Free Republic

For someone who is in love and recently married, a wedge of “very odd pain” is lodged in Mpho Tutu van Furth’s heart. It is caused by the South African Anglican church’s refusal to allow the daughter of one of the world’s best known Christian leaders to continue to work as a priest after she married the person with whom she has pledged to share the rest of her life: a woman. “It was hard for me to give up my [priest’s] licence, it felt incredibly sad,” Tutu van Furth – whose father, Desmond Tutu, won the Nobel peace prize...

A white South African waitress who was refused a tip by an Oxford student involved in the Rhodes Must Fall campaign has received more than $6,000 in "sympathy" tips after an online campaign on her behalf. Cape Town restaurant employee Ashleigh Shultz was allegedly told by activist Ntokozo Qwabe that he would not give her any service charge on his bill until her "fellow white people" returned South Africa's land to its black population. In an encounter that he described on Facebook, Mr Qwabe gleefully recounted that Ms Shultz had "burst into typical white tears", adding that he was "unable...

THE good Samaritans who took onto their farm over 100 refugees displaced by this year’s xenophobic violence, now claim they have been threatened with murder by the same people they had set out to help. Besides property being destroyed, the ­family who took in the immigrants have also been accused of not helping them to be ­relocated back home or to another country, driving a chasm between them. Owners of Hope Farm in Cato Ridge, ­Andrew and Rae Wartnaby, were yesterday forced to evacuate their 10 children from their farm house in fear that they would be attacked or used...

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2010/jan/13/cape-town-giant-shark-attack Witnesses have described their horror at seeing a tourist being eaten by a "gigantic" shark in South Africa's most popular holiday destination. Lloyd Skinner was pulled under the surf and dragged out to sea by the shark, believed to be a great white, off Fish Hoek beach in Cape Town. His diving goggles and a dark patch of blood were all that remained in the water. "Holy shit. We just saw a gigantic shark eat what looked like a person in front of our house," witness Gregg Coppen posted on Twitter. "That shark was huge. Like dinosaur huge." The...

A bronze bust of British colonialist Cecil John Rhodes has lost its nose to vandals who severed it with a power tool at a South African mountain slope overlooking Cape Town. South African officials have increased security in Table Mountain National Park after the vandalism at the temple-like Rhodes Memorial on the slopes of Devil’s Peak, Merle Collins, a national parks spokeswoman, said Monday. Parks staff have also been cleaning graffiti scrawled on the monument in the incident early Friday, Collins said. One slogan read: “Your dreams of empire will die.” …

South Africa's University of Cape Town (UCT) has removed a statue of British colonialist Cecil Rhodes that had become the focus of protests. The monument, taken down in front of cheering protesters, will be stored for "safe keeping", UCT's council said. Students have been campaigning for the removal of the statue of the 19th Century figure, unveiled in 1934. Other monuments to colonial-era leaders have also been the target of protest in South Africa. The BBC's Mohammed Allie told Focus On Africa radio that there was a "festive atmosphere" as students, academics, members of political parties and ordinary Cape Town...

more than two weeks, public debate in South Africa has been dominated by a statue. Students at the University of Cape Town have been demonstrating to have the bronze figure of British colonialist Cecil Rhodes removed from its central position on campus. Rhodes bequeathed the land on which the university was built, but he also slaughtered Africans by the thousands in colonial conquest and helped lay the foundations of apartheid in South Africa.

Poachers kill 300 Zimbabwe elephants with cyanide • Cyanide has been used to kill 300 elephants in Zimbabwe's biggest nature reserve - three times the original estimate - as new photos show the scale of the slaughter Poachers in Zimbabwe have killed more than 300 elephants and countless other safari animals by cyanide poisoning, The Telegraph has learned. The full extent of the devastation wreaked in Hwange, the country's largest national park, has been revealed by legitimate hunters who discovered what conservationists say is the worst single massacre in southern Africa for 25 years. Pictures taken by the hunters, which...

**SNIP** The children, most of them less than 7 years old, were ferried to the city's police stations, where they had to spend the night. At one crowded city beach, 35 children were handed in, according to authorities. South African's reacted with shock on social media. "I am battling to understand, how do you lose a child on a beach? And you still go home? It is sad," tweeted one Cape Town resident with the Twitter handle WaMputhi. "If I travelled with a child, I will not leave without him/her even if it means no sleep searching," he added in...

Sitting on a salvaged sofa in the centre of her small tin shack, Nomfusi Panyaza looks increasingly worried, as heavy clouds gather in the sky outside. “When it rains, the public toilets overflow into my living room,” she says. “Water comes in through the ceiling and the electricity stops working.” Outside her makeshift home in the sprawling township of Khayelitsha, on the eastern edge of Cape Town, barefoot children play on the banks of an open sewer, while cows roam next to an overflowing rubbish heap. Panyaza shares this tiny cabin with her two daughters and four grandchildren, a family...

An American family found the deceased mother shark on a beach in Cape Town, South Africa, but noticed that something inside the creature was still moving. Realising there could be baby sharks inside, the gruesome but remarkable footage shows the man using a knife to perform a makeshift C-section on the animal. As the beachgoer cuts into the shark, a witness can be heard saying: 'Err... I don't think there's a baby in there.' But moments later something begins to wriggle inside, causing the good Samaritan to jump back and shout as a baby shark squirms in his hand.

A disabled boy wants to be able to sue the Cape Town based Foetal Assessment Centre over its failure to inform his mother that he had down syndrome before he was born. The child's mother said that had the Foetal Assessment Centre properly informed her of the risks of down syndrome, she would have terminated the pregnancy. The mother missed the window period to file a claim on her own behalf.

BURGLARS broke into the Cape Town home of South African peace icon Desmond Tutu when he was away speaking at Nelson Mandela's memorial. "I can confirm that there was a burglary last night," said Archbishop Tutu aide Roger Friedman. "We are not able to tell exactly what was stolen, the archbishop and his wife were not at home. The house was not pillaged." Archbishop Tutu had used the memorial to call on South Africans to follow Mandela's example. "I want to show the world we can come out here and celebrate the life of an icon." The timing of the...

Live! In Black and White! And Living Color! It’s Lady M at the Sci-Bono Discovery Centre in Johannesburg!No need to adjust your screen, you are perceiving this accurately. What’s that expression? “It is what it is.” And what it is, is a blouse with black side insets and a front in a navy blue and white pattern. The skirt is some type of fabric collage in green, yellow and white. And if you don’t like it, you’re probably a racist.It’s very trendy. See those little white hashy-marks on the blouse? Yes! They’re exactly what you think they they are: clustered...

CAPE TOWN — For countless foreign visitors, Cape Town is an indelible symbol of the beauty and promise of post-apartheid South Africa. Beyond its gorgeous scenery and great wines, its very logo — an outline of majestic Table Mountain superimposed over a rainbow — emphasizes its historic mix of races and cultures, and its most famous resident, Desmond Tutu, is revered as a symbol of tolerance, inclusiveness and forgiveness. But for many black South Africans, this city represents something very different: the last bastion of white rule.

Absolution author Patrick Flanery Absolution Patrick Flanery Knopf Canada 400 pp; $29.95 This novel gave me nightmares. It even gave me daymares, but I had to read it. Patrick Flanery’s debut novel is a searing look at South Africa both before and after the legal dissolution of apartheid. But as Flanery shows, the troubles are far from eradicated. Sam Leroux is a South African who went to New York for graduate school, married an American named Sarah, and is now back in South Africa because of his wife’s job as a journalist and his own plan to write the...

A British Royal Navy ship was ordered to turn its guns around because they were parked pointing at a hotel room Michelle Obama was staying in. Fearing the First Lady might be in danger, minders ordered the captain of the HMS Edinburgh stationed in Cape Town, South Africa, to switch them away from her five-star suite. The U.S. agents have since been accused of overreacting after it emerged the Sea Dart missiles were, in fact, loaded with blanks having been used during a ceremony in honour of a sailor who had died. Former Royal Navy officer Mike Critchley told the...

Shirley Fisher says she was evicted from a hostel near a stadium where soccer's biggest stars train. Natasha Flores says she was driven out of squatters' quarters near a new $450 million stadium in one of Cape Town's busiest tourist areas. Both ended up in Blikkiesdorp, a settlement of corrugated-iron shacks ringed by a concrete fence, home to hundreds of evicted families. Many residents say there is only one reason they wound up in this bleak place, which in Afrikaans means "tin-can town." "The World Cup," said Fisher, 41, without hesitation. Human rights campaigners say South African authorities have forcibly...

South Africa's murder rate — one of the world's highest — has dropped slightly, but the country faces a distressing rise in rapes, robberies and hijackings, South African police said Tuesday. The number of murders decreased 3.4 percent to 18,148 between April 2008 and March 2009. That still leaves 50 murders a day in the country of some 50 million people. Sexual offenses increased 10.1 percent, with a total of 71,500 reported offenses. Robberies at homes and businesses increased more dramatically, up 27.3 and 41.5 percent respectively. South Africa has one of the worst crime rates in the world, putting...