Nelson Mandela’s childhood village shows how the ANC risks losing its grip on power
The green rolling hills of Nelson Mandela’s childhood village Qunu are now a dry pale brown.
The clear streams are muddied and the families sustained by their crops and livestock are hungry. The picture of rural simplicity Mandela detailed in his autobiography A Long Walk to Freedom has tipped into deprivation.
Over a decade since his death, his cherished hometown is now another impoverished village in the Eastern Cape – the poorest province in South Africa.
Mandela’s childhood home is off the N2 motorway, the longest-numbered national route in the country.
There are no signs to alert the trucks and cars whizzing past that the humble red-bricked house off the side of the road belongs to the man who led South Africa to freedom.
Not only the place of Mandela’s earliest childhood memories, but where he is now buried.
Just across the road, 29-year-old Babalo reminisces about the days the South African flag would be hoisted to signal Mandela’s return. Behind him, the white flagpole is stark and bare.
“Everything was nice when you saw him – when he was around. You used to get inside the house and he would give us sweets and money,” Babalo tells us wistfully.
His face darkens as he says: “The freedom was still alive but now everything is not good at all.”
Babalo says he will not be voting in this election. This is the most consequential election in South Africa since Mandela and his party, the African National Congress (ANC), won the country’s first free and democratic vote in 1994, ending 45 years of oppressive Apartheid rule.
Mandela’s childhood home in Qunu where he is now buried
The hills of Qunu are dry
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Why the ANC matters to South Africa
There is growing discontent with the ANC-led government and the soaring levels of unemployment, power cuts and corruption scandals that have marked the last decade.
Thirty years on, the ANC is at risk of losing its grip on power with polls indicating the party may get less than 50% of the vote.
“I used to vote for the ANC but now I struggle because I don’t see my vote – I don’t feel the fruits. I still live with poverty and unemployment. There is no change and that is why I stopped voting,” says Babalo.
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Zinhle washes clothes with dirty puddle water
Deeper into the fields that face Mandela’s home, an older lady wearing a faded ANC T-shirt is gathering maize from a field framed by withered crops and collecting dried cow dung to heat her pot.
“We are going to vote for the ANC because we have always voted for the party but we are aggrieved,” says 67-year-old Nobongile Geledwane.
“We don’t have water as we speak, I have just come from the river – we share water with pigs. We don’t have government houses. We are hungry. We cannot plough. Things are bad.”
Older ladies in Qunu support the ANC but feel they need more from the governing party
Older women cooking with dried cow dung
The ANC runs the Eastern Cape province where many remote villages struggle with access to running water and functioning clinics. Schools that are meant to provide schoolchildren with meals under the National Nutrition Programme that Mandela introduced in 1994 go weeks without offering children food.
In November, the South African Human Rights Commission found that child hunger in the Eastern Cape qualifies as a disaster and should be declared as such under the Disaster Management Act.
Across the state, mothers are having to give their children water from muddy puddles and contaminated water sources.
A statue of Mandela in a nearby empty museum
An ANC poster over Qunu
In the backyard of Mandela’s Qunu home, a mother of two washes her children’s clothes with water from a nearby dirty puddle.
I ask her where she drinks from and she points to the same puddle.
“We drink with the cows and pigs,” says 30-year-old Zinhle.
“I was born in the year of change – supposedly. I don’t see any change. I see that difficultness is getting more difficult.”
Donald Trump has agreed to send “top of the line weapons” to NATO to support Ukraine – and threatened Russia with “severe” tariffs if it doesn’t agree to end the war.
Speaking with NATO secretary general Mark Rutte during a meeting at the White House, the US president said: “We’ve made a deal today where we are going to be sending them weapons, and they’re going to be paying for them.
“This is billions of dollars worth of military equipment which is going to be purchased from the United States,” he added, “going to NATO, and that’s going to be quickly distributed to the battlefield.”
Weapons being sent include surface-to-air Patriot missile systems and batteries, which Ukraine has asked for to defend itself from Russian air strikes.
Pic: Reuters
Mr Trump also said he was “very unhappy” with Russia, and threatened “severe tariffs” of “about 100%” if there isn’t a deal to end the war in Ukraine within 50 days.
The White House added that the US would put “secondary sanctions” on countries that buy oil from Russia if an agreement was not reached.
It comes after weeks of frustration from Mr Trump against Vladimir Putin’s refusal to agree to an end to the conflict, with the Russian leader telling the US president he would “not back down” from Moscow’s goals in Ukraine at the start of the month.
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Trump says Putin ‘talks nice and then bombs everybody’
During the briefing on Monday, Mr Trump said he had held calls with Mr Putin where he would think “that was a nice phone call,” but then “missiles are launched into Kyiv or some other city, and that happens three or four times”.
“I don’t want to say he’s an assassin, but he’s a tough guy,” he added.
Earlier this year, Mr Trump told Ukrainian leader Volodymyr Zelenskyy “you’re gambling with World War Three” in a fiery White House meeting, and suggested Ukraine started the war against Russia as he sought to negotiate an end to the conflict.
After Mr Trump’s briefing, Russian senator Konstantin Kosachev said on Telegram: “If this is all that Trump had in mind to say about Ukraine today, then all the steam has gone out.”
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Meanwhile, Mr Zelenskyy met with US special envoy Keith Kellogg in Kyiv, where they “discussed the path to peace” by “strengthening Ukraine’s air defence, joint production, and procurement of defence weapons in collaboration with Europe”.
He thanked both the envoy for the visit and Mr Trump “for the important signals of support and the positive decisions for both our countries”.
At least 30 people have been killed in the Syrian city of Sweida in clashes between local military groups and tribes, according to Syria’s interior ministry.
Officials say initial figures suggest around 100 people have also been injured in the city, where the Druze faith is one of the major religious groups.
The interior ministry said its forces will directly intervene to resolve the conflict, which the Reuters news agency said involved fighting between Druze gunmen and Bedouin Sunni tribes.
It marks the latest episode of sectarian violence in Syria, where fears among minority groups have increased since Islamist-led rebels toppled President Bashar al Assad in December, installing their own government and security forces.
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In March, Sky’s Stuart Ramsay described escalating violence within Syria
The violence reportedly erupted after a wave of kidnappings, including the abduction of a Druze merchant on Friday on the highway linking Damascus to Sweida.
Last April, Sunni militia clashed with armed Druze residents of Jaramana, southeast of Damascus, and fighting later spread to another district near the capital.
But this is the first time the fighting has been reported inside the city of Sweida itself, the provincial capital of the mostly Druze province.
The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights (SOHR) reports the fighting was centred in the Maqwas neighbourhood east of Sweida and villages on the western and northern outskirts of the city.
It adds that Syria’s Ministry of Defence has deployed military convoys to the area.
Western nations, including the US and UK, have been increasingly moving towards normalising relations with Syria.
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UK aims to build relationship with Syria
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Concerns among minority groups have intensified following the killing of hundreds of Alawites in March, in apparent retaliation for an earlier attack carried out by Assad loyalists.
That was the deadliest sectarian flare-up in years in Syria, where a 14-year civil war ended with Assad fleeing to Russia after his government was overthrown by rebel forces.
The city of Sweida is in southern Syria, about 24 miles (38km) north of the border with Jordan.
The man convicted of the murder of British student Meredith Kercher has been charged with sexual assault against an ex-girlfriend.
Rudy Guede, 38, was the only person who was definitively convicted of the murder of 21-year-old Ms Kercher in Perugia, Italy, back in 2007.
He will be standing trial again in November after an ex-girlfriend filed a police report in the summer of 2023 accusing Guede of mistreatment, personal injury and sexual violence.
Guede, from the Ivory Coast, was released from prison for the murder of Leeds University student Ms Kercher in 2021, after having served about 13 years of a 16-year sentence.
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Since last year – when this investigation was still ongoing – Guede has been under a “special surveillance” regime, Sky News understands, meaning he was banned from having any contact with the woman behind the sexual assault allegations, including via social media, and had to inform police any time he left his city of residence, Viterbo, as ruled by a Rome court.
Guede has been serving a restraining order and fitted with an electronic ankle tag.
The Kercher murder case, in the university city of Perugia, was the subject of international attention.
Ms Kercher, a 21-year-old British exchange student, was found murdered in the flat she shared with her American roommate, Amanda Knox.
The Briton’s throat had been cut and she had been stabbed 47 times.
(L-R) Raffaele Sollecito, Meredith Kercher and Amanda Knox. File pic: AP
Ms Knox and her then-boyfriend, Raffaele Sollecito, were placed under suspicion.
Both were initially convicted of murder, but Italy’s highest court overturned their convictions, acquitting them in 2015.
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