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Mozambique’s government has sought to play down reports of widespread violence. But the number of refugees who’ve fled and the conditions in which they’ve done so, tell a different story.
“People left everything behind, they were weak, there were unaccompanied children…” said Dorothy Kachitsa, UNHCR Malawi
The United Nations Human Rights Office and other groups have documented refugees’ testimonies, in which they accuse both sides of atrocities, including sexual abuse and summary executions. Many here say they can’t envisage going back home.
@cctvnewsafrica Watch @ClemLogan bring you the story of Mozambique refugees in Malawi on #AfricaLive at 1000GMT
Borders and border crossing are, of course, not just problematic in southern Africa. Across the globe, refugees and economic migrants are subjects of intense political dispute. South Africa is at the forefront of regional efforts to regularise rather than demonise migrants through this arrangement with Lesotho, a similar effort to legalising Zimbabweans who fled in large numbers to South Africa after the economic and political collapse of the country of the mid-2000s.
Botswana has seen its economy ravaged by heavy droughts that have ploughed through the region over the last eight months. And while the disaster has seen taps run dry in its capital, Gaborone, nowhere is the driest season in over 30 years more evident than in the Okavango Delta, a UNESCO World Heritage site, where, as a result, tourism has withered.
In March, the World Food Programme warned that almost 16 million people were already food insecure in southern Africa. Last week, this figure was raised to 31.6 million by the Southern Africa Food and Nutrition Security Working Group (pdf). One of the strongest El Niño weather events ever recorded is partly to blame: the UN has warned that its severity has “overwhelmed” many countries. It has caused severe droughts and floods in southern Africa, and hunger crises elsewhere.
South Africa, traditionally a regional breadbasket, is just recovering from what it described as its worst drought in about 30 years, receiving the lowest rainfall in 2015 since recording began in 1904. Mozambique has raised alert levels for central and southern regions.
Last week in Malawi, which is facing its most severe food crisis in a decade, president Peter Mutharika declared a state of national disaster. Almost half of Malawian children under five are malnourished.
Zambia : Declared Most Peaceful Country In Africa
Climate models project that, given the current rate of carbon dioxide emissions into the atmosphere, and some unique features of South Africa’s climate system, like our location in the subtropics and the important role that high pressure systems play in controlling the system, temperatures in southern Africa are likely to increase by at least 1.5 times the global average rate of temperature increase.
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CLOSE to 29 million people in southern Africa are already facing food shortages as a result of this season’s poor harvest, but worse could be on the way.
“Serious concerns are mounting that Southern Africa will this coming season face another poor harvest, possibly a disastrous one,” the UN’s aid coordinating agency, OCHA, warned in a recent report.
A drought-inducing El Niño – perhaps the strongest ever recorded – is already underway. Floods are expected to hit the region early next year, and there is a 65% chance of a cyclone slamming into the island of Madagascar.
This year, Southern Africa’s cereal harvest fell by almost a quarter, down to 34 million tonnes. Major food shortages are affecting Malawi, Zimbabwe, South Africa and Madagascar.
In Lesotho and Namibia, whose populations are tiny, 30% of rural people are classified as “food insecure,” which essentially means they lack access to food that’s sufficient to lead healthy, active lives.
After the previous year’s good harvest, “The crisis has been to an extent mitigated by the region’s grain reserves, but they are now largely exhausted,” OCHA humanitarian officer Yolanda Cowan told IRIN.
Online Exhibition: (Not) Remembering Namibia
South Africa had a long and frequently traumatic colonial relationship with Namibia, but this seems little remembered in contemporary South Africa. Namibia became a South African protectorate after World War I, and subsequently apartheid’s ‘fifth province’, winning its Independence only in 1990, after a cruel and highly censored war that lasted more than 20 years.
(Not) Remembering Namibia, curated by Julie Taylor, draws on the photographic archive and considers its role in remembering, not remembering, and reconfiguring historical moments, in individual and collective narratives and silences. (Not) Remembering Namibia is part of the Guns & Rain culture spot that offers contemporary fine art online by emerging artists from Africa.
Photographs are the ongoing sites of social encounters, in which archivists, historians and curators are implicated. This online exhibition explores the ways in which archival and documentary photographs have been appropriated by contemporary artists (John Muafangejo, Christo Doherty and Erik Schnack) to ask fresh questions and build new layers of meaning around these images.
This exhibition is also part of a collectively curated group exhibition by postgraduate students in the Wits History of Art programme. The full set of curating projects can be found at http://hartcurating.wits.ac.za.
South African filmmaker Resad Desai has won an International Emmy Award in the category of Best Documentary for Miners Shot Down.
The film charts the chronology of events leading up to the Marikana massacre in August 2012, which saw mineworkers in one of South Africa’s largest platinum mines striking for better wages. 6 days into the strike the police used live ammunition to suppress the group, killing 34 and injuring 78. By exploring the ordeal through the eyes of the miners, the film provides a drastically different narrative to the one authorities have put forward.
Estimates suggest that violence against women costs South Africa a minimum of R28.4 billion each year. This figure includes health, justice and other service costs as well as lost earnings, revenue and taxes. There are also second generation costs: children witness and live with violence, and this results in increased juvenile and adult crime.
A decade ago evidence showed that young women between the ages of 16 and 23 who have partners three or more years older than them are 1.5 times more likely to experience violence in their relationships.
There’s been no measurable improvement in the situation since then. Why does South Africa appear to hate its women so much?
About 3 million of Zimbabwe’s 13 million people have left the country in the past 15 years as policies pursued by President Robert Mugabe’s government have driven much of the southern African nation to ruin. The money they send to those left behind is playing an ever-increasing role in shoring up an economy plagued by deflation and a jobless rate estimated at 95% by the National Association of Non-Governmental Organisations.
Zimbabweans living abroad are expected to send home $2 billion this year, up from $1.8 billion last year, central bank Governor John Mangudya said Aug. 29.
Remittances equated to about 13% of gross domestic product in 2014, outstripping all export income besides minerals, which the Chamber of Mines says earned the country $1.85 billion.
#DownwithXenophobia!
A heated debate has erupted on Twitter after Destiny magazine featured University of Witwatersrand SRC leader Nompendulo “Ulo” Mkatshwa in its December issue.
While some celebrated Mkatshwa others accused her of hogging the spotlight and that she was not the face of the #FeesMustFall campaign. For two weeks in October, thousands of students from various tertiary institutions around South Africa protested against a proposed 10% fee increase.The protests ended when government stepped in and decided there would be no fee increases.
Raised in Libson, Francisco has been living and teaching in Luanda, the capital of Angola, for the past three years, and these works relate heavily to his experience in Africa.“There’s a very survivalist approach to life in Luanda, even though the war ended 13 years ago,” explains Francisco: “Everything is growing steadily and society is pulling together; I had to learn from the kids I taught. They had grown up there who knew how to do things themselves to survive and create.”The civil war altered the cultural discourse of one of Africa’s most mineral-rich nations, and littered its fields and towns with mines that are still being cleared up today. In an extraordinary approach to rehabilitation, the country has pushed its cultural fringes to the world stage, Angola being the first sub-Saharan nation to win the Golden Lion at the Venice Biennale in 2013. The country has since been represented at the Venice Architecture Biennale, the Milan Triennial and this year’s Venice Art Biennale, where Francisco was one of three artists chosen to represent his nation.
