SALIMA/BEIJING, Sept 18 (Reuters) – Malawians bill their
country as the “Warm Heart of Africa” and pride themselves on a
reputation for friendliness. But Jaffa Shaibu, a burly
32-year-old merchant in a clothes market in Salima, a dusty town
near the shores of Lake Malawi, feels less than welcoming to the
Chinese traders who have moved in over the past four years.

“The way it looks, one day there will be a big fight with
them,” Shaibu said. “One day there will be blood.”

JOHANNESBURG (Reuters) – Labour unrest sweeping across South Africa’s mining sector hit top world platinum producer Anglo American Platinum on Wednesday, with striking miners blockading roads leading to shafts belonging to the mining giant, police said.

The platinum price jumped as much as 1.5 percent to $1,624.74 an ounce, its highest since mid-April amid fears of more disruption to supplies of the precious metal used in jewelery and vehicle catalytic converters.

MARIKANA, South Africa (Reuters) – They are the anthems hard-wired into the soul of every adult black South African: the haunting ‘struggle songs’ that were the soundtrack to the decades-long fight against apartheid.

Now, a new breed of songs is being born of a wave of labor unrest that has swept across the platinum sector, culminating in the deaths of 44 people last month at Marikana, a mine 100 km (60 miles) northwest of Johannesburg run by Lonmin.

MARIKANA, South Africa, Sept 10 (Reuters) – They are the
anthems hard-wired into the soul of every adult black South
African: the haunting ‘struggle songs’ that were the soundtrack
to the decades-long fight against apartheid.

Now, a new breed of songs is being born of a wave of labour
unrest that has swept across the platinum sector, culminating in
the deaths of 44 people last month at Marikana, a mine 100 km
(60 miles) northwest of Johannesburg run by Lonmin.

MARIKANA, South Africa, Sept 10 (Reuters) – Striking South
African platinum miners stayed off the job on Monday and marched
to press wage demands at major producer Lonmin
as 15,000 workers at the world’s fourth biggest bullion
producer, Gold Fields, also downed tools.

Thousands of Lonmin workers were defying a Monday deadline
to return to shafts that have been idle for a month at the
Marikana mine, 100 km (60 miles) northwest of Johannesburg.

TWO KM BENEATH WELKOM, South Africa (Reuters) – One of South Africa’s biggest gold firms has taken the drastic step of banning all food underground to cut supply lines to gangs of illegal miners used to staying deep in the mines for months on end, threatening lives and official production.

With gold mining around Welkom, 200 km (130 miles) south of Johannesburg, dating back to the 1930s, the bedrock is criss-crossed by a myriad network of tunnels that provide perfect cover and multiple entry points for illegal miners.

JOHANNESBURG (Reuters) – South Africans celebrated Nelson Mandela’s 94th birthday on Wednesday with giant cakes, mass renditions of “Happy Birthday” and 67 minutes of good deeds – one for each year of the anti-apartheid leader’s struggle against white-minority rule.

But beyond the mawkish tributes to South Africa’s first black president, the day revealed the unseemly scramble among companies, politicians and charities for a slice of the reflected glory of “Madiba”, the clan name by which he is affectionately known.

JOHANNESBURG, July 10 (Reuters) – South Africa is talking to
Tehran about the prospect for Iran to insure its crude oil
cargoes, which can no longer be underwritten by European
insurance firms due to sanctions, Energy Minister Dipuo Peters
said on Tuesday.

Peters said Deputy Foreign Minister Ebrahim Ebrahim had met
his Iranian counterpart two weeks ago to discuss ways of getting
around the European clamp-down on insurance and reinsurance,
part of Western sanctions to halt Tehran’s disputed nuclear
programme.

JOHANNESBURG, July 5 (Reuters) – A major conference of South
Africa’s ruling African National Congress (ANC) last week was
billed as the final nail in the coffin for a drive to
nationalise the country’s mines. Instead, the policy corpse
appears to be alive and kicking.

While “blanket nationalisation” – a sweeping buyout that
would cost the state, by its own reckoning, $132 billion, or
nearly an entire annual budget – and a windfall tax appear to be
off the table, the week-long ANC talk-fest has left almost
everything else up in the air.

JOHANNESBURG, June 21 (Reuters) – To the minerals and
mobiles underpinning Africa’s pacy growth over the last decade,
you may soon be able to add malaria – or at least its absence.

Besides the huge human cost imposed on the continent – 90
percent of the 655,000 deaths estimated worldwide in 2010 – the
mosquito-borne disease is an economic millstone, draining public
and private resources and hammering productivity.