GroundUp Newsletter 07 March 2014: Boxing saved my life and other stories

Top Stories

\xe2\x80\x9cBoxing saved my life\xe2\x80\x9d: Interview with the owner of the African Youth Boxing Club

\xe2\x80\x9cBoxing saved my life\xe2\x80\xa6 without boxing I would be dead\xe2\x80\x9d. Thembani Gqeku was telling me about his childhood and his experiences as a young professional boxer. Gqeku started boxing in East London in 1978, when he was nine years old. He had fought 18 professional fights, with five losses and a draw.

Adam Armstrong

Inside the mind of a seasoned donkey smuggler: How an alternative medicine dealer plans to evade new regulations

Science: Last year the health department gazetted changes to the Medicines Act which, over about five years, will require complementary and alternative medicines (CAMs) to be registered with the Medicines Control Council (MCC).

Koot Kotze

News

Alleged discrimination against foreign children in the Techno Girl programme

News: A Zimbabwean woman, Sandra Chinyanga, is unhappy because her daughter was dropped from the Techno Girl Programme after three years of consistent participation. Now she has been told that her daughter should never have been allowed to join the programme, because she is an immigrant.

Tariro Washinyira

Sex workers demand recognition and march to Parliament

News: Sex workers and sex worker advocates in Durban, Polokwane, Cape Town and Johannesburg took to the streets on Monday to honour International Sex Worker Rights\xe2\x80\x99 Day. Similar marches were held in cities and towns all over the world. The protesters were calling attention to the human rights abuses suffered by sex workers and demanded legal recognition of sex work as a form of employment.

Marlise Richter

Ugandans in South Africa unhappy with anti-gay law

News: Uganda\xe2\x80\x99s brutal new anti-gay law puts Dembe Ainebyona (not her real name) in a difficult situation because she may never see her country of birth again.

Tariro Washinyira

The Khayelitsha Commission takes a break

News: On Friday 21 February, the first round of public sittings of the Khayelitsha Commission came to an end. There will be no public sittings until 17 March, when senior SAPS officers will continue to give testimony.

Adam Armstrong

Editorial

Voting every five years is not enough - direct democracy is possible

Editorial: Capitalism is not dead. But it is severely ill and its chronic contagion is spreading through the economic and social fibres of the world.

Terry Bell

Opinion

A tale of three policies

Opinion: The ANC is increasingly accused of breaking the promises it has made to the South African public. What is less widely discussed is how their promises contradict one another.

Gilad Isaacs

Uganda\xe2\x80\x99s apartheid-style atrocity deserves sanctions

Opinion: The leaders who spoke of an African renaissance and who brought about the African Union ignored gay rights. We are seeing the consequences of their omission today.

Leon Linz

Who are the real illegal miners?

Opinion: The rescue and subsequent arrest of zama-zama \xe2\x80\x94 (those prepared to) \xe2\x80\x9chave a go\xe2\x80\x9d \xe2\x80\x94 miners from an abandoned mine shaft near the East Rand city of Benoni made world headlines.

Terry Bell

Book Review

Categories of Persons: Rethinking Ourselves and Others

Book extract: This slim volume, containing nine essays, is at once ambitious and humble. In their introduction, editors Megan Jones and Jacob Dlamini explain that they tried to capture a variety of deeply personal lived experiences.

Joshua Maserow

Music Review

Jam That Session gives a boost for Cape musicians

Review: Jam That Session is an initiative that boosts the arts in Cape Town and provides an unconventional environment for musicians to connect with their fans and fellow artists.

Dumisani Dabadini

Sport

Teaching kids in Khayelitsha how to fence - for sport

News: A few years back you wouldn\xe2\x80\x99t be seen as an ignorant person in Khayelitsha if you didn\xe2\x80\x99t know what fencing is. But that is slowly changing, with the introduction of this unusual sport in the township.

Siyabonga Kalipa

Cartoon

And the Oscar goes to….

Roberto Millan