A white South African who had overstayed his work visa in Canada, applied for refugee status on the grounds that should he return to South Africa, black South Africans would “persecute” him.
He was granted refugee status by an immigration board tribunal in Ottawa last week.
More pictures and short interview with the Cape Town-based photographer at Mahala.co.za
The latest statistics (they get updated once a month) from the Energy Information Administration, “the official energy statistics” of the United States government. Nigeria (769,000 barrels a day) and Angola (400,000 barrels a day) are the fifth and largest crude oil exporters to the United States. (Nigeria is also the fifth largest, Algeria the seventh and Angola the eight largest petroleum exporter to the United States).
You win a prize of you still believe Hillary Clinton went to Nigeria and Angola to talk about democracy.
The death by suicide of 22- year-old S’khumbuzo Douglas Mhlongo on Friday is an extreme example of how some of our laws and regulations may be adding unnecessary burdens to the lives of the poor.
[South Africa] has laws and regulations on its books that place the country on par with some of the developed nations. However, most of them are in practice out of sync with the circumstances of the poor, and just make it that much more difficult for the poor to make a living.
Mhlongo, a part-time employee at a pet food factory, was offered a full-time position which he could only take up once he got his identity document. He applied at the Department of Home Affairs office in Pinetown, where officials sent him from pillar to post.
Mhlongo had already borrowed heavily to finance his living expenses and to make trips to the home affairs offices, expecting no doubt that he would repay the money once he got the job. Bad mistake, you might say, but what options did Mhlongo have?
When one official tore up his application because he was not convinced that he was indeed a South African citizen, Mhlongo reportedly committed suicide.
Jendayi Frazer, who was George W Bush’s assistant secretary of state for African affairs from 2005-2009, has an opinion piece in the Wall Street Journal, going on about “four things” the Obama Administration can do to help Africa. Two of her proposals are non-controversial: put Eritrea on a terrorist watch-list (the Eritrean Embassy in Washington DC has already a letter to the paper) and singling out African countries for trade preferences. The third suggest a summit in Washington between the presidents of Uganda, the DRC and Rwanda. But it is the fourth by Frazer, who hardly served with distinction on the continent, that might get people talking:
These celebrities want to gamble and hang out. So they say they want to save Africans.
Ted Kennedy passed away last week. Around here the emphasis has been on his domestic legacy (Civil Rights, disability rights, health care reform), but as blogger Texas in Africa (her blog is worth visiting for US debates on development politics) reminds us, that like his older brother, the Senator also played a public role in African liberation:
A Ugandan newspaper’s critical caricature of President Yoweri Museveni led police to interrogate three journalists today on allegations of sedition, according to a defense attorney and local journalists.
[Read more...]
The work of Adam Patterson who photographed young gang members in South London, some them the children of African immigrants.
