'Hands Off Zuma' vigil turns into party of the year

An overnight vigil in support of beleaguered South African ex-president Jacob Zuma turned into a festival of song and dance on Thursday night.

Durban's Albert Park reverberated to the "Hands Off Zuma" rally, initially dubbed a vigil and "mother of all prayers" for the popular former leader who faced trial on 16 corruption charges at the city's High Court on Friday morning.

Those charges relate to allege kickbacks from the mammoth 1998 arms deal, struck before Mr Zuma was even a member of the national government. His supporters have called the reinstatement of the charges, which were thrown out of court in 2008 and finally dropped in 2009, a witch-hunt orchestrated by "White Monopoly Capital," common parlance for neo-colonial Western business interests looking to maintain their dominance of the South African economy.
The ruling African National Congress (ANC) pressured Mr Zuma to resign in February, just over a year ahead of scheduled elections, and installed billionaire deputy Cyril Ramaphosa in his stead.
But comments by some ANC leaders and pro-opposition media over the past week have betrayed a fear that the show of solidarity with Mr Zuma could threaten the authority of the new president, who has already made himself unpopular with workers and small businesses. Police minister Bheki Cele warned ANC members attending the vigil and marches not to wear their party regalia -- an instruction they defied en masse.

Supporters from across the vast country of 50 million converged on the Indian Ocean east coast city and capital of KwaZulu Natal province on Thursday evening, with high spirits already evident on the buses.

Zuma supporters partying en route to Durban

Police warnings of blocked city streets on Friday morning already proved correct, as Zuma supporters danced and sang at junctions, blocking traffic.

Blocking the city streets

The event quickly turned into an open mic night as one impromptu speaker after another took the stage, interspersed with more spontaneous singing and dancing among the crowd.

At the vigil in Durban's Albert Park

Sun-crossed haters endanger 220,000 lives

My stepmother Shanthie Naidoo and her sister Ramnie were on an overnight flight from Johannesburg to Heathrow for a speaking tour when Extinction Rebellion offshoot Heathrow Pause began wilfully endangering aircraft by flying drones over the airport this morning. Shanthie is an ANC struggle veteran who lived in exile in London from 1973 to 1993, apart from some time in the exile community in Mazimbu, Tanzania. She and all her immediate family were jailed by the Apartheid government for political reasons. Shanthie's late brother Indres did 10 years on Robben Island and later wrote the book 'Island in Chains'. Their grandfather Thembi Naidoo worked alongside Mohandas K Gandhi during the civil disobedience campaigns against the early form of Apartheid. Extinction Rebellion has chosen for its logo a variation on the 'sonnenkreuz', a symbol used by both proto-fascist neo-pagan organisations and modern neo-Nazis. Around 220,000 passengers fly in and out of Heathr...

The mystery of the Guanches

The origins and language of the indigenous people of the Canary Islands remain a mystery, writes Dr Sabina Goralski Filonov Translation by James Tweedie The guanches, the aboriginals of the Canary Islands whose origin, lost in the mists of time, still arouses intense and passionate debate and great controversy about their origins and the how the seven Canary Islands were populated – which according to some studies occurred between 10,000 and 8,000 years BC. Literally, the word ‘Guan’ means man or person and ‘Chenech’ or ‘Chinet’ is applied to the island of Tenerife, thus meaning a man or inhabitant of Tenerife – although according to Núñez de la Peña, the Spanish named them the Guanchos during the conquest of the islands. But with the passage of time, experts in the subject are questioning whether the word Guanche was used to designate the primitive inhabitants of all the islands in the pre-Hispanic period. The term ‘Guanche’ has also ceased to be applied to the di...

Los Gigantes Beach Landslide Tragedy - Three Days of Mourning for Victims

SHATTERED IDYLL: Los Guios beach in Los Gigantes in happier times. SANTIAGO del Teide council declared three days of official mourning after two women were killed in a landslide on Los Gigantes beach on November 1. by James Tweedie The local authority announced the period of mourning following an emergency council meeting on Monday November 2, called in response to the tragic deaths of 57-year old British holidaymaker Marion O’Hara and 34-year old Canarian hotel worker Maria Vanesa Arias Romera. Flags at Santiago del Teide town hall were flown at half mast for the period of mourning, and all official functions observed a minute’s silence in memory of the victims. The two women were killed when 130-foot wide stretch of the cliffs above the tiny Los Guios beach collapsed from a height of about 200 feet, burying them beneath rubble up to 15 feet deep, according to a spokesman for the Guardia Civil which was conducting the investigation into the accident. The landslide occurred about 3pm ...

World People's Conference urges "new world order"

Delegates from across the developing world called for a “new world order” of peace and development in Bolivia last week. The final declaration of the World People's Conference in Tiquipaya, outside the central city of Cochabamba, said the “social property of natural resources” must be consolidated, the Bolivian Information Agency reported. Some 4,000 delegates from 43 countries on four continents attended the conference on Tuesday and Wednesday last week. They demanded the establishment of a “new international finance architecture” without multilateral organisations serving transnational capital. The declaration also called for “the building of true peace” — not only between nations but in social relations. “It is not only the inexistence of armed conflicts but also the overcoming of structural violence that translates to equitable access to wealth and development opportunities,” it read. It identified the principal causes of the current global crisis as: “Armed confli...

THE HOME OF THE BRIGHT GREEN FUTURE

GRANADILLA DE ABONA, Tuesday March 16 2010 FROM recycling your rubbish to cycling to work, in recent years we have been urged to make myriad small changes to our lifestyles to save the world from the supposedly cataclysmic threat of climate change. by JAMES TWEEDIE But how much can we really contribute towards cutting global greenhouse gas emissions by using low-energy light bulbs and putting our potato peelings in a compost bin? Can we really have a carbon-neutral lifestyle? The Canary Islands have become something of a laboratory for renewable energy over the last two decades. Tenerife has three wind farms with three more in the pipeline, and a photo-electric solar panels are now assembled at a factory on the island, a welcome diversification from the crisis-hit tourism economy. Tenerife's Renewable Energy and Technological Institute (ITER) opened its new bioclimatic homes exhibit at its headquarters in the Granadilla industrial estate on March 19. The 14-year long project attrac...

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