Another video from our bloggers’ trip to South Africa.
In March 1886, nearly forty years after the California Gold Rush, legend has it that Australian gold miner George Harrison stumbled across a rocky outcrop of gold in what was then the Zuid Afrikaanse Republiek. Says Wikipedia: “Ironically, Harrison is believed to have sold his claim for [...]

Hector Pieterson in the arms of Mbuyisa Nkita Makhubu, his sister, Antoinette Musi, running alongside. Photo by Sam Nzima, 1976.
My good friend Sameer at WITNESS is leading an online conversation in commemoration of today’s 60th anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Here’s the question: What image opened your eyes to human rights?
Last week, [...]

For thousands and thousands of years the Nama people of Southern Africa maintained a nomadic pastoral way of life, tending their flocks of goats and sheep, gathering firewood, and collecting wild honey. Driving along the dirt roads surrounding Richtersveld National park you can still see the same lifestyle, supplemented by some modern conveniences like butane [...]

An article in this morning’s Times, cleverly positioned next to a marketing blurb about an increase in traffic to their website, says that South African bloggers are thriving in cyberspace. A new study released this week by World Wide Worx claims that 4.5 million South Africans are now online and that over 5,000 are consistently [...]

The surprise highlight of this trip for me so far hasn’t been a helicopter flight, luxury resort, or journey down three and half kilometers to the world’s deepest mine. No, what has impressed me the most was a lunch-time visit to !Khwa ttu, a culture and education center for the San people of Southern Africa [...]

Optimal Energy CEO Kobus Meiring Presenting the Joule Electric Car
Who Killed the Electric Car? is a 2006 documentary which shows the roles of American automobile manufacturers, the oil industry, and the US government in stopping production of electric cars in the US, specifically the General Motors EV1 of the 1990s. That turned out to be [...]

Yesterday morning we visited the Darling Wind Farm. In addition to the three windmills in the photo, there is a fourth behind me. Those four generate enough electricity to fulfill 80% of Darling’s current energy needs.
Of course, not every community is windy enough to justify wind-powered renewable energy, but there are plenty of windy places [...]

As I wrote a couple weeks ago in an email to the Rising Voices mailing list, I have mixed feelings about World AIDS Day. On the one hand, it can help create the illusion that we only need to think about AIDS one day out of the year and then somehow everything will get better. [...]

As if staying at the Rosebank Hotel didn’t already completely spoil us, we began our blogger’s road show of South Africa with a box full of gadget goodness thanks to the kind folks at Vodacom. Included in the bag was a Vodafone E172 Mobile Broadband USB Stick with enough 3G data to keep us publishing [...]