THE PROPHET'S ‘WAR AGAINST WHITES’: SHEPHERD STUURMAN IN NAMIBIA AND SOUTH AFRICA, 1904–7

1999 ◽  
Vol 40 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-19 ◽  
Author(s):  
TILMAN DEDERING

‘GOD HAS TAKEN POWER FROM WHITE MEN THROUGHOUT THE WORLD’EARLY on the morning of 5 September 1906, at a small asbestos mine in the northern Cape, six African workers entered the tent of their white foreman and his family. They assaulted the sleepers with stones, knobkerries, the leg of a chair and an ox-yoke. The foreman, Dirk Mans, died of his injuries eighteen hours later, while his son, Jan, who had been sleeping in another tent, ran away. Dirk Mans's wife also had a narrow escape. She woke up when a blow narrowly missed the head of her three-year-old child, who was sleeping in her bed. Both could flee in the general mêlée. Another victim, the well digger, William Swanepoel, was bludgeoned to death so ferociously that his skull ‘was entirely knocked out of shape [and] separated in halves’. The perpetrators tried to kill more whites, but dispersed in the ensuing confusion. The six men were tracked down by the police after several days. The Griqualand West Supreme Court in Kimberley sentenced four of the culprits to death; they were hanged in March 1907.The ringleader of the Hopefield gang, Hendrik Bekeer, told the policeman who had followed his tracks for several days, that ‘he was glad to be caught, although he knew that his life would be at an end’. He could hardly wait to tell the prison warder that the group had planned to kill all whites in South Africa. In court, the eloquent Bekeer explained:I admit that I am guilty. I, Hendrik Bikier [sic], laid hands on these two souls. I have a craving in my heart which must be made known to everyone. I admit that I am a worker of God. I confess to the Court and all the white people that I am placed here by the Lord, and that I do his will. … The time when the whites had the upper hand is past. This is for Africa alone, but God has taken power from white men throughout the world.

2018 ◽  
Vol 114 (9/10) ◽  
Author(s):  
Stanislaus Nnadih ◽  
Mike Kosch ◽  
Peter Martinez ◽  
Jozsef Bor

Sprites are the optical signatures of electrical discharges in the mesosphere triggered by large lightning strikes associated with thunderstorms. Since their discovery in the late 1980s, sprites have been observed extensively around the world, although very few observations of sprites from Africa have been documented in the literature. In this paper, we report the first ground-based recorded observations of sprites from South Africa. In 2 out of the 22 nights of observations (11 January and 2 February 2016), about 100 sprite elements were recorded from Sutherland in the Northern Cape, comprising different morphologies (carrot (55%), carrot/column (11%), unclassified (21%), column (13%)). The sprites were triggered by positive cloud-to-ground lightning strikes, which had an average peak value of ~74 kA and were observed at distances from ~400 km to 800 km. The estimated charge moment change of the lightning discharges associated with these events was in agreement with the threshold for dielectric breakdown of the mesosphere and correlates well with the observed sprite brightness.


Zootaxa ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 4940 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-82
Author(s):  
RUAN BOOYSEN ◽  
CHARLES R. HADDAD

The genus Micaria Westring, 1851 (Araneae, Gnaphosidae) is a group of small (1.85–5 mm) ant-like spiders that can be distinguished from other gnaphosids by their piriform gland spigots that are similar in size to the major ampullate gland spigots. According to the World Spider Catalog, there are 105 species of Micaria in the world, of which only three species are known from the African part of the Afrotropical Region, namely M. chrysis (Simon, 1910), M. tersissima Simon, 1910 and M. beaufortia (Tucker, 1923). The objectives of this study were to revise Micaria in the Afrotropical Region, providing new and updated records for each of the species, evaluating the relationships between them using COI barcoding data, and providing information on their biology, mimetic relationships and feeding ecology. These objectives were met by collecting fresh material from the KwaZulu-Natal, Western Cape, Northern Cape and Free State provinces in South Africa. Fresh material of M. tersissima and M. chrysis were collected from their type localities, Komaggas and Port Nolloth (Northern Cape Province), respectively, for identification and DNA analyses. COI sequences generated, together with those sourced from Barcode of Life Data Systems (BOLD) and GenBank, were aligned using the CulstalW alignment algorithm in the Mega X software, and molecular phylogenetic analyses were performed using MrBayes for Bayesian Inference (BI) and RaxML for maximum likelihood (ML) analyses. Morphological examination of the collected and voucher material yielded 17 new species for the Afrotropical Region, namely M. basaliducta sp. nov. (♀, ♂, South Africa), M. bimaculata sp. nov. (♀, ♂, Mauritania), M. bispicula sp. nov. (♀, ♂, Namibia, South Africa), M. durbana sp. nov. (♀, ♂, South Africa, Zambia), M. felix sp. nov. (♀, ♂, Cameroon, Ethiopia, Malawi, Mozambique, Namibia, South Africa, Zambia, Zimbabwe), M. gagnoa sp. nov. (♀, ♂, Côte d’Ivoire, Mozambique, Mozambique, Tanzania), M. koingnaas sp. nov. (♂, South Africa), M. lata sp. nov. (♂, Namibia, South Africa), M. laxa sp. nov. (♀, South Africa), M. mediospina sp. nov. (♂, South Africa), M. parvotibialis sp. nov. (♀, ♂, Senegal), M. plana sp. nov. (♀, ♂, Ethiopia), M. quadrata sp. nov. (♀, Ethiopia), M. quinquemaculosa sp. nov. (♀, ♂, Namibia, South Africa), M. rivonosy sp. nov. (♀, ♂, Madagascar), M. sanipass sp. nov. (♂, South Africa) and M. scutellata sp. nov. (♂, South Africa). Furthermore, both sexes of M. beaufortia, as well as the male of M. tersissima, are redescribed. Both sexes of M. chrysis are described for the first time, as this species was only known from a juvenile. Of the previously known species, M. beaufortia (Botswana, Ethiopia, Lesotho, Namibia, South Africa, Zimbabwe) and M. chrysis (Côte d’Ivoire, Ethiopia, Lesotho, Namibia, South Africa, Tanzania) are widespread in the Afroptropics, while M. tersissima is only known from South Africa. Both the Bayesian inference and the maximum likelihood analysess recovered Micaria (sensu lato) as monophyletic with the inclusion of the subopaca group. The pulicaria species group was recovered as polyphyletic in both the BI and ML analyses. Four Afrotropical species, as well as the M. rossica Thorell, 1875/M. foxi Gertsch, 1933 group, formed a clade sister to M. formicaria (Sundevall, 1831). Eight of the Afrotropical species now have COI barcoding data uploaded to BOLD. 


2014 ◽  
Vol 70 (a1) ◽  
pp. C1287-C1287
Author(s):  
Claude Lecomte ◽  
Gautam Desiraju

IYCr2014 aims at improving public awareness of the field, boost access to instrumentation and high-level research, nurture "home-grown" crystallographers in developing nations, and increase international collaborations for the benefit of future generations. The IUCr-UNESCO OpenLab is a network of operational crystallographic laboratories based mainly in Africa, Asia and South America, and implemented in partnership with industry. The OpenLabs will enable students in far-flung lands to have hands-on training in modern techniques and expose them to cutting-edge research in the field. Such project was started based on the strong experience gained through the IUCr Initiative in Africa . The Summit meetings are intended to bring together scientists from countries in three widely separated parts of the world. Karachi (Pakistan), Campinas (Brazil) and Bloemfontein (South Africa). These meetings, attended by scientists from academia and industry and by science administrators, will focus on high-level science, and also highlight the difficulties and problems of conducting competitive scientific research in different parts of the developing world. Moreover, a worldwide crystal-growing competition aims at attracting and inspiring youngsters.


Zootaxa ◽  
2017 ◽  
Vol 4294 (4) ◽  
pp. 462 ◽  
Author(s):  
YURI M. MARUSIK ◽  
MIKHAIL M. OMELKO

Three species of Micaria Westring, 1851 are known to occur in the Afrotropical Region, two from Namibia and one from South Africa. All three species are known from a single sex only, either from the male (M. tersissima Simon, 1910) or from the females in the case of M. beaufortia (Tucker, 1923) and M. chrysis (Simon, 1910). In this paper, we redescribe the female of M. beaufortia and describe the previously unknown male of this species. This species has pseudosegmented tarsi and complex scopula formed by two paired rows of setae; these characters are unknown in other Micaria. The setae covering the legs in M. beaufortia are briefly described and the scopula is compared with that of M. fulgens (Walckenaer, 1802). A paired mating plug, previously unknown in Micaria, is documented in M. beaufortia. It was found that M. chrysis and M. tersissima, considered in the World Spider Catalog (2017) as endemics of Namibia, were actually described from Northern Cape Province, South Africa. The taxonomic position of these two species is briefly commented on and distribution records of all three species are mapped. 


Author(s):  
Mambo Mupepi

This article seeks to understand how a family enterprise was structured and positioned and grew into a successful global mining house. The focus is on how talent was managed drawing ontology from the mining industry founded in 1873 in South Africa by British and Dutch colonists. The founding families are those of Deidrick and Johannes De Beer, Alfred Beit, Cecil Rhodes, Nathaniel Rothschild and Ernest Oppenheimer. The De Beer brothers sold out to Cecil Rhodes and his partners and the business was, amalgamated later with Anglo American Corporation. The business arrangement continued for four generations under the direction of the Oppenheimer family who were apprenticed by excellent craftsmen in the diamond trade, and educated in finance economics and law from Europe's best business schools, and a conducive segregated political environment which ended in a US Supreme Court judgment in 2012. However, the Oppenheimers nurtured the mining house to a successful international mining business that employs more than 20 000 people around the world today.


1987 ◽  
Vol 15 ◽  
pp. 70-76
Author(s):  
Manthia Diawara

We used to play soccer with white boys in Kankan at Saint John, a Catholic elementary and junior high school. Then one day a girl by the name of Dusu told my mother that I had been in the worshipping house of the white people. When I came home my mother was crying, saying that the Devil had entered me. The other women in the compound gathered around her to express their surprise and distress as well. I could hear them talking about how the world had become a dangerous place since the era of the white man. Some said that nowadays the white men had driven Satan deep into the souls of some black men so much so that, like mad dogs, they had turned against their trainers themselves. Some said that the world was coming to an end, and others enjoined that it was all Sekou Toure’s fault. That day my mother locked me up and began whipping me.


2016 ◽  
Vol 4 (4) ◽  
pp. 345-367 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ali Qadir

This article explores the on-going construction, or “sedimentation,” of Sunni orthodoxy by paying attention to the boundary role of “insider-Others.” To highlight how boundary positions of heretical communities shape the category of orthodox Islam, this paper focuses on the social processes excluding the “heretical” Ahmadiyya Muslim Community in South Africa. The paper undertakes a qualitative analysis of two Supreme Court cases involving Ahmadis and the Muslim Judicial Council of South Africa, local representatives of orthodox Sunnism. These two cases stand out in a contentious history that has led to extreme ostracism of Ahmadis by Sunni Muslims in the country. The analysis identifies three features of Sunni orthodoxy that crystallized in the process of conflict with the Ahmadiyya: alienation, transnationalism, and Archimedean moral authority. These features help make sense of social processes marginalizing Ahmadis around the world, and offer new insights into construction of global Sunni orthodoxy.


EDIS ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 2020 (1) ◽  
pp. 7
Author(s):  
Demian F. Gomez ◽  
Jiri Hulcr ◽  
Daniel Carrillo

Invasive species, those that are nonnative and cause economic damage, are one of the main threats to ecosystems around the world. Ambrosia beetles are some of the most common invasive insects. Currently, severe economic impacts have been increasingly reported for all the invasive shot hole borers in South Africa, California, Israel, and throughout Asia. This 7-page fact sheet written by Demian F. Gomez, Jiri Hulcr, and Daniel Carrillo and published by the School of Forest Resources and Conservation describes shot hole borers and their biology and hosts and lists some strategies for prevention and control of these pests. http://edis.ifas.ufl.edu/fr422


Author(s):  
Sabrina Bruno

Climate change is a financial factor that carries with it risks and opportunities for companies. To support boards of directors of companies belonging to all jurisdictions, the World Economic Forum issued in January 2019 eight Principlescontaining both theoretical and practical provisions on: climate accountability, competence, governance, management, disclosure and dialogue. The paper analyses each Principle to understand scope and managerial consequences for boards and to evaluate whether the legal distinctions, among the various jurisdictions, may undermine the application of the Principles or, by contrast, despite the differences the Principles may be a useful and effective guidance to drive boards' of directors' conduct around the world in handling climate change challenges. Five jurisdictions are taken into consideration for this comparative analysis: Europe (and UK), US, Australia, South Africa and Canada. The conclusion is that the WEF Principles, as soft law, is the best possible instrument to address boards of directors of worldwide companies, harmonise their conduct and effectively help facing such global emergency.


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