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For several years, South Africa has been a world leader in deporting people en masse. This paper analyses the contradictions that exist between South Africa's progressive asylum and refugee laws and its very rigid practice of mass deportation. These contradictions are instrumentalised by the Department of Home Affairs as part of a policy to control and manipulate migration, often executed by the police in a violent and arbitrary manner; the authorities primarily target people from Mozambique and Zimbabwe. The article argues that the current state of affairs can only be fully understood within historical context. Therefore, it is important to keep in mind that rigid controls of immigration and the practice of deportation were established during the colonial period and institutionalised during apartheid. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Since 1994, South Africans have witnessed the unexpected and enigmatic politicisation of sexuality to an unprecedented extent. This paper attempts to demonstrate, and make sense, of this phenomenon. It is structured in two parts. The first part considers ,,how sex is brought into the realm of discourse", as Foucault put it, and how this discursive constitution of sexuality is informed by wider dimensions of the post-apartheid social order -- in particular, the acceleration of the country's HIV/AIDS epidemic, on one hand, and the generational shifts associated with the emergence of new black elites, on the other. Drawing on this discussion, the second pan proposes a reading of the so-called ,,HIV/AIDS controversy" which has come to summarise Thabo Mbeki's presidency in many national and international circles, and which has generated more political division, conflict, uncertainty and anger than any other issue since the inauguration of the post-apartheid state. I argue that this ,,controversy" -- although immediately concerned with questions of science and drugs -- is more fundamentally a struggle over the discursive constitution of sexuality, in a form which dramatises the enmeshment of the manner of sexuality with the politics of nationalism, and the inflections of race, class and generation within it. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The perhaps most important physical evidence concerning the question of hominoid cognitive abilities is the "australopithecine" jasperite cobble from the cave of Makapanagat, South Africa. Although excavated in 1925. it was not closely examined until 1997. This paper reports the findings of this examination. Much of the cobble's long and complex history is reconstructed on the basis of an array of surface markings and residues of various types. The object is found to be an entirely natural product, a manuport that was carried into the cave. The author agrees with previous commentators that this was probably because of the colour and very prominent markings of the cobble. which implies a rudimentary australopithecine ability to appreciate the unusual properties of the object. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]