Figure 1: An inyanga in her ndumba, a sacred hut used for healing. On the shelves are her mutis (medicine). (Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 3.0)
Traditional medicine practice is deep-rooted in African cultures. Approximately 80% of southern Africa’s population relies on medicinal plants for its primary health care needs because modern medicine is either unobtainable or prohibitively expensive.
Certainly the most recognizable of all arachnids, spiders are ubiquitous little predators on every continent except Antarctica. Their lineage stretches back 380 million years, with some of the oldest known fossils such as Attercopus fimbriunguis dating from the Devonian period and still having segmented abdomens.
Adaptations in bill morphology, diet preferences and social structures: insights from some species in the Free State.
By Dawie de Swardt.
LBJ’s or “little brown jobs” in birding terms are cryptic or brownish birds and most of the time difficult to identify. Larks, together with other generally drab-coloured birds such as pipits, warblers and cisticolas; are small to medium-sized passerines with such cryptic plumages. They occur mostly in open, structurally simple habitats, ranging from desert and semi-deserts, the Karoo areas, to the moister transitional grasslands and savannah woodlands to the east. Many larks exhibit substrate colour-matching, the dorsal plumage in particular bearing a resemblance to the substrate of the environment it inhabits.
Sifiso Samuel Gumede, Education not police, 2017. Linocut
A day when bullets rained down, clouds of noxious gas infiltrated airways and peaceful protests were met with violence, the course of our nation’s history was irrevocably changed. On June 16th we honour the sacrifice young people made in the fight for freedom. The Soweto Uprising that started in 1976 spread like wildfire across apartheid South Africa. The spark that lit the proverbial match was the enforcement of Afrikaans alongside English as the medium of instruction across schools. Students objected and with few other means to voice their dissatisfaction, they planned a protest action.
Over the last year, every aspect of our lives has changed. On the 27th of March 2020, a nationwide lockdown began as an attempt to curb the rising cases of COVID-19 infections in South Africa. What started as a three-week hard lockdown, has unfolded into months and months of uncertainty and isolation.