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RAZIL’S snap decision last month, after 10 years of deliberations, to choose the Saab Gripen jet fighter ahead of American and French competitors, is the first time a deal of this size has been done without involving superpowers or United Nations Security Council members. The deal, at the initial stage worth $4.5bn for 36 Gripen NGs, could open up the possibility for deliveries of 100 or more aircraft, and also widens access for South African defence and other technology exports, in particular among fellow Brics countries (Brazil, Russia, India, China, South Africa). The market has suddenly moved from seeing a...

We’ve known for some time that Nelson Mandela was a member of the South African Communist Party. It was hard for fawning liberals to acknowledge the meaning of his membership, so they came up with a narrative explaining it. Their story went something like this: He only briefly joined to get the benefit of their organizational talent, and his membership was rather symbolic, and hardly meaningful. What is important is his steadfast commitment to non-violence, his adherence to political democracy, and the role he played after emerging from prison in the waning days of apartheid.

South Africa's president Jacob Zuma has told how he used to practise witchcraft against white people. Speaking in his native Zulu language at a pre-election rally in the country's rural north, he told a crowd of his voodoo past. 'I used to practise witchcraft around here, bewitching the Boers during apartheid', Zuma reportedly said.

A new species of crustacean has been named in honour of Nelson Mandela. The squat lobster is related to hermit crabs and now has the Latin name Munidopsis mandelai in honour of the South African revolutionary. The sea creature was discovered in a relatively unexplored area of the Southwest Indian Ocean Ridge, off the coast of South Africa, in 2011.

CAPE TOWN, South Africa — With the death of Nelson Mandela, the political party and broad coalition he helped to bind together are coming apart at the seams. The African National Congress remains in power, holding nearly two-thirds of the seats in Parliament, but it is losing popularity even among its staunchest supporters. To many South Africans, the ANC looks less and less like a party of legendary anti-apartheid leaders and more like a grouping of crony capitalists and dispensers of patronage.

Cape Town (AFP) - The tribal royal house in South Africa of which Nelson Mandela was a member on Sunday expressed concern at "instability" in the icon's family and urged calm as his estate is settled. The AbaThembu royal family called the meeting in Qunu where Mandela was buried on December 15 and "shared their concern" amid reports of internal strife and warring over his estate. ... The meeting also backed Mandela's grandson Mandla as head of the family, dismissing as "disrespectful" his ex-wife Winnie Madikizela-Mandela's naming of his surviving daughter Makaziwe in the position.

... The point about Nelson Mandela is that he was equally willing to go along with both the Stalinist and the lizard-skin-shoe school of economic thought. When Stalinism was the fashion, he was not opposed to it. Nor did he appear to mind much when the lizard-skin-shoe brigade became predominant. He was fortunate that, due to historical circumstances, the second prevailed and prevented him from passing into history as a failed socialist despot. He would have become the latter only after the conclusion of a hideous racial war, but having been head of a guerrilla organization, he had no very...

PRETORIA, South Africa (NNPA) – President Obama and former presidents Jimmy Carter, Bill Clinton and George W. Bush flew to South Africa to pay their respects to Nelson Mandela, the country’s first democratically elected president who died on Dec. 5 at the age of 95. At the height of South Africa’s campaign against the warrior for majority rule in South Africa, the U.S. government’s behavior was far from respectful as it supported a regime that oppressed more than 90 percent of its people. Under South Africa’s rigid racial segregation system known as apartheid, Whites were only 5 to 10 percent...

The South African public broadcaster has been warned not to report on calls for Jacob Zuma to step down as president, according to campaign groups. A spokesman from the country’s Right2Know group said the interference “makes a mockery of the principle of freedom of expression”. The claim, which is denied by the South African Broadcasting Corporation, was reported by Right2Know and fellow campaign group SOS Coalition. …

Ventersdorp, South Africa — On the edge of this rural town, poor blacks have been moving into a line of new tin shacks across the road from an affluent white enclave. Now, the whites are taking action. “For Sale” signs are posted on many of their large brick houses. “The white people are running away,” said Sara Letsie, who moved into her shack two months ago. “They don’t want to be our neighbors.”

The horror stories about life in South Africa under apartheid are endless, of course, and the fall of that morally repugnant political system is universally hailed as a triumph. But two decades after the white-led government relinquished power, and especially in the afterglow of worldwide praise for the nation’s former president Nelson Mandela after his passing at age 95, an objective look at South Africa today is very disturbing. In fact, even among the harshest critics of apartheid and racial oppression, there is an acknowledgement that in many ways the “rainbow nation,” under African National Congress and South African Communist...

Benjamin Netanyahu Under Fire for Not Bowing Down to Mythical Idol Nelson Mandela By Julio Severo The mainstream international media were chocked when Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and President Shimon Peres said they would not be attending the funeral of Nelson Mandela in South Africa, citing costs and health reasons. Benjamin Netanyahu In contrast, Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas did not miss the funeral. Why so much fuss about it? Russian President Vladimir Putin decided not to attend it, and he has not received the widespread criticism Netanyahu did. For Putin, who was an active leader in the infamous...

Poor Michelle Obama. She can't even blink the wrong way without the lightning fast flash of a camera catching her every expression and turning it into the next big invisible controversy. By now you've probably seen the pictures (and memes) of FLOTUS glancing over at President Obama while he chats with Danish prime minister Helle Thorning Schmidt at Nelson Mandela's memorial service. In another widely circulated photo, Mrs. Obama is staring into the distance as the president, Thorning Schmidt and British Prime Minister David Cameron take a selfie. Moments after the photos were released #MichelleObama was trending on Twitter with...

As Nelson Mandela was being laid to rest, an opinion poll showed his political heir Jacob Zuma losing support over claims of abuse of public funds. A survey for the Sunday Times newspaper showed 51 per cent of registered voters of the ruling African National Congress (ANC) want the president to resign. The results of the survey conducted by the Ipsos market research company comes in the same week that Zuma was booed at Mandela's memorial service in Soweto. Of the 1,000 ANC voters polled in a representative survey, 33 per cent said they were less likely to vote for...

The South African reality differs from the Western lore.‘Go safely Umkhonto. Umkhonto we Sizwe. We the members of the Umkhonto have pledged ourselves to kill them — kill the whites.” These are lyrics from the anthem of Umkhonto we Sizwe, or “Spear of the Nation.” The organization is better known as the MK, the military wing of the Marxist African National Congress (ANC). The MK was established by its commander, Nelson Mandela, to prosecute a terrorist war against South Africa’s racist apartheid regime. Mandela had been out of prison for about two years in September 1992 when, fist clenched in...

The globalist, progressive propaganda campaign deifying South Africa’s Marxist revolutionary and former president Nelson Mandela should be galling and disgusting to all people of good will who love truth, real history and hate lies. The Big Lie is that yes, Mandela experimented with communism in the 1940s early in his political career at the dawn of the black struggle against the racist White Afrikaners and that he and his organization, ANC (African National Congress) only turned to armed struggle in the early 1960s once he saw the futility of overturning capitalism while seeking to establish Black majority rule in South...

Whether or not they were aware, the leaders of the Western democracies gathered in Pretoria’s stadium were inadvertently taking part in the celebration of “the people’s democracy” and not the democracy. (…) On the day of Mandela's Memorial Service in the Pretoria Stadium, the former deputy general secretary of the South African Communist Party, Solly Mapaila stated in an interview that Mandela was a member of the party but it was denied at the time for “political reasons”. Documents...

It's becoming increasingly clear that when President Obama arrived at the Nelson Mandela memorial service in Johannesburg, South Africa Tuesday, he stepped into an atmosphere so chaotic, disorganized, and unsafe that under any other circumstances the White House and Secret Service might well have insisted the president not appear. FNB Stadium, where the memorial was held, seats 95,000 people. Even with a steady rain and thousands of empty seats in uncovered areas, there were tens of thousands of people in the area with the president. It appears most of them got in without going through any security. "There were no...

Another controversy hit South Africa’s long goodbye to anti-apartheid icon Nelson Mandela on Saturday when his fellow anti-apartheid foe Desmond Tutu said he had not been accredited as a clergyman at the funeral by the government so would not attend. Mac Maharaj, a spokesman for the South African president Jacob Zuma, insisted that Tutu is on the guest list and that he hopes a solution will be found so Tutu attends. The 82-year-old retired Anglican archbishop of Cape Town indicated he felt he had been snubbed by the current government, with which he has clashed several times in the past....

The man who used jibberish sign language at Nelson Mandela’s memorial service also used incoherent hand gestures to sign a notorious anti-white song sung last year by current South African President Jacob Zuma. Thamsanqua Jantjie, 34, late said that he is schizophrenic and was hallucinating during the Mandela memorial speeches. The interpreter also admitted that he’d been prone to fits of violence in the past, an admission that was worrisome given his proximity to President Barack Obama and other world leaders. According to NBC News, Jantjie has worked two other gigs on behalf of the African National Congress (ANC), South...