Beauty is all in the eyes and spirit of the beholder. South Africa has been a cynosure of touristy eyes, a welcoming, breathtaking destination that offers everything from urban sophistication to unspoiled wilderness. While the innumerable websites and...

Ladysmith Black Mambazo won the best traditional world music album at the 2009 Grammy Awards on Sunday for their album Ilembe. Locally the album won the Sama for the best traditional a cappella album in 2008.

South Africans of Indian-origin, on November 16 next year, will celebrate 150 years of coming of their fore-fathers from India to work as indentured labourers in the sugar plantations of Natal. Two groups, the 1860/2010 150 Year Commemoration Committee...

his coriander aromatic and his spinach “very soft, sweet and tasty”. His half-acre farm is a former rubbish dump in the heart of East Africa’s biggest slum. So arresting is the sight of tall sunflowers growing amid the rust-coloured...

Like zombies from a nightmare, about 50 teenage boys and girls amble hollow-eyed on the lawn of Liberia’s sole psychiatric hospital, drug-laced casualties of a civil war fought using children. “The majority come here to be treated for drug...

If you were trying to fathom the name of an emotion coming across a sign such as “Heaven Bound Coffin Makers” or “Comfort Coffin Carpentry,” it could range between heartrending, stirring, poignant, or to some, poignantly amusing..This is Malawi,...

A doctor from the Democratic Republic of Congo who treats women raped by combatants in the war-torn country has been named “African of the Year”. Denis Mukwege, 53, who runs a clinic in Bukavu, has said all sides have “declared women...

Just off the crowded central market in Old Damascus, a sales assistant called Mahmoud is giving me my first introduction into an unusual Syrian speciality - musical knickers. The garments come in many different shapes and colours, and play little...

As I was reading “Dinner with Mugabe,” a book by Heidi Holland, rated as one of the “most intimate portrait yet produced of Zimbabwe’s clever but brutal leader”, Heidi Holland “gets under the skin of a troubled man who turned from...

NEW YORK (Reuters) - They were the “gold-collar” workers: highly educated Chinese people working on Wall Street. Now, they are known as “sea turtles” as they head home to escape the financial storm.