The World Factbook. ShowIntroduction :: SOUTH AFRICA Panel - Collapsed Dutch traders landed at the southern tip of modern day South Africa in 1652 and established a stopover point on the spice route between the Netherlands and the Far East, founding the city of Cape Town. After the British seized the Cape of Good Hope area in 1806, many of the Dutch settlers (Afrikaners, called "Boers" (farmers) by the British) trekked north to found their own republics in lands taken from the indigenous black inhabitants. The discovery of diamonds (1867) and gold (1886) spurred wealth and immigration and intensified the subjugation of the native inhabitants. The Afrikaners resisted British encroachments but were defeated in the Second South African War (1899-1902); however, the British and the Afrikaners, ruled together beginning in 1910 under the Union of South Africa, which became a republic in 1961 after a whites-only referendum.
South Africa. Skip to main content World Malaria 2014 Access Search Advanced search Navigation Language عربي 中文 English Français Русский Español Countries South Africa Map This map is an approximation of actual country borders. Statistics Contact information The WHO Representative Barber, Dr Sarah Louise PO Box 13113 Tramshed 0126 - Pretoria, South Africa Telephone: +27 12 3057709 Facsimile: +27 12 3057729 afwcozawr@who.int Country Office web site Regional Office web site Health profile WHO collaboration Mortality and burden of disease Nutrition Risk factors Features South Africa: Vusi 5 December 2008 News Bulletin articles You are here: Quick Links Sitemap Help and Services WHO Regional Offices loading.
"South African Courts at Risk" by Mamphela Ramphele and Zohra Dawood. Exit from comment view mode. Click to hide this space PRETORIA – South Africa’s courts can be impressive – as demonstrated by Pretoria High Court Judge Hans Fabricius’s recent ruling that the country’s prosecutors must act against known torturers from Zimbabwe. But those same courts are under threat from an appointment process in which politics and apathy are increasingly determining who sits on them. This problem is especially apparent in the struggle to prepare a short list of suitable applicants for a vacancy on the Constitutional Court – a position that was once considered one of the best jobs in the South African legal profession.
It is difficult to find qualified judges, and once found, they frequently do not want to be considered. The problem partly reflects a lack of consensus about the criteria that a judicial candidate must satisfy. The politicized nature of the appointment process has resulted in civic apathy: excellent candidates are refusing nomination. News Desk: Black Tuesday in South Africa. South Africa, which many still see as a role model for young democracies—it has one of the most liberal constitutions in the world—just sent a strong message to the rest of the young (and even old) democracies on the continent: get tough with anybody going public with state secrets. In fact, the South African government wants to get so tough that anybody caught doing so could face up to twenty-five years in jail. That harsh penalty is contained in a bill that the National Assembly approved today by a vote of 229 to 107, with two abstentions.
It is officially titled the Protection of State Information Bill, but is widely referred to as the Secrecy Bill. Its opponents include just about every media house in the country; unions whose members were terrorized over their reporting of local government corruption; and most civil-society organizations. Unless, that is, the not-so-secret hope that many hold in South Africa is realized. One more step has to be taken before the bill becomes law.
"Information Apartheid" by Zohra Dawood. Exit from comment view mode. Click to hide this space CAPE TOWN – Accurate information is the oxygen that keeps democracy breathing. It is the key to ensuring a government’s probity, and to monitoring its relations with the large corporations that drive modern economies. Without accurate information, a country’s citizens are at the mercy of whatever potentially corrupt group happens to be controlling public agencies and making and enforcing the law. Millions of South Africans suffered the consequences of a lack of information – and considerable disinformation – during the secretive apartheid era. Now, however, the right to information in South Africa is in jeopardy. Fortunately, the proposed secrecy bill has not yet been enacted. Of course, even liberal democracies must safeguard some information in order to protect their citizens.
But the bill would also give the security agencies extensive powers to control the information flow between the government and citizens. South Africa: The New Threat to Freedom by Nadine Gordimer. Let the truth be told. By Nadine Gordimer / 16 March, 2012 Writer, activist and Nobel Prize literature prize winner Nadine Gordimer warns that new legislation will return South Africa to apartheid-era limits on free speech Under Apartheid The regime of racism was maintained not alone by brutality — guns, violence, restrictive laws. It was upheld by elaborately extensive silencing of freedom of expression. The Suppression of Communism Act, 1950, had definitions of Communism which were vast. What was forbidden included promotion of industrial, political, economic and social change. In 1982 the Act became the Internal Security Act, which banned the African National Congress and Pan African Congress along with the South African Communist Party and retained almost all these other definitions of what was forbidden.
The Publications and Entertainments Act banned thousands of newspapers and books in South Africa from 1950 to 1990 — 40 years. Freed of Apartheid The right to know. We must be free to mock Jacob Zuma | Sharmini Brookes. The defacing of Cape Town artist Brett Murray’s controversial portrait of South African president Jacob Zuma has fuelled an intense debate in SA about art and offensiveness. Murray’s portrait showed Zuma in an iconographic Lenin-style pose, fully clothed apart from his penis, which is protruding from his zipper.
The painting is called ‘The Spear of the Nation’. It is a stylised cartoon in red and black and is meant to satirise political power. Murray says he wanted to make a point about how the leadership of the African National Congress, of which Zuma is president, had betrayed its Communist ideology. The Goodman Gallery in Johannesburg, which curated the Brett Murray exhibition and Zuma portrait, normally finds it hard to persuade the South African public to enter its portals. Barend La Grand, one of the (white) defacers of the painting, said that prior to the ANC statement and court action, he had had no problem with the painting. Article continues after advertisement. The Real Legacy of Nelson Mandela.
A hundred years since birth, but what has happened to the ANC? – By Richard Dowden. It produced one of the greatest leaders of the 20th century. It fought a violent race-based dictatorship and replaced it with the most liberal constitution the world has ever known. Its song, a poignant Christian hymn, became South Africa’s national anthem. Since it came to power in 1994, about two thirds of South Africans vote for it. So whatever happened to South Africa’s African National Congress? The success or failure of the new South Africa has been a race between the expectations and aspirations of a young and growing population and the ability of the government to deliver jobs and services. South Africans have been patient but their ANC government is losing that race. The population, now estimated at about 50 million, has grown by 10 percent since 1994 when the ANC came to power.
A hundred years old on January 8th, the ANC is South Africa’s oldest political organisation, beating the National Party (which instigated apartheid) by two years.