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Africa :: What's the best tour company for visiting the pyramids? What kind of clothing should be packed for a safari? What's there to see in Marrakech? Is development encroaching on the Kalahari? What's life like in Nigeria? Here is the place to discuss issues of interest to Africans, and inquire about tourist destinations in Africa. Ask us a Question!
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| SA: Human excrement delays trains |
Posted by Pamela Rosa on March, 12. :: 1 Comment
How difficult is to dig pit-latrine and building a shelter from sticks around it ?
It seems that for some homo sapiens the technologically complicated design is beyond grasp.
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Human excrement delays trains
Babalo Ndenze
March 11 2008 at 12:37PM
Human excrement and illegal electrical connections running beneath railway tracks in Metrorail's Central Line, are causing major train delays and malfunctions, says Metrorail's regional executive after visiting stations there.
Nyanga station, its surrounds and the stretch of railway between Nolungile and Nonkqubela stations in Khayelitsha came under the spotlight for encroachments on to the railway tracks by people living in informal settlements.
According to Metrorail's Blits publication, residents are forced to dump their excrement on to the railway line, due to the lack of amenities in informal settlements.
"As a result of the waste seeping into the ballast stone supporting the tracks, insufficient power is generated to operate trains.
"Trains either have to slow down at the section, or worse, are prevented from travelling across these tracks in some instances.
"The acid waste, over time, corrodes the track metal and causes further service interruptions as electrical components malfunction," it read.
Metrorail said the communities on one side of the railway line were serviced by Eskom, but those on the other side had no service, and as a result they made illegal connections through railway tracks to get electricity.
"This is especially dangerous as wires are unprotected, insecure and laid through wet waste. The unsavoury conditions pose a health risk to the public and to Metrorail employees.
"Operations and maintenance staff are particularly affected. Authorities are concerned for communities. Young children and toddlers especially are vulnerable, living in the settlement."
Metrorail spokesperson Riana Scott said its executive would make a follow-up visit to the affected sites on Saturday.
"The medium-term plan is to clear the area up. There are contractors on site but until they get relocated they are being asked to put the waste elsewhere," said Scott.
She said the long-term solution would be to move all the residents, with the help of the city, to a fully serviced site.
"But in the interim, the solution is to keep the areas clean."
Trains will be closely monitored in the affected areas until the communities are formally relocated. |
http://www.iol.co.za/index.php?set_id=1&click_id=181&art_id=vn20080311055052610C293756
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| Blacks need White Farm Land |
Posted by Pamela Rosa on March, 08. :: 3 Comments
http://www.africancrisis.co.za/Article.php?ID=23831&
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South Africa: The Big Lie that Blacks need White Farm Land - They got it 33 years ago!!
Date Posted: Friday 07-Mar-2008
When I visited Richard's family in the Eastern Cape a few days ago, I once more travelled through the former Apartheid Homeland of the Transkei. You will recall the world had no actual interest when the Whites were giving the blacks their tribal land back. They created what were called the "TBVC" states. These were: Transkei, Bophuthatswana, Venda and Ciskei. Some of these were recognised by the Apartheid Govt as 100% bona fide independent countries. They had their own constitution, parliament, leaders, army, Police, etc.
The Blacks whine indefinitely about "land, land, land". But you know South Africa is the last place in Africa where the blacks have any possible reason to whine about SELF RULE and LAND, because South Africa actually did both these things long ago, and back then the blacks proved what failures they were.
When Cecil John Rhodes was the Premier of the Cape a century ago he already experimented with black self rule then. The Apartheid Govt experimented with black self-rule on an even bigger scale over 30 years ago.
The Eastern Cape is South Africa's second largest province and it is probably one of the most populous too. This is where both Presidents Nelson Mandela and Thabo Mbeki come from. Well, I need to show you photos of this place, because I have a lot to tell you all about the Eastern Cape.
(Oh and the Eastern Cape is the last place the Blacks of South Africa colonised when they first came here. It was on the borders of the Eastern Cape that the northward advancing Whites met the Blacks for the first time - by the Great Fish river).
You'll hear a lot of complete HOGWASH about Blacks getting the worst land and the Whites getting the best land. Nowhere in Africa is this lie more easily exposed than in South Africa itself. And I will prove it to you. It amazes me that nobody has pointed this out before.
But here is a little titbit for starters.
When I visited Richard's family when Richard was still alive, members of the family told me that they had owned farms which the Apartheid Govt had bought from them in the 1980's. That land was bought by the White Govt and given to the Transkei - for blacks only. The whites had to move to let the blacks resettle on it.
Recently, another Afrikaans lady I met told me that in 1975 she was in the Eastern Cape. She told me that the White Apartheid Govt bought out, hundreds, if not thousands of white farms in order to create the Transkei for blacks only. She said that within a short time, the white farms fell into disrepair when the blacks got them. The white farmers were very bitter because the blacks got the best land.
Now I've been to those areas, and I've seen where whites farmed since then. In the Ugie area where Whites moved to, the land is rocky and mountainous. You can't farm. You can only let cattle graze there. But in the Transkei, the blacks got the most beautiful land imaginable. It was the Whites who were thrown off the lush land by the WHITE GOVERNMENT in order to give this land FOR FREE to Blacks - who then proceeded to do bugger all with it.
When the Blacks were settled on these VAST PIECES OF LAND... most of them did not even use it for farming. In fact, some of the blacks even STOPPED the subsistence farming they were doing because it was easier to buy food from the shops! If you travel all across the former Transkei, you will see blacks living everywhere on a marvellous piece of land that receives lots of rain. But the blacks do virtually no farming EVEN THOUGH BY LAW THEY DO NOT HAVE TO BUY LAND. THEY CAN SIMPLY RUN CATTLE OR GROW CROPS ANYWHERE THEY PLEASE!
Every time I go through the Transkei I marvel. Being a farm boy myself, and having ploughed for my father, I have some idea of what is a nice place to farm.
I was telling this Afrikaans lady that in Rhodesia (Zimbabwe), the soil is not particularly good. There were lots of trees and vegetation that one had to clear. Then there were lots of rocks. But that is where whites farmed and created one of the breadbaskets of Africa.
Now in the Eastern Cape, the whole country-side looks like one vast lawn as far as the eye can see. There is plenty of rainfall. And the blacks do bugger all farming.
The ANC now wants to take 30% of white farmland by 2014.
But nobody mentions that 30 years ago, the Apartheid Govt bought out hundreds, if not thousands of white farmers in order to create vast territories that blacks can live on.
We also need to establish the actual SIZE of these countries that were created, because I think when people see how BIG these countries were they will be shocked. I'm sure many of those states that were created by the Apartheid Govt were BIGGER THAN MANY COUNTRIES IN EUROPE!!!
Aparently the man who heads the Free Market Foundation in South Africa gave a speech some years ago. In it he pointed out that he had done a study. The study showed that the Govt, the railways and other parastatals (like Eskom), own so much land that there is more than enough land to resettle the blacks on WITHOUT TAKING AWAY ONE SINGLE WHITE-OWNED FARM!
The studies of economists, and the views of intellectuals in this country, which completely disprove the ANC's lies are completely ignored by the Govt. The Govt has a path, and it uses its dishonest "logic" to justify its actions. This is exactly what I warned about in my book. In Government by Deception, I questioned this logic and the reasoning. I pointed out that these lies are just a smokescreen to hide their real intentions. Their real intentions are anti-white and anti-Western, etc.
If the Blacks are so keen to farm, and we've seen in Zimbabwe that they don't really care despite all Mugabe's propaganda to the contrary. What about experiments like the Transkei, where they got beautiful, lush farms in probably some of the best farmland in all of South Africa - 33 years ago! Why aren't the blacks farming there? If they're so interested in farming, then why aren't they doing any of it in the Transkei?
When the black leaders scream about "land! land!" they're talking complete rubbish - just like Mugabe. Its not about land! It is about getting rid of whites. Once the whites are gone the blacks will do absolutely nothing with the land. At best, they might settle on it. But the call to "farm" is complete junk. Its all just motivated by communism and their hatred of Land Owners. They want the White farmers gone.
I will revisit this issue, but this time with photo and film footage for you to see. Then you compare the beautiful, lush farmland the blacks got, with the virtual desert of the Karoo where only White farmers farm. In South Africa it is White Farmers who farmed in the DESERT and the Blacks got some of the finest land in the country and went on to do - absolutely nothing with it!! They did nothing with it then, and they're still doing nothing with it now.
Finally, in these homelands, the Blacks did not BUY LAND. Land was communal (like it was before Whites came). Blacks had no conception of buying and owning land until Whites arrived in Africa. (That would explain why blacks sold land to whites to begin with because they just never conceived that land actually had any VALUE!) But I want to ask you a question: Show me any place ON PLANET EARTH, where people got FREE LAND FOR FARMING AS MUCH AS YOU WANT - and where they did nothing with it. Well, that is what happened in the Transkei and other Black Homelands.
Posted By: Jan
AfricanCrisis Webmaster
Author of: Government by Deception |
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| Notes from Africa |
Posted by dagmaraka on March, 08. :: 11 Comments
A friend of mine is in Rwanda for half a year. She's a brilliant writer and she blogs from there. Not sure if i can link to her blog, i presume not, but I thought i'd share some of her writing here every now and then, as it's always a good read.
DECODING THE NEWS
Posted: 07 Mar 2008 02:05 AM CST
Jina Moore
Here’s an article from Agence France Press, which is like the A.P. or Reuters–those big news organizations that cover the world in “traditional journalism style.” You’ll recognize it; it’s that thing Jon Stewart mocks so brilliantly. The article is short, but I made it shorter, so I can get to the point:
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BUJUMBURA (AFP) — Some 600,000 Burundians are suffering from food shortages and need emergency aid, the World Food Programme’s director in the small central African nation said Thursday.
“At preset, we need 60 million dollars to alleviate the suffering of around 600,000 people who are hungry, who are the most vulnerable among the vulnerable,” Jean-Charles Dei said…..
“In 2008, we expect a shortfall of 486,000 tons of food goods in spite of a two-percent increase in harvests compared to the previous year,” Dei said.
He said that 46 percent of the country’s 8.1 million people suffered from chronic malnutrition, explaining that Burundi was self-sufficient in 1993 but that the population had since grown by 33 percent while production stagnated….
Burundi, ranked the world’s third poorest country by the World Bank, is struggling to emerge from a civil war that broke out in 1993 and has cost some 300,000 lives, mostly civilian. |
Are you asleep yet?
This article shocked me, actually. What’s this person, whoever he or she is who wrote it, really saying? In news journalism, the last thing you write is supposed to be the “most expendable.” An editor should be able to look at your story and if it doesn’t fit in the space, he starts cutting paragraphs, from the bottom up. But in order to understand what this person is really saying, I have to start from the bottom of his article and work my way to the top. That, already, is an indictment, of the article and the model it is based on.
In 1993, the third in a history of ethnic massacres broke out in Burundi. It’s an unrecognized genocide, one which shares some of the dimensions of but was somehow eclipsed by Rwanda’s own genocide in 1994. Strangers killed strangers; neighbors killed neighbors, and at the end of it all, three hundred thousand people had died, whole families were destroyed, and probably some, as in Rwanda, still haven’t received proper burial. The country’s infrastructure–roads, agriculture, electricity, to say nothing of banks and business–still hasn’t recovered; even if it had, generations of talented Burundians aren’t alive any more, and 15 short years aren’t quite enough to train those who do remain or who have returned to make a country function.
Since then, the country has slowly been negotiating peace, formally and informally: You can have all the agreements you want, but peace is negotiated every day by the people who live in your country.
As you can probably guess, any history of massacres also means a history of refugees. Even before 1993, hundreds of thousands of Burundians were living in refugee camps in Tanzania, Kenya, Rwanda, Congo. As Burundi became stable, they returned home–sometimes because they wanted to, sometimes because their “hosts” wanted them to leave. So now Burundi’s population is soaring. So are land conflicts: if I fled from my family home during the second massacres in 1972, and you’ve been living there since, who owns the house? Does our instinctual answer to that question change if we find out that you, who have been living there, chased we who fled away with a machete? How can we both eat, in a country where people have for generations grown their own food, and where the opportunity to grow food comes only with the right to land, which comes through the family?
And so… “Some 600,000 Burundians are suffering from food shortages and need emergency aid….Burundi was self-sufficient in 1993 but that the population had since grown by 33 percent while production stagnated.”
This is voice for the voiceless?
We say we want to solve problems. How can we solve problems if the very language we use to describe them fails to tell us what they really are? This is not just a problem of journalists. Download a Security Council resolution or a State Department report. Pick up a program report from USAID or CARE, two big players in international aid: This is also a problem of diplomats, and it’s a problem of development workers. In the course of our professional duties to be objective, or to be scientific, or to be both, we use language to cut out of our jobs the very people we are supposed to be helping. The problem is, we in those professions also profess to be advocating for them.
There is a way to be fair, to be objective, to be clear-headed, to be independent, while also acknowledging the humanity of the people you are working with, the nuance of the context you are working in.
So next time you are writing a world news article, or using a log frame, or advising your boss about policy options, stop for a second and read out loud what you have in your hands. Can you hear anything human in it?
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