Human Rights, NYT, 24.3.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/2007/03/24/world/africa/24africa.html?hp

A Dead Swindler

Holds Sway Over South Africa

March 15, 2007
The New York Times
By MICHAEL WINES

JOHANNESBURG, March 14 — Brett Kebble was by all accounts a larger-than-life figure — gold-mining tycoon, concert-quality pianist, raconteur, gourmand, flamboyant benefactor of politics and the arts and, not least, master swindler. So it is fitting that the scandal he left behind after his death 18 months ago should be oversize, too.

But this big?

Mr. Kebble’s tangled financial dealings have not just roiled South Africa’s business world, where mining is both the epicenter of finance and the engine of growth. Now they also threaten to complicate national politics, where the emerging record of his financial gifts and other aid to top figures in the African National Congress is swaying the heated contest to lead the party — and by extension, to choose the successor to President Thabo Mbeki.

“On the face of it, it’s going to have fairly severe political ramifications,” said Nic Borain, a writer and political analyst for HSBC, the global finance company. “He spent a lot of time apparently currying favor with politicians and possibly even intervening in the succession race.”

Much has occurred since the September 2005 evening when Mr. Kebble, 41, perished on a Johannesburg freeway overpass, shot seven times with a 9-millimeter pistol through the side window of his silver S-class Mercedes.

Mr. Kebble’s mining empire, once anchored by control of the globe’s richest unexploited gold seam, has collapsed amid a series of frauds, with some of South Africa’s biggest investors squabbling over the remains.

Glenn Agliotti, a reputed drug kingpin known as “The Landlord,” was charged last November with Mr. Kebble’s murder. He has argued through his lawyers that the killing was really an assisted suicide, arranged by Mr. Kebble days before an audit exposed a billion-rand fraud at one of his companies.

Mr. Agliotti, in turn, has been revealed to be a close friend of South Africa’s national police commissioner, Jackie Selebi. Indeed, Mr. Agliotti admitted to The Mail & Guardian months before he was arrested that he had called Mr. Selebi from near the scene of Mr. Kebble’s murder 90 minutes after the shooting, a fact Mr. Selebi has acknowledged. Both have said they were trying to solve the crime.

Nonetheless, the revelations have provoked calls for Mr. Selebi, the current president of Interpol and a powerful figure in the ruling African National Congress party, or A.N.C., to resign as police commissioner. Mr. Selebi has refused, even after Mr. Agliotti’s diary showed repeated meetings with him. “Does that mean that anyone who has an appointment with him is a criminal?” Mr. Selebi said in the Star newspaper in Johannesburg. President Mbeki has stood behind Mr. Selebi.

And in early March, South Africa’s elite crime-fighting squad, the Scorpions, executed 29 search warrants around the country, swooping down on Mr. Kebble’s relatives, business associates and members of the African National Congress. Part of that inquiry involves accusations that Mr. Kebble made millions of dollars in disguised payments to the party, its affiliates and, in smaller amounts, to other political organizations as well.

All this is unfolding as Mr. Mbeki and his many rivals in the A.N.C. are publicly girding for a battle to choose the party’s next leader at a meeting in December. Whoever wins that job will have the inside track to succeed Mr. Mbeki as president in 2009 — or if not, to anoint a successor.

Given that, many South Africans are riveted to the Kebble soap opera, waiting to see where in the party, if anywhere, the inquiry leads next.

“In many ways he represents the murky link between money and politics in a democratic South Africa,” said Hennie van Vuuren, an expert on corruption at the Institute for Security Studies, a South African research organization.

Granted, South Africa has no monopoly on murk. But Mr. van Vuuren and other analysts say such scandals are doubly jarring in young democracies like South Africa’s, where the laws are still being made, political power is still being sorted out and the temptations are unusually great.

Russia’s democracy was all but overwhelmed in the 1990s by corrupt ties between business moguls and the government, and corruption is a defining problem in many other African nations. In contrast, South Africa often seems to be striking back: The Scorpions have pursued a bribery scheme for a government military contract all the way to the door of the former deputy president, Jacob Zuma, who is the chief rival to Mr. Mbeki and a front-runner to succeed him.

Beyond that, government financial regulators last month accused Fidentia, an asset manager that has courted government favor, with fraud that could approach 900 million rand, or more than $121 million at current exchange rates.

“I don’t recall a flood of high-profile raids of this magnitude for years,” said Barry Sergeant, who wrote a book on Mr. Kebble and has followed the Kebble and Fidentia scandals for South Africa’s Moneyweb news service. “There’s definitely a hugely accelerated pace in the response to white-collar crime.”

Some supporters of Mr. Zuma argue that the Scorpions and the police have effectively singled out his political machine, seeking to derail his challenge to Mr. Mbeki’s control of the party.

Mr. Zuma has been accused, and his financial adviser convicted, of receiving hundreds of thousands of dollars in bribes from a French military contractor to influence the award of a huge contract for vessels for South Africa’s navy. The case against Mr. Zuma is in legal limbo, but if it is successfully revived, as some expect, it could destroy his ambition to lead South Africa.

The Kebble scandal also threatens to tilt the political balance in the A.N.C. against Mr. Zuma because of the close ties between Mr. Kebble and Mr. Zuma’s supporters. And because the party is guaranteed to dominate the next elections, it also threatens Mr. Zuma’s hopes for the presidency.

The son of a mining engineer turned Cape wine farmer, Mr. Kebble allied with a relative of the James Bond novelist Ian Fleming to become stakeholders in Randgold, a major gold mining company, and won control of it at age 32.

Mr. Kebble spun several major mining companies out of Randgold and concentrated his major holdings in Western Areas, a firm that controlled a fabulously rich gold vein called South Deep in western South Africa. In need of money, he sold a half-interest in South Deep to a rival firm, then sold the vein’s unmined gold to other investors for $308 per ounce of gold produced through 2014.

It was a bad bet. The price of gold skyrocketed to $721 an ounce last year, and Western Areas found itself selling gold for far less than it cost to mine it. But in a fraud that involved moving money through a string of companies and selling shares he did not control, Mr. Kebble maintained the image of a high flier in the gold business and a force to be reckoned with.

He bought fabulous homes in Cape Town and Johannesburg and established a huge arts award in his own name. Most of all, he became a financier of so-called black empowerment deals, a government-endorsed process in which white-controlled companies sold major interests to black investors, often at favorable terms.

Many of the deals Mr. Kebble brokered involved major figures within the African National Congress, government investigators say. In particular, many beneficiaries of these deals and other Kebble projects were in the A.N.C. Youth League, a party subsidiary that is a bedrock of support for Mr. Zuma and a virulent critic of Mr. Mbeki.

Mr. Kebble was a strong Zuma backer and a committed enemy of Bulelani Ngcuka, a onetime head of the Scorpions who not only began the bribery case against Mr. Zuma, but also unsuccessfully prosecuted Mr. Kebble’s father. In August 2005, as the impact of his frauds began showing up on company books, Mr. Kebble was forced to resign as the head of three companies he controlled, meeting a condition of loans from South African investors to keep those companies afloat.

A month later, his empire falling apart, he was dead. Today, under a different leader, the Scorpions are unraveling his dealings and pursuing his financial ties to figures in the A.N.C. Youth League and elsewhere.

Meanwhile, Johannesburg’s Sunday Times newspaper reported on Sunday that Mr. Kebble’s estate has demanded that the party and some of its leaders return more than $3 million that Mr. Kebble gave them.

Why Mr. Kebble was killed remains a mystery. John Stratton, a business adviser and close friend who might shed light on the murder, is in Australia, resisting extradition in connection with the killing. Officials of the Scorpions have indicated that they support Mr. Agliotti’s assertion that Mr. Kebble arranged his own death.

Mr. Sergeant, the journalist who wrote about the garrulous Mr. Kebble, says the suicide theory is nonsense. “I knew this guy over the years,” he said. “He’s not in any kind of suicide category.”

By Mr. Sergeant’s reckoning, Mr. Kebble’s roll-the-dice style eventually enmeshed him in deals with people too rich and too powerful for him to manipulate, and he became their pawn.

“They got him in so deep that he reached a terminal phase,” he said, “and in the end, he became a fall guy.”

    A Dead Swindler Holds Sway Over South Africa, NYT, 15.3.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/2007/03/15/world/africa/15safrica.html?hp

South Africa Unveils

Plan to Fight HIV

March 14, 2007
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Filed at 9:47 a.m. ET
The New York Times

JOHANNESBURG, South Africa (AP) -- The government proposed a five-year plan Wednesday to halve the number of new HIV infections in South Africa, saying it had failed to persuade young people to change their sexual habits.

In a report, the government also said the country needed to better address the stigma associated with the disease, which discouraged many people from being tested, and vowed to expand its treatment and care program to cover 80 percent of people with AIDS.

The report's frankness -- and the warmth with which it was received by AIDS activists -- marked a turnaround in government rhetoric on AIDS, after years of international condemnation for policies that many said went against medical advice and activists' efforts. The health minister in particular has been criticized for questioning antiretroviral treatments and promoting nutritional remedies, such as garlic and lemons, to fight the disease.

''This plan marks a turning point in the struggle to stop the HIV/AIDS epidemic,'' said Zwelinzima Vavi, the general-secretary of the Congress of South African Trade Unions. ''We hail the new spirit, which signals the end to acrimonious debate and the standoff between government and important sectors of our people.''

Poor coordination and lack of clear targets and monitoring has helped AIDS to become a major cause of premature death in South Africa, with mortality rates increasing by about 79 percent in 1997-2004, with a higher increase among women, the 120-page report said.

About 5.54 million people were estimated to be living with HIV in South Africa in 2005, with 19 percent of the adult population affected. Women in the 25-29 age group were the worst affected, with prevalence rates of up to 40 percent.

''There are still too many people living with HIV, too many still getting infected,'' the report said. ''The impact on individuals and households is enormous.'' Children were also vulnerable, with high rates of mother-to-child transmission.

A two-day conference, beginning Wednesday, brought political and business leaders together with AIDS activists to discuss ways to implement the government's five-year plan.

''The National Strategic Plan includes ambitious targets to reverse the course of HIV and AIDS over the next five years,'' the acting health minister, Jeff Radebe, said. ''These bold targets reflect our commitment to combat HIV and AIDS.''

The government appointed Radebe last month, after Health Minister Manto Tshabalala-Msimang left her duties due to illness. Since taking the post, Radebe has sought to mend fences with doctors and AIDS activists, including the main Treatment Action Campaign group, after years of Tshabalala-Msimang advising South Africans that natural remedies were better for fighting AIDS than antiretrovirals.

Deputy President Phumzile Mlambo-Ngcuka, appointed last year to efforts in revamping the country's AIDS strategy, said the government had set aside 14 billion rands ($1.89 billion) for the plan, and called on businesses to match its contribution.

She called for targets to be set and met to ensure the plan had the required impact, saying ''our actions must be measurable.''

The proposed plan -- meant to be finalized by the South African National AIDS Council later this month -- set a target for reducing the number of new HIV infections by 50 percent by 2011.

To reach the target, it called for more effort in empowering women, who often are targeted in sexual abuse, and to encourage people to be tested for the virus.

More also must be done to promote behavior change in young people, the report said.

Mlambo-Ngcuka urged youths to delay their first sexual experiences and to be at the forefront of the fight against the disease.

''We would like to make sure our young people believe there can be and there will be an Africa free of AIDS,'' she said.

The Treatment Action Campaign, in the past highly critical of government efforts, welcomed the proposed five-year plan as one of the ''best responses'' to the epidemic.

''We can already recognize significant departures from the previous plan (for 2000-05) which didn't have targets or recognize the drivers of the epidemic,'' said Sipho Mthathi, the campaign's general secretary, according to the South African Press Association.

The report said the government should aim to provide ''appropriate packages of treatment, care and support to 80 percent of HIV positive people and their families by 2011.''

Currently nearly 250,000 people are receiving antiretroviral therapy -- about 20 percent of the estimated number of people living with HIV.

The report also said a tuberculosis epidemic in South Africa was closely linked to AIDS, and voiced concern about the emergence of a nearly untreatable TB strain that preys on those with a suppressed immune system. More coordination in managing the two diseases was needed, it said.

    South Africa Unveils Plan to Fight HIV, NYT, 14.3.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/world/AP-South-Africa-AIDS.html

Song Wakens

Injured Pride of Afrikaners

February 27, 2007
The New York Times
By MICHAEL WINES

JOHANNESBURG, Feb. 26 — “Proudly South African” is this nation’s E Pluribus Unum, a slogan stamped on products, echoed in radio commercials and inculcated into the new South African DNA. Much as America’s motto celebrates melding many into one, South Africa’s says that it doesn’t matter what you look like — we can all be proud of our young country.

Enter Louis Pepler, who, perhaps inadvertently, has cast the notion of South African pride in a whole new light. He and two friends penned an unlikely rock ballad about an Afrikaner general named De la Rey who battled British forces a century ago, and it instantly became an Afrikaner anthem.

Mr. Pepler calls the song, “De la Rey,” a testament to Afrikaner pride. “I’m part of this rainbow country of ours,” he said. “But I’m one of the colors, and I’m sticking up for who I am. I’m proud of who I am.”

Which would be fine, except that nobody, not even Afrikaners themselves, agrees on what an Afrikaner is these days.

A dozen years after the end of an Afrikaner government that invented apartheid, the mere concept of Afrikaner pride remains an exquisitely sensitive issue among whites and blacks alike. Are Afrikaners the feared Dutch descendants who built an empire based on a belief in their God-ordained racial superiority? Are they just another ethnic group, like the Zulu and Sotho and Xhosa, with a distinct place in the new democracy? Or are they South Africans first and foremost— 2.5 million whites in a stewpot of 4.5 million whites among 47.5 million people — and Afrikaners second, or third?

“De la Rey” has become a vessel for those aspirations and fears and, for the last month, the object of a caustic, often racially tinged national debate.

The seeds of the debate were planted late last year, when “De la Rey” first saturated Afrikaner radio airwaves and catapulted Mr. Pepler from middling success on the bar and restaurant circuit into an ethnic rock icon. Suddenly, at some of his concerts, a small knot of fans began to wave the old orange-and-green flag of apartheid South Africa as “De la Rey” was sung.

Mr. Pepler repudiated them. But the Ministry of Arts and Culture was unpersuaded. Two weeks ago it issued a brusque warning that “De la Rey” was “in danger of being hijacked by a minority of right wingers,” and that “those who incite treason, whatever methods they might employ, might well find themselves in difficulty with the law.”

That drew a barbed retort from the Democratic Alliance, the second largest and mostly white political party. If the government was looking for subversion in a song, the party said, it might well examine “Bring Me My Machine Gun,” the personal anthem of Jacob Zuma, the deputy president of the governing African National Congress and an aspirant to succeed President Thabo Mbeki.

Mr. Zuma and a business adviser faced bribery and corruption charges last year. Throngs of his supporters chanted the song outside their courtrooms, an act some critics called an attempt to intimidate the judiciary.

Since the dispute over “De la Rey” began, a ban on singing it has been issued and revoked at Loftus Stadium in Johannesburg, the nation’s most hallowed rugby pitch; the culture minister affirmed his support in Parliament for Mr. Pepler’s freedom of expression; and Nelson R. Mandela’s personal assistant has defended the song as a youthful cry for direction. Newspapers and blogs have resounded with competing takes on the meaning of its lyrics and its larger significance.

Taken literally, the lyrics are clear: “De la Rey” is a song about Afrikaner history. In the Second Boer War, from 1899 to 1902, a much larger British force overwhelmed the Boers, or Afrikaners, in a scramble for gold and land — but only after Gen. Koos de la Rey inflicted punishing defeats on the British. Nearly 28,000 Afrikaners and perhaps 20,000 black Africans died in British concentration camps during the war, many of them women and children. Their suffering is a central theme in Afrikaner lore.

Mr. Pepler’s song is set in the trenches of that war. In the music video, a blooded and beleaguered Afrikaner soldier sings of “a handful of us against a whole big force” and “a nation that will rise again” — as the Afrikaners later did, winning control of South Africa in an election in 1948.

“De la Rey, de la Rey,” the refrain pleads, “will you come and lead the Boers?”

But while the lyrics as a whole refer to the Boer War, some see in those phrases, and in the soldier’s hopeless plight, a metaphor for Afrikaners’ reduced place in post-apartheid society. His plea for a leader is viewed as a call for resistance to South Africa’s government, which is based on universal suffrage.

Not only blacks have raised those interpretations. “I understand Afrikaans, and I’ve listened to the song,” said Steven Friedman, an independent white political analyst. “It says that ‘we need to follow some sort of general like you,’ which could be interpreted by literal-minded people to be a call to arms.”

Mr. Pepler, 28, a construction engineer from Pretoria, calls that interpretation “totally ridiculous.”

“I’m not clever enough to read coded language in a song,” he said after a concert in Orania, a village of 600 on the fringes of the Great Karoo desert. “It’s such a sensitive subject. You say ‘Boer,’ and everyone is ‘What is this now?’ It’s directly connected to people getting ideas and pictures in their heads — that a Boer is a right-wing person with khaki clothes who wants to murder black people.”

Such people undoubtedly exist; a few far-right Afrikaners were recently tried on charges of antigovernment terrorism. But many more seem to be searching for a comfortable place in a black-majority society and still have not found it.

The Sunday Independent, perhaps South Africa’s most renowned newspaper, says the song “answers a deep sadness” in Afrikaners’ souls, a feeling that they have not merely fallen from power but have been marginalized in South African society — tossed into history’s dustbin, as Ronald Reagan once said of the Soviets.

In its comment on “De la Rey,” the government raised those fears, then dismissed them as nonsense. In fact, better than one in seven South Africans speaks or understands Afrikaans, including many blacks.

But many Afrikaners are not convinced. Students at Stellenbosch University, once the Harvard of Afrikaner enlightenment, have formed a society to preserve Afrikaans-language teaching there. Eastward, in the Indian Ocean province of Mpumalanga, government officials this month decertified an Afrikaans school that refused to teach courses in English.

Afrikaners complain that the government has excised their history, including General de la Rey’s exploits, from official textbooks.

“It’s a continual process of assimilating Afrikaners into the larger population,” said Corel Boshoff, who represents Orania in the Parliament of Northern Cape Province. Mr. Boshoff says his great-grandfather was born in a British concentration camp. Yet Afrikaner history, including the Boer War, has been sidelined to a few sentences in South African history texts, he says. He argues that the language and culture of Afrikaners may be next.

Mr. Boshoff is hardly the exemplar of his cause. He is a relative of Hendrik Verwoerd, the South African leader who institutionalized apartheid as national policy in the 1950s.

Orania itself, a privately owned compound, was founded in 1990 as an all-Afrikaner enclave, a place where Boer culture could flourish free of black, mixed-race or even white English influence. A bust of Mr. Verwoerd dominates its entrance. The town’s 600 residents even have their own currency. Most people would call Orania’s very premise racist.

Moreover, hardly all Afrikaners share Mr. Boshoff’s views. Among intellectuals a school of thought argues that Afrikaners should sublimate their ethnic identities in favor of the larger purpose of forging an integrated South African society, a model for the world.

Yet it is still possible to recognize that it is not easy to be a proud Afrikaner these days. “Not everything we did in our history was wrong and bad and despicable,” Mr. Boshoff said as Mr. Pepler’s band clamored in the background. “There’s also a history of a hundred years ago, which is represented by this song.”

    Song Wakens Injured Pride of Afrikaners, NYT, 27.2.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/2007/02/27/world/africa/27safrica.html

Virulent TB in South Africa

May Imperil Millions

January 28, 2007
The New York Times
By MICHAEL WINES

JOHANNESBURG, Jan. 27 — More than a year after a virulent strain of tuberculosis killed 52 of 53 infected patients in a rural South African hospital, experts here and abroad say the disease has most likely spread to neighboring countries, and some say urgent action is essential to halt its advance.

Several expressed concern at what they called South Africa’s sluggish response to a health emergency that, left unchecked, could prove hugely expensive to contain and could threaten millions across sub-Saharan Africa.

The director of the government’s tuberculosis programs called those concerns unfounded and said officials were doing everything reasonable to combat the outbreak.

The form of TB, known as XDR for extensively drug-resistant, cannot be effectively treated with most first- and second-line tuberculosis drugs, and some doctors consider it incurable.

Since it was first detected last year in KwaZulu-Natal Province, bordering the Indian Ocean, additional cases have been found at 39 hospitals in South Africa’s other eight provinces. In interviews on Friday, several epidemiologists and TB experts said the disease had probably moved into Lesotho, Swaziland and Mozambique — countries that share borders and migrant work forces with South Africa — and perhaps to Zimbabwe, which sends hundreds of thousands of destitute refugees to and from South Africa each year.

But no one can say with certainty, because none of those countries have the laboratories and clinical experts necessary to diagnose and track the disease. Ominously, none have the money and skills that would be needed to contain it should it begin to spread.

Even in South Africa, where nearly 330 cases have been officially documented, evidence of the disease’s spread is mostly anecdotal, and epidemiological work needed to trace its progress is only now beginning.

“We don’t understand the extent of it, and whether it’s more widespread than anyone thinks,” Mario C. Raviglione, the director of the Stop TB Department of the World Health Organization in Geneva, said in a telephone interview. “And if we don’t know what has caused it, then we don’t know how to stop it.”

Cases of XDR TB exist elsewhere, in countries like Russia and China where inadequate treatment programs have allowed drug-resistant strains of the disease to emerge. The South African outbreak is considered far more alarming than those elsewhere, however, because it is not only far larger, but has surfaced at the center of the world’s H.I.V. pandemic.

Although one third of the world’s people, by W.H.O. estimates, are infected with dormant tuberculosis germs, the disease thrives when immune systems are weakened by H.I.V. At least two in three South African TB sufferers are H.I.V. positive. Should XDR TB gain a foothold in the H.I.V.-positive population, it could wreak havoc not only among the five million South Africans who carry the virus, but the tens of millions more throughout sub-Saharan Africa.

People without H.I.V. have a far smaller chance of contracting tuberculosis, even if they are infected with the bacillus that causes TB. But because tuberculosis is spread through the air, anyone in close contact with an active TB sufferer is at some risk of falling ill.

Most if not all of the 52 people who died in the initial outbreak of XDR TB, at the Church of Scotland Hospital in a KwaZulu-Natal hamlet called Tugela Ferry in 2005 and early 2006, had AIDS. Most died within weeks of being tested for drug-resistant tuberculosis, a mortality rate scientists called unprecedented.

Since then, South African health officials say, they have confirmed a total of 328 cases of XDR TB, all but 43 in KwaZulu-Natal. Slightly more than half the patients have died.

Those numbers are deceptive, however. The Tugela Ferry outbreak was reported in part because the hospital there was part of a Yale University research project involving H.I.V.-positive patients with tuberculosis. Because South Africa’s treatment and reporting programs for tuberculosis are notoriously poor — barely half of TB patients are cured — virtually all experts contend the true rate of infection is greater.

“We’re really concerned that there may be similar outbreaks to the one in Tugela Ferry that are currently going undetected because the patients die very quickly,” said Dr. Karin Weyer, who directs tuberculosis programs for South Africa’s Medical Research Council, a semiofficial research arm of the government.

Some other researchers and experts say they share Dr. Weyer’s concern. They say South African health officials have lagged badly in assembling the epidemiological studies, treatment programs and skilled clinicians needed to combat the outbreak, and say the government has responded slowly to international offers of help.

Dr. Weyer said the council “shares the concern that not enough is being done, quickly enough, to get on top of the problem.” In particular, she said, officials have yet to carry out epidemiological studies or address a “shocking” lack of infection controls in hospitals that could allow TB and other infections to spread freely among H.I.V.-positive patients

“It’s an emergency, and we’re not reacting as if it were an emergency,” said Dr. Nesri Padayatchi, an epidemiologist and expert on drug-resistant TB for Caprisa, a Durban-based consortium of South African and American AIDS researchers. “I think we have the financial resources to address the issue, and we’ve been told the Department of Health has allocated these resources.”

Although the government was first told of the outbreak 20 months ago, in May 2005, “to date, on the ground in clinics and hospitals, we are not seeing the effect,” she said.

In KwaZulu-Natal’s major city, Durban, the sole hospital capable of treating XDR TB patients has a waiting list of 70 such cases, she said.

Dr. Weyer said the waiting list indicates that “capacity is becoming a problem” in KwaZulu-Natal, the outbreak’s center. “I’m quite sure we may find a similar situation in other provinces,” she added.

A spokesman at the hospital said it could not easily determine how many patients were awaiting treatment.

But the manager of South Africa’s national tuberculosis program, Dr. Lindiwe Mvusi, said such complaints were misplaced. The Durban hospital in question, she said, is under renovation, and officials are “looking for accommodations in other hospitals” while construction proceeds.

Hospitals in other provinces have enough beds now for XDR TB patients, and some are expanding isolation wards to handle any spread of the disease, she said.

She said other responses to the outbreak were under way, including a rough assessment of TB cases in hospitals nationwide. A more comprehensive national survey of TB cases may be conducted late this year, she added, and health officials in KwaZulu-Natal have begun surveillance programs to detect new cases of drug-resistant TB in the province.

Dr. Mvusi also rejected the notion that the tuberculosis had moved beyond South Africa’s borders. But in interviews, a number of TB experts and epidemiologists raised that concern, including Mr. Raviglione at the world health organization, Dr. Padayatchi, Dr. Weyer and Dr. Gerald Friedland, director of the AIDS program at the Yale University School of Medicine.

Dr. Raviglione of W.H.O. said that South African health officials were cooperating on responses to the outbreak, and that an official of his organization would arrive in Pretoria within days to discuss placing a team of global TB experts in the country.

“W.H.O. is ready to come to South Africa and to help in any place, for anything, whether surveillance, or detection, or infection control,” he said. However, those arrangements have not been completed.

Dr. Mvusi, the government’s TB program head, said global health experts were welcome, but “in an advisory role, because we want the capacity locally.”

Virulent TB in South Africa May Imperil Millions, NYT, 28.1.2007, https://www.nytimes.com/2007/01/28/
world/africa/28tuberculosis.html