South Africa: Diary Of Troubled Times
A South African journalist gives her own forthright and often courageously iconoclastic view of life in South Africa's black townships. Taken together, Mathiane's stories of herself and her neighbors (most of them previously published in the South African journal Frontline) movingly portray the perplexity and pain of parents caught between the evils of a system that distorts their children's lives and the fighting response of those children.
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For much of Africa this year, immediate threats to survival dominated national agendas. In the extreme north and south, Libya and South Africa attacked the territory of weaker neighbors. Less noticed but far more widely devastating, a harsh drought destroyed crops across the continent, confronting more than 20 million people with the prospect of starvation. Declining rates of per capita food production over the last decade, coupled with escalating debt and falling returns on exports, left many African states at the margins of existence--at least according to Western calculations. And at year's end, a military coup abruptly ended four years of American-style democratic government in Africa's largest nation, Nigeria, renewing fears about political upheaval throughout the continent.
