Red radicals storm Joburg legislature

T-shirt typo turns heads at Mandela bike ride

JOHANNESBURG, July 23, (AFP): South African police threw stun grenades and fired rubber bullets when radical lawmakers stormed the provincial legislature in the country’s economic powerhouse Johannesburg Tuesday.

Led by Julius Malema, who styles himself “Commander in Chief” of the Economic Freedom Fighters, some 2,000 EFF members protested the eviction of their representatives for wearing what they call “workers clothes” to legislative sessions.

The outfits include red overalls, red hard hats and rubber “gumboots” for the men and “maids uniforms” for the women, while most members wear formal western dress.

The EFF say this it to indicate their solidarity with South Africa’s poor who have not benefited from economic changes since the end of the raciallybased apartheid system 20 years ago.

Malema, who holds one of the 25 seats in the national parliament won by the EFF in May elections, led a group of the protesters through police lines into the Gauteng provincial legislature building, demanding a meeting with the speaker.

When this was refused he and others sat in the foyer and refused to move until stun grenades were thrown and he was escorted out, the South African Press Association reported.

Outside the building, police fired rubber bullets at demonstrators, the agency said.

Power

The EFF charges that the ruling African National Congress of President Jacob Zuma has betrayed the trust of poor black South Africans since taking power at the end of apartheid.

The EFF was formed by Malema, a former ANC youth league leader who was expelled from the party for indiscipline, and who is known more for his luxurious lifestyle and designer clothes than for his working class roots.

Nelson Mandela had a way with words, but not quite like this.

Cyclists traversing Johannesburg in the former South African president’s honor on Sunday wore T-shirts with one of his many inspiring quotations, along with a glaring typographical error in the word “freedom.”

The T-shirt read: “The purpose of freedoom is to create it for others.”

Some 5,000 T-shirts with the typo were made for the 35-kilometer (22mile) “Freedom Ride,” which passed landmarks in downtown Johannesburg and the city’s Soweto area, organizer Hugh Fraser said Tuesday. The spelling mistake was “a bit of a PR hiccup” but the cycling event was otherwise a success, drawing 8,000 riders, Fraser said.

The ride came two days after the July 18 birthday of Mandela, who died in December at the age of 95. The goal is to promote commuter cycling and to connect communities in Johannesburg, a city that was divided into wealthy white suburbs and poor black townships during white minority rule, which ended in 1994.

A South African court has jailed a rhino poacher for 77 years, one of the heaviest sentences handed out for the crime as poaching continues to escalate, an official said Wednesday.

South African national Mandla Chauke was arrested in the iconic Kruger National Park in 2011 after he killed three rhino calves. The vast park has seen the highest number of killings, with 370 slaughtered since January.

The South African National Parks (SANParks) hailed the sentence, saying it showed that “the courts are keen on stamping out the scourge of poaching.”