Barely hours after Finance Minister Nhlanhla Nene was sacked by President Jacob Zuma Wednesday night, the rand plummeted to an all-time low and social media started going crazy asking for Zuma’s head. Today #ZumaMustFall is still trending like crazy. The tweets range from the outraged (in by far the majority) to those calling for immediate […]

More than three-quarters of South Africans faced with having to pay a bribe pay it, according to a new survey, and almost half of all bribery takes place in Limpopo. The South African Citizens’ Bribery Survey 2015 was released this week by the Ethics Institute of South Africa. Of the 6,380 people surveyed, 26 percent […]

On a day Tanzania would normally be celebrating its independence, its newly elected president wasn’t attending any fancy celebrations. He was out cleaning up the streets of the city. On Wednesday, John Magufuli – who was elected five weeks ago and inspired the hashtag movement #WhatWouldMagufuliDo because of his no-nonsense, clean-up-the-government, anti-corruption attitude –  was outside State House in Dar […]

PRETORIA – The Minister of Finance Nhlanhla Nene has been replaced by President Jacob Zuma, the presidency has announced. The markets reacted quickly. The statement by the presidency said that Nene would be replaced by member of parliament David van Rooyen, who serves as a whip of the standing committee on finance and as whip of […]

Chances are getting stronger that South Africa’s Deputy President Cyril Ramaphosa will be the next leader of the country, says powerful US financial news agency Bloomberg. In a story today titled “Once Militant, Now Millionaire. Next Up: South Africa President?” journalists Michael Cohen and Amogelang Mbatha write that Ramaphosa is the only serving politician in South Africa who has led both a […]

Madiba could be closing down. The first totally South African restaurant in New York, it opened 17 years ago in an area – Fort Greene, Brooklyn – that was way off of everyone’s map. And for a long time it did very well. Any South African in New York was invariably asked, “Have you been […]

Anglo American will cut its work force by two-thirds, the mining giant said on Tuesday, a move that is seen to reflect China’s diminishing appetite for commodities, according to news reports. As part of Anglo’s restructuring, its diamonds business will be run by its De Beers subsidiary, its platinum and base metals operations will come under Industrial […]

On Tuesday two local tribesmen were charged in the Chief Magistrates Court in Kenya for poisoning an unknown number of lions that belonged to the well-known Marsh Pride made famous on the TV show “Big Cat Diary” and which in turn helped make the Masai Mara famous. This is the first case that has been […]

PRETORIA (Reuters) – A South African court on Tuesday granted bail to paralympian Oscar Pistorius after he was convicted of murder for killing his girlfriend Reeva Steenkamp on Valentine’s Day 2013, with the judge saying the athlete did not pose a flight risk. The Supreme Court last Thursday upgraded the 29-year-old athlete’s sentence to murder […]

PARIS – During the climate summit COP21 last week, 10 African countries announced their commitment to a plan to reforest huge tracts of the continent over the next 15 years. The announcement was made during the Global Landscapes Forum at the Conference of Parties (COP21). AFR100, the African Forest Landscape Restoration Initiative, is a pan-African, country-led effort to restore 100 […]

After having worked for years in Africa, I have come to believe it is one of the places in which the world of tomorrow is being incubated. Most of the stereotypes I had in mind 13 years ago when I began travelling across the continent proved to be wrong. What I discovered is that Africa […]

Twin brothers from Khayelitsha township in Cape Town have surmounted considerable odds over the years, and this week they will do it again by both graduating as doctors from Stellenbosch University. And their message: Believe in yourself. Wandile and Wanele Ganya grew up in J-Section of Khayelitsha, the sons of a domestic worker, Sylvia, who […]

The gorgeous exhibition of the Natural History Museum’s 51st Wildlife Photographers of the Year (WPY) has reached Cape Town, and includes the works of several South Africans among the winners. Its opening was attended by HRH Prince Harry during his visit to the country. The WPY says it champions ethical photography, where images are chosen for their […]

As holiday makers descend on Cape Town, the choice is to be quickly identified as an out-of-towner – whether it is by wearing khaki shorts and sensible shoes or holding a camera – or to fit in and act like a local. For anyone choosing the latter, here’s a handy guide to being a Capetonian. Dislike Johannesburg […]

Justice Malala’s book, “We Have Now Begun Our Descent: How to Stop South Africa Losing its Way”, does a number of things well. It reclaims the space for a particular kind of conversation among successful but ordinary South Africans – those who are not radical or particularly steeped in the eloquent and sometimes exclusionary new […]

Johannesburg and Cape Town won two of 10 environmental leadership awards during a ceremony that took place at the same time as the COP21 summit in Paris last week for their efforts to tackle climate change. The awards were given by C40 Cities, a network of the world’s megacities committed to addressing climate change. The C40 Cities Climate […]

High tea – that sumptuous invention credited to the Duchess of Bedford to quell the pangs of hunger between lunch and dinner – is still part of the culture at a range of hotels in Cape Town. So settle back and raise your pinkie as you enjoy the savoury and sweet treats found at some of the best high tea spreads […]

Whether you call it shweshwe, shoeshoe or isishweshwe, the indigo cloth or Germanic print that has been a part of life in Southern Africa since missionaries gave some to Lesotho’s King Moshoeshoe I is probably trendier now that it’s ever been. Many young designers are tapping into the designs and motifs used for shweshwe cloth for postmodern inspiration. […]

Everything from unidentified flying objects over Durban’s UFO-like stadium to women taking to the roads of Cape Town – to fix them, no less – to reminiscences about walking the famed “camino” trail across northern Spain, those are a few stories you might not have seen this week. 1. Good grief, green light a UFO? The […]

It started with one picture of shoes lined up against a wall, posted on Facebook by Fish Hoek High School in Cape Town, and another two pictures of students walking away from them shoeless. And it quickly grew into a storm of good news across the country. “As our Matric class of 2015 finish writing […]

Jenny Crwys-Williams, the well-known talk show host, was driving home in Johannesburg this week when she saw something that took her totally by surprise… “How fabulous is this?” Crwys-Williams wrote on Facebook. “Driving through Craighall Park I thought I saw a scarecrow. So I turned round, parked & walked down the road and sure enough, it […]

BLOEMFONTEIN – A full panel of five judges of the Supreme Court of Appeal of South Africa has found Oscar Pistorius guilty of murder of his girlfriend Reeva Steenkamp, saying that the lower court erred in its decision of culpable homicide. The ruling was read on Thursday by Supreme Court of Appeal Judge Eric Leach. He […]

PRETORIA – During the visit of Chinese President Xi Jinping to South Africa for the China-Africa summit this week, the two countries signed 26 agreements worth R94 billion ($6.5 billion) on Wednesday, the South African government announced. Xi arrived in South Africa on Wednesday from Zimbabwe, ahead of the Forum on China-Africa Cooperation (FOCAC) summit in […]

Almost 60 percent of Africans believe that corruption in their countries has increased over the past year, although in South Africa this figure is 83 percent, according to a new survey released on Tuesday. According to Transparency International’s Global Corruption Barometer for 2015, done together with Afrobarometer, it spoke to 43,143 respondents across 28 countries […]

South Africa has made incredible strides providing anti-retroviral treatment to millions of people since 2004. HIV has been transformed from a grim and inexorable death to a chronic disease controlled with a cheap, safe tablet-a-day, rendering a person with HIV healthy and non-infectious. Treatment is freely available at primary care clinics, administered largely through nurses. […]