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Victims of slavery
March 26 is the International Day of Remembrance of Victims of Slavery and the Transatlantic Slave Trade. What was the Cape Colony’s role in the bigger picture of slavery at the time?
The Cape of Good Hope was a small, but not unimportant, part of the whole picture of slavery and colonisation. Firstly, there was no important trade here as in the East. Therefore the refreshment station at the southern tip of Africa was a natural halfway house in a long and exhausting sea journey, there and back.
Only people who were sent in the first ships in 1652 originally attempted it. Apart from a number of experts who were required to lay the foundations of a new community, the majority of the crew consisted of ordinary sailors and soldiers. Some of them were skilled artisans who had been trained in a particular field. The majority were considered suitable to perform the everyday backbreaking work.
Gradually the real problems presented themselves. One of these, as often also in respect of various settlements in the East and the West, was the urgent need for more people, ordinary labourers in particular. Locally there was no labour system with which the newcomers could integrate or of which they could make use...
Law
Crime and violence
Weather
Tropical cyclones
A tropical cyclone mostly originates in late summer or autumn as an area of low pressure over a tropical ocean. Warm, moisture-laden air moves into the area from which it rises. Water vapour within the rising column condenses into clouds and rain, and large amounts of heat are released, accelerating the rising flow of air even more. Eventually up to a quarter of a million tons of water may be sucked up per second. As the heated air continues to rise more and more rapidly, air from outside is sucked...
Science
Bonus for stargazers
Venus glitters brightly in the Southern skies at the moment, while Jupiter and the constellation of Orion are also visible this month. Join us on a journey amongst the stars:
From Earth, we can watch day by day as the Sun rises in the east and sets in the west. The Moon and planets and most of the stars also rise in the east and set in the west.
But the rate at which they rise and set is not the same for every object. Why? What is the Moon? What is a planet? What is a star? How does everything fit together? Where did they come from?..
Human rights
Social justice
South Africa's legal heritage is based on two traditions, namely the Western legal tradition and indigenous African tradition. Therefore the human rights that are applied in South Africa today are founded upon the Western theory of natural law as well as the African philosophy of ubuntu. The development of the idea of fundamental, natural rights...
Heritage
Mandela free!
From then on, the various governors of the Cape found the island useful for dispatching undesirables, as it is conveniently situated about eleven kilometres off the coast of Cape Town. In 1846 the prison was converted into a hospital...
Technology
Solar power for Africa
The idea that solar energy could replace conventional fossil fuels as the energy resource that provides the planet with its power needs has slowly become a real possibility rather than an ideal scientific dream. Developments in solar engineering have increased the efficiency of solar panels, and technology has made installation...
