What does it mean to be a feminist in Africa today? Some of Africa's best commentators share their thoughts. Do the issues raised chime with your experiences? Join our debate A debate has ignited among the Guardians Africa network partners. In a guest blog for Ms Afropolitan Doreen Akiyo Yomoah wrote that "you are a woman" was her least favourite word combination in the English language,...
The San people are reaching out to Prince Charles to help overturn new laws threatening their tribal culture It costs £500 a night to stay in a luxury safari camp in the Kalahari desert in Botswana. For that price, wealthy tourists get drinks, game drives and, says one tour company, an "interpretive Bushman walk with staff members who hail from the ancient Bushman clans of the area"....
Mrs Kgosietsile arrives bearing bounty the tasty white maize so hard to grow in this usually arid but now soaked region There is nothing unusual about Mrs Kgosietsile, my mother-in-law, visiting our house bearing vegetables from her 10-hectare plot here in Botswana referred to as "the lands". We are coming to the end of the rainy season, when various greens, a proliferation of watermelons...
Terms of a prior agreement gives Botswana an option to take a share of the Oppenheimer family's 40% stake in De Beers Global miner Anglo American has secured the final regulatory approval for its $5.1bn (£3.2bn) acquisition of the Oppenheimer family's stake in diamond producer De Beers, paving the way for the deal to close within the coming months. The approval from South Africa's minister of...
Ministry of Aircraft Production tried to find isolated area for trials in 1943 but had to postpone plan as rainy season approached Britain planned to test a very virulent type of poison gas in what is now Botswana, the colonial archives reveal. The plan for "practical trials" carried out on a "considerable scale" was first proposed by the Ministry of Aircraft Production in 1943....
Windhoek-based facility to open in August after South Africa, Angola, Botswana, Zambia and Namibia commit to project Five countries in southern Africa have joined forces to launch a research centre that will work on combating climate change in the region . South Africa, Angola, Botswana, Zambia and Namibia signed a declaration on Wednesday to base the initiative in the Namibian capital Windhoek. The...
s remote wilderness in an attempt to put them beyond the reach of rampant poaching, conservationists said on Wednesday . The mass relocation comes after a record 1,004 rhinos were killed in South Africa last year and the failure of every measure tried so far to curtail the scourge, which is fuelled by demand for horn in Asia. The crisis is under discussion at a global summit in London on Thursday aimed...
t call them "Americans" if they were from Brazil and the United States, even though the distance between the two is the same – and the economic conditions as different. You don't have a film called Out of Asia and you rarely go to Oceania on holidays (instead you talk of vacations in Australia, New Zealand or another island). Yet for a continent of one billion people three times the size of the US,...
Entrenched political interests are fighting to expand coal’s role in the national economy despite the promise of renewable energy, reports Yale Environment 360 Adam Welz ...
Watch a clip from a new documentary looking at the effects of fracking in Africa ...
s most precious wildlife reserves, to commercial fracking while ignoring the concerns of environmentalists and communities who could lose access to scarce water. Hydraulic fracturing, known as fracking, for the production of gas is the subject of fierce debate in America, Britain, South Africa and countries around the world, with green activists warning that it degrades land and pollutes air and water....
s much vaunted economic growth is failing to trickle down to their daily lives, according to the biggest survey of its kind. "After a decade of growth in Africa, little change in poverty at the grassroots," is the title of a report by the Afrobarometer research project , which questioned 51,605 respondents in 34 countries from October 2011 to June this year. Roughly one in five Africans told researchers...
s president, Ian Khama, causing minor injuries, his spokesman Jeff Ramsay said on Monday, adding it was "a freak accident, not an attack". Ramsay said Khama did not go to hospital but did see a doctor, who put two stitches in his nose. Khama, 60, was asked about the injury when he appeared at public meetings in south-east Botswana with a plaster on his nose. The cheetah...
s harder line Since then, the EU executive has taken a harder line. In 2011, it proposed suspending the agreement if the countries did not ratify the EPA by January 2014. The parliament voted in a strong majority to extend the deadline to October 2014, in a second reading . Botswana, Namibia, Cameroon, Ghana, Ivory Coast, Kenya and Swaziland have not completed the agreement. They, along with the Pacific...
s two main exports are natural resources and weapons. Africa has plenty of former and plenty of demand for latter At the start of April, the UN general assembly overwhelmingly approved a new arms trade treaty . The treaty had been nearly 20 years in the making and seeks to regulate the $70bn international trade in conventional arms. Despite the recalcitrance of North Korea, Iran and Syria – the only...
s heavy metal bands defy criticism – and heat – in their search for artistic freedom See more of Frank Marshall's photographs here In the remorseless Kalahari heat, leather is not the most obvious choice of attire. But to a dedicated band of Batswana metalheads, it's the only way to dress. The country's heavy metal scene, imported from neighbouring South Africa, may be niche but its fans are passionate...
Photographer Frank Marshall has documented the tight-knit subculture in the Kalahari ...
bonfire of the quangos' I worked in the policy unity at the General Teaching Council For England. I had been there for 10 years when the decision was announced, a few months after the current government came into power to get rid of it. They said it was to cut costs, but I think it was more political than economic. "I did not think about going abroad at first. But the opportunities in the UK were minimal...
s Street View cameras came to Botswana, a country of 2 million people and 70% covered by the Kalahari desert, the company might have expected to avoid such controversy. Not so. "We feel such places as the military base and the office of the president, the American embassy and any other such high-security areas should not have been allowed to be published," the Monitor newspaper opined in an editorial...
s recent independence celebrations, an easier version of this traditional shredded meat dish If there is any lesson to be taken from Mma Ramotswe , Botswana's No. 1 Lady Detective, it would be that bush tea is the solution to every problem that exists under the sun. But there is more to Botswana's gastronomic culture than that mild honey scented brew. In fact there is one dish that you are almost always...