Wronged spouses can no longer sue for damages in the event of an adulterous affair in South Africa.  The court stated that there can be no monetary value placed on marital fidelity and the third party involved in the infidelity can not be sued for damages. So the title of this article is TRUE.

"I  am  led  to  the  conclusion  that the  act  of  adultery  by  a  third  party  lacks wrongfulness for purposes of a delictual claim of contumelia and loss of consortium it  is  not  reasonable  to  attach delictual  liability to  it.

That is what  public policy dictates. At this day and age it just seems mistaken to assess marital fidelity in terms of money."

This was recorded in a written judgement.

The case that brought this ruling about is that of a woman referred to as Mrs H in court documents who left her marital home and her spouse Mr DE in March 2010.

Evidence showed that Mrs H left after years of serious problems including physical assault and rape.  She then began a relationship with a Mr RH which led to her husband suing Mr RH for a R1 million for the “insult” of the “infidelity” as well as for the “loss of comfort and society of his spouse”.  

The written judgement continues to say:

"In the present case, the breakdown of the marriage was as a result of a failure by the spouses themselves to sustain their marriage and thus it would be inappropriate for the courts to intervene. In contrast, maintaining the claim in our law would infringe on various rights of adulterous spouses and the third parties, including the rights to dignity and privacy. Accordingly, adultery should no longer be punished through a civil damages claim against a third party," the judgment said.

South Africa has joined a string of countries all over the world including England, New Zealand, Scotland, and Canada amongst many, where adultery is no longer a criminal offence.

Some of the African countries where it is still a legal offence are Cameroon, Kenya, Botswana, Namibia, and Zimbabwe.

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THE sale of a greater Kudu bull, a type of antelope prized by hunters, more than tripled a previous record at a game auction in northern South Africa going for a price of 9.4 million rand ($692,000).

The animal known as Hercules is about 12 years old, with spiral horns of more than 66 inches (1.7 meters) long, and was bought by a group of game farmers from the Thabazimbi area, 235 kilometers (146 miles) northwest of Johannesburg, according to the seller, Dries Visser of Dries Visser Pure-Bred Game.

The previous record for a kudu bull was 2.4 million rand.

“If he is looked after, he can still be used for breeding for about three years,” Visser said by phone on Monday. “He was bought solely for his blood and genetics.”

Driven by growing demand from international hunters for exotic and large horned animals, South Africa’s game ranching industry is worth close to 12 billion rand a year and is growing at about 10% annually, according to Barclays Africa Group Ltd.

If the country’s game ranching industry were an economy, it would be the fastest growing in Africa, ahead of Ethiopia, which the World Bank has projected could touch 9.5% growth this year.

Mystery, a tuberculosis-free buffalo with a 53-inch horn span, was bought for 40 million rand by a group including billionaire Johann Rupert in 2013, while Deputy President Cyril Ramaphosa sold three white-flanked impala antelope for 27.3 million rand last September.

Other breeds fetching high prices include golden gnus, where a recessive gene gives the normally blue-black wildebeest a yellowish coat, and sable antelope.

Greater kudu have white striped coats and can weigh as much as 600 pounds (272 kilogrammes).

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Earning his stripes in the high-risk forex market through his company, Global Forex Institute, Shezi has managed to establish himself as one of South Africa’s most successful forex traders and his company one of the best in forex training.

Based at Umhlanga in South Africa, Global Forex Institute – established by Shezi and George van der Riet – brings “affordable, effective Forex training that works, to the masses.”

According to the company’s website, “In fact most of the training and mentoring provided is done so free of charge. Global Forex Institute is the only company in South Africa that provides Forex Training not for income but to help curb unemployment. Global Forex Institute makes their money from trading and their results are on the website for everyone to see.

The training that Global Forex Institute does is part of the community work and their way of giving something back. Students can link their accounts to the Global Forex Fund and earn while they learn.

With over 2000 clients trained Global Forex Institute is truly Africa’s leading Forex training provider.”

From age 12, Shezi had started showing a proclivity for entrepreneurship by selling muffins at school.

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What does it mean to be an African? In his famous "I am an African," speech, which he delivered at the adoption of the The Republic of South Africa Constitution Bill in 1999, Thabo Mbeki seeks to unravel what it means to be an African.

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Only one Nigerian university has made it to the list of top 10 African universities, a rating that has six South African schools.

In a ranking released Tuesday July 7th 2015, Nigeria’s University of Ibadan came a distant eighth on the top 10 list, beaten by schools from South Africa, Kenya and Egypt.

With its performance, the University of Ibadan naturally came tops as Nigeria’s best, according to the research conducted by Journals Consortium.

The result shows how the Nigerian education system struggles against its African peers.

The ranking was based on research publications and citations from 2010 to 2014 as well as visibility on the Internet, Journals Consortium said.

The University of Cape Town in South Africa was graded the continent’s best while Cairo University in Egypt came second.

Another South African institution, University of Pretoria, ranked third while the University of Nairobi, in Kenya, ranked fourth.

University of South Africa was ranked fifth leaving Witwatersrand University at the sixth position and Stellenbosch at seventh.

The University of Nigeria, Nsukka, came 13th in Africa – apparently Nigeria’s second best.

While the University of Ibadan started off as University College in 1948, the University of Nigeria was founded in 1955 and was formally opened in 1960.

Ahmadu Bello University, Zaria, ABU, ranked 18th in Africa and third in Nigeria, while the University of Lagos ranked 20th in Africa, and fourth in Nigeria.

Obafemi Awolowo University, OAU, ranked 24th in Africa, and fifth in Nigeria while University of Benin ranked 27th in Africa and sixth in Nigeria.

University of Ilorin was rated seventh best in Nigeria but 31st in Africa while the University of Port Harcourt ranked eighth in Nigeria, and 36th in Africa.

Nnamdi Azikiwe University stood at ninth position in Nigeria, and 42nd in Africa, leaving the University of Calabar as 10th in Nigeria but 43rd in Africa respectively.

“University of Ibadan has always maintained that rank status from as back as I know, and am proud to be a product of that University,” Bayo Aladejo, an alumnus of the University of Ibadan said.

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SOUTH AFRICA President Jacob Zuma Monday lashed out at Africa governments who “criticise the South African government but their citizens are in our country”, even he took a firm stance against stance on the wave of xenophobic violence that has gripped the country. 

Addressing the public on Freedom Day at  the Union Buildings South Lawn, Zuma chastised governments who have criticised the South African government for the violence that has claimed seven lives.

“As much as we have a problem that is alleged to be xenophobic, our sister countries contribute to this. Why are their citizens not in their countries and are in South Africa?” he asked.

This comes in the wake of Nigeria recalling its ambassador to South Africa in protest at the xenophobic violence.

Nigeria has summoned Acting High Commissioner Martin Cobham and Deputy High Commissioner Uche Ajulu-Okeke “for consultations” over the “ongoing xenophobia”, Minister of Foreign Affairs Aminu Wali said in a statement on Saturday.

Zuma said a frank conversation on illegal immigrants needed to take place within the Southern African Development Community (SADC) as well as the African Union.

Zuma mentioned the murder of Mozambican citizen Manuel Jossias—first identified as Emmanuel Sithole—in the Alexandra township.

“He used a false name to avoid detection by authorities as he was an illegal immigrant,” he said.

Zuma paid tribute to the three South Africans who were killed in the attacks in Durban: Ayanda Dlamini, Msawenkosi Dlamini and Thabo Mzobe, who was 14 years old.

He said South Africans were angry, adding; “We need to be cured, we are sick”.

“The latest outbreak of violence necessitates more comprehensive action from all of us to ensure that there is no recurrence. We have to address the underlying causes of the violence and tensions, which is the legacy of poverty, unemployment and inequality in our country and our continent and the competition for limited resources,” Zuma said.

South Africans need psychological cure

He also spoke at length of how violent South African communities are, adding that “we need a psychological cure”.

“Apartheid was a violent system and it produced violent countermeasures to it. So people still believe that to fight authority you must fight government ... even now, when it is your own government. We need to be helped as a society,” he said.

“They get excited. They burn the tyres; they block the roads; they destroy property; exercising their rights but interfering with the rights of many.”

Zuma then lashed out at the Economic Freedom Fighters and their trademark militancy  in Parliament.

“Look at the institution that is said to be the apex of democracy, Parliament. Look at the politicians whom you have voted for, how angry they are. How defiant they are, even in Parliament,” he said to thunderous applause.

Zuma said Parliament and the office of the Speaker should be respected.

He was taking exception to the behaviour of EFF Members of Parliament who often disobey the orders of the Speaker in the national assembly.

“If the Speaker says ‘Out of my house’, you must get out. But what do some of the members of Parliament do when the Speaker says ‘Sit down’, they say ‘Speaker, I want to address you’. They will continue addressing the speaker. If the speaker says ‘Withdraw’ they say ‘I won’t withdraw’. If the speaker says ‘Out’ they say ‘I won’t go out’,” Zuma told the crowd.

He said this was a glaring example of what he called the “violent culture of apartheid”.

“Imagine if politicians are so angry then who will rule the country.”

-This article first appeared in Mail & Guardian.

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More than 5,000 people have fled their homes and shops have been looted and razed. SOUTH Africa defended its efforts to stop attacks on migrant workers against criticism from around the continent that it isn’t doing enough to end the worst anti- foreigner violence in years.

A seventh person has died in the unrest that began earlier this month in the coastal city of Durban and spread last week to Johannesburg, the government said Sunday. A man from Mozambique was stabbed Saturday in the Johannesburg township of Alexandra, according to the local Sunday Times newspaper which ran pictures of the attack.

African countries including Ghana, Nigeria, Malawi and Zimbabwe have called for stronger action from the South African government to protect their nationals.

More than 5,000 people have fled their homes and shops have been looted and razed, according to the United National refugee agency. The dead include three South Africans, as well as four foreigners.

“We are satisfied that the security measures that are currently in place are sufficent to bring the situation under control,” Malusi Gigaba, home affairs minister, told reporters in Pretoria on Sunday. “We will do whatever it takes to maintain law and order.”

He said 307 people have been arrested over public order- related offenses and would be tried in dedicated courts set up to speed the process. The government also has provided food and shelter to 1,026 foreigners and will help them resume lives within their communities, he said, reading from a government statement.

Development plan

South Africans are taking out their frustration over high unemployment and poverty on foreigners, State Security Minister David Mahlobo said at the same news conference. He said the government’s plan for fostering economic growth and development deals with these issues.

Some poor South Africans see Somalis, Ethiopians, Malawians and Pakistanis as competitors for jobs and business opportunities in a country with 24% unemployment.

One fifth of the population of 54 million survive on less than 335 rand ($28) a month.

South Africa currently hosts about 65,000 refugees and 295,000 asylum seekers, according to the United Nations Refugee Agency.

President Jacob Zuma, who has denounced the violence as an attack on South African values, on Saturday canceled a state visit to Indonesia to visit a camp for some of those displaced.

The anti-immigrant attacks are the worst since 2008, when about 60 people died and 50,000 were forced to flee their home.

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ATTACKS against foreign nationals in South Africa have caused outrage around the continent, with South African businesses operating in the rest of Africa beginning to feel the heat.

South Africa’s cabinet warned on Friday that companies operating in the rest of Africa may be targeted, just as Johannesburg-based Sasol Ltd. announced it was repatriating South African employees working on projects in Mozambique for their own safety.

In Nigeria, the newly-elected All People’s Congress (APC) together with civil society handed a memorandum to the South African embassy in Lagos on Wednesday, giving the government 48 hours to stop the violence, or else South African businesses in Nigeria would be shut down.

It puts businesses such as MTN, Shoprite, Pick n Pay and Multichoice in a tight spot, as their African operations contribute significantly to company revenues.

Wealthy South Africans having a good time [Photo/Per-Anders Pettersson/Getty Images]

In MTN’s case, for example, the company has twice as many subscribers in Nigeria than it does in South Africa, with the Nigerian operation alone contributing 37% of group revenues.

Significantly, MTN’s Nigerian business is growing while its South African one is stagnating - latest company results show that revenue in the half-year ending June 2014 grew 22% in Nigeria, while it shrank 3.4% in South Africa.

Mega retailer Shoprite has 357 outlets in the rest of Africa, including 115 Shoprite supermarkets, and more than 100 other furniture, home decor, pharmacy and restaurant stores in 14 African countries.

Image II

Last year a report revealed that just five Shoprite stores in Angola sold more cans of energy drink Red Bull than in all of Shoprite’s 382 stories in South Africa, and 19 Shoprite stores in Angola sold more bottles of the ubiquitous sparkling wine JC Le Roux than the entire South African business did.

And one of South African Airways’ most lucrative routes per kilometre is to Angola: the Johannesburg- Luanda route, at about $0.19 per km, is three times as expensive as Johannesburg-London which brings in $0.06 per km - although the UK is six times further than Angola from South Africa. 

Therefore, by antagonising the rest of Africa with the xenophobic attacks, South Africa is biting the hand of the continent that feeds it. South African businesses and their shareholders must be very unhappy with the attacks.

[Image II above is an info-graphic showing just a few of South African businesses in the rest of Africa]. 

*As a matter of principle, Scanty Gela BLOG will not show any of the videos of the xenophobic attacks but to view the videos of attacks, click here

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E-mail, cellphones, instant messages and social media are not only a part of Africa's Digital Natives' lives but are integral parts of their lives.

My two-year old was unlocking my phone, playing videos and taking selfies before he could speak, and now taps icons on the television screen at home, looking at me quizzically when nothing happens.

There’s much handwringing about the effect that this is having on the ability of children to grow up “normal”, and understandably so. Evolutionary anthropologists tell us that human beings evolved in small hunter-gatherer communities, rarely more than 100-150 people per group.

That limit is important; because that’s about the maximum number of people that one individual can know personally. In a hunter-gatherer society, the “social glue” that holds the group together is mandatory sharing. The clever fellows who study these things have a nifty phrase for it – fierce egalitarianism.

Fierce egalitarianism

Essentially, the only way to survive in that kind of society is if everyone shares, because each of you depends on the group for survival - you can’t hunt alone. The biggest sin, therefore, is selfishness, or worse, hoarding food. It’s considered deeply shameful, almost unforgivable behaviour.

Shame is what keeps the system functional, and to be able to shame someone, you need to know their business. As a result, there’s little or no privacy in these societies, and the individual only finds his or her identity and purpose in the group.

But this only works if the group small. The human brain can only process a certain number of concurrent relationships. Once the group grows beyond 150 individuals, you can’t know everyone one-on-one; you start losing track of who’s doing what and certain people in the group start becoming strangers to each other.

It makes it easier to hide secrets, and hoard food, threatening the group cohesion.

Having evolved in small, intimate bands where everybody knows our name, “human beings aren’t very good at dealing with the dubious freedoms conferred by anonymity,” say anthropologists Christopher Ryan and Cacilda Jetha in their stunning book Sex at Dawn.

Cities and sins

It explains why crime, delinquency and all sorts of nasty anti-social behaviour emerge in towns and cities – the bigger the society is, the less effective shame becomes as a social policing tool, “our behaviour changes, our choices shift, and…our sense of the acceptable grows ever more abstract.”

It makes the ultra-anonymity of the Internet particularly pernicious, and explains why even a reasonable, decent, level-headed person can make the most vitriolic comments online.

This break between “reality” and “online reality” is really what characterises the life of a digital native. Social media, for example, is really just a careful curating of the best moments, and a ruthless competition to see who has the best wedding, the cutest baby, the coolest vacation, etc.

Data from Google Trends reveals the number of times the word “narcissist” has appeared online has risen four-fold over the past decade. And the country with the highest search volume? South Africa.

At the end of last year, Facebook had to apologise for its “Year in Review” feature, an automatically-generated slideshow of a user’s most popular photos of 2014. The default tagline was “It’s been a great year! Thanks for being a part of it.”

But for some, the algorithms selected photos of traumatic events. One user lost his daughter to cancer and the slideshow had his daughter’s face surrounded by some holiday clip-art, and he complained to Facebook for its “inadvertent algorithmic cruelty”.

What’s illuminating is not that the algorithm got it wrong; it’s the implicit assumption that photos shared on Facebook would obviously be happy ones.

But are digital natives really shallow, attention-seeking narcissists conditioned to jump at the ping of a WhatsApp message? Yes, but maybe, no.

Someone I know, a through-and-through digital native, works part-time in a remote part of Kenya, a place where there’s only a smattering of mobile coverage and people have never heard of Twitter.

It was torture, obviously, being away from his social networks, and you would think it would break the addiction – it didn’t. Every time he gets back, he’s launches a flurry of tweets, photos and status updates, carefully curating before uploading – he deletes photos that show him in an unflattering light, before uploading the best one.

But these days, when you talk to him one-on-one, before he hits “Post”, he sometimes makes an offhand comment – “Now, to lie to the people.”

I can’t quite tell if he’s being sarcastic, or if he’s genuinely psychologically aware of the deception, and choosing to play the game from a completely detached vantage point. It’s like smoking marijuana without inhaling.

For him, it helps that he also has an occasional physical detachment to reinforce his psychological aloofness.

But I bet if you look carefully, you will find that some digital natives are not as self-absorbed as you think. They are just cynically playing the game.

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In the South African bush, elephants are being trained in the art of “bio-detection” to see if they can use their exceptional sense of smell to sniff out explosives, landmines and poachers.

Supported by the US Army Research Office, the project looks promising.

During a recent test run, a 17-year-old male elephant named Chishuru walked past a row of buckets. A swab laced with TNT scent had been stapled to the bottom of one.

Sticking his trunk into each bucket, Chishuru stopped and raised a front leg when he came across the one with the swab. He got the bucket right each time.

And like a sniffer dog, he was rewarded with a treat: marula, a fruit that elephants love.

“An elephant’s nose is amazing. Think about mammoths, which had to find food through the ice,” said Sean Hensman, operator of Adventures with Elephants, the game ranch 180 km northwest of Johannesburg where the training is being conducted.

The project has a number of roots. Elephants in Angola, which suffered decades of civil war, have been observed avoiding heavily-mined areas, suggesting their trunks were warning them to stay away.

In Hensman’s case, he said his father was startled in the 1990s while watching a herd of elephants in Zimbabwe to discover that a female member of the herd had tracked him.

Inspired, his father trained 12 elephants for anti-poaching patrols in Zimbabwe but in 2002 the family lost their three farms to President Robert Mugabe’s land seizures and came to South Africa.

US army researchers, who have been involved in the project for five years, say unlike in Hannibal’s day, elephants will not be staging a return to the theatre of combat.

“We could bring scents from the field collected by unmanned robotic systems to the elephants for evaluation,” said Stephen Lee, chief scientist of the US Army Research Office.

And who has the better nose, the dog or the elephant?

“In our work I don’t believe we have a firm conclusion. We would like to better quantify this,” Lee said.

But the old adage about an elephant never forgetting seems to have some basis in truth.

“Dogs require constant training while the elephants seem to understand and remember the scent without the need for constant training,” Lee said.

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Somewhere in South Africa, traffic cops are directing traffic with some unusual choreography. Is it safe for the cops? Is it not a distraction to drivers? Doesn't look like it. But it definitely is entertaining.

These South African traffic cops in the coastal city of Port Elizabeth know there is no law against dancing on the job. So they decided to take advantage of this.

Port Elizabeth, after all, is known as “The Friendly City”.

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Kenny Solomon from Mitchell's Plain has become the first South African to attain the coveted chess title of Grandmaster.

In October 2012, GroundUp ran an interview with Solomon. At that time he had become a grandmaster-elect but still needed to jump through some technical hoops to become a full-fledged grandmaster.

On Sunday, the popular Chessbase website reported that by winning the 2014 Africa Chess Championship which ended a few days ago, he attained the Grandmaster title. Solomon scored 7/9 and won the tournament on tie-break from Egyptian Grandmaster, Ahmed Adly.

The Chessbase article carries an interview with Solomon, who is quoted saying, "Eventually, I hope I can help in developing the chess scene in South Africa in some way, perhaps by being involved in a training centre. There are many chess players in South Africa and it does have its own chess culture. However, most tournaments are not FIDE-rated. In junior tournaments, emphasis is mainly on qualification to international junior events. South Africa needs more FIDE-rated events."

Credit: AllAfrica.com

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There seems to be a general consensus amongst Africans that while it is occasionally acceptable to comparatively group countries within the continent together, South Africa stands on its own, South Africa is not real Africa. Are we only satisfied with a poorer, less developed Africa or has apartheid left an un-healable scar in the African continent?

Amongst other things, our African countries are a product of colonialism and conflict. As a result of our complex histories, there are misconceptions about our present respective situations. Apartheid and South Africa will not be separated, not from the history books and not from people’s memories, especially from the memories of other Africans. The issue of race discrimination in an African country is something Africans can not and have not accepted as a problem of the past. An African country with a population that includes 4.6 million white people (9 percent of the total population) is not easily understood by the African continent at large – no other country boasts that high a figure (in Namibia it’s  six to seven percent, but people rarely think of Namibia), again, a reminder of our varied complex histories.

Whenever there is a crime against humanity, it becomes hard to separate the past from the present and a lot of people suffer the punishments for crimes of their predecessors.

Apartheid ended twenty years ago but the effects can hardly dissipate in such a short time period. The caution regarding race sensitive issues in South Africa is still heavy in the air. Affirmative action in both the education system and workplace continues to spark debate and create conflict between white and black South Africa.

When other Africans visit South Africa, they expect and assume that they will experience or witness racism. I recently had a discussion with a friend who visited Cape Town. He had been prepared for a barrier between himself and ‘white South Africa’, but what shocked him was the absence of familiarity he experienced amongst his ‘brothers’, black South Africans. He felt they were uninterested and misinformed about the rest of the continent.

A Johannesburg-based intellectual (Lionel Isaacs) points out that “…Many black South Africans, because of the long history of Eurocentric education, have a deficit of knowledge about the rest of the continent, combined with mis-education about the rest of Africa, which was deliberately instilled by the Apartheid regime. They gleefully emphasised African missteps, as part of their psychological warfare against black South Africa to entrench African inferiority, and bolster the fictional case that the white minority should rule South Africa because black Africans are inherently incapable of governing themselves. Unfortunately some of this has been internalised by black South Africans.”

While there was a worldwide image of racial cohesion during the World Cup hosted in South Africa in 2010, people aren’t quite convinced that prejudice isn’t prevalent, especially when we see footage like the award winning documentary, Afrikaner Blood...Read more

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Youngsters from one of Cape Town's gang-ridden townships have taken to riding waves in a unique project aimed at getting them away from a life of violence.

They are being taught to surf, in a project which is part of the efforts to reduce the level of gun crime in South Africa. Commendable or just a drop of water in the desert?

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