Speaking at a press conference yesterday Makhenkesi Stofile responded angrily to reports in which a source close to the inquiry into the athlete claimed that tests had suggested she was a hermaphrodite. Asked how South Africa would react were the International Association of Athletics Federations (IAAF) to say that Semenya could no longer compete against women, he said: “I think it will be the third world war.

Gone are cold-war politics of propping up dictatorships in the fight against communism. Gone, too, are the days of unending development aid for developing African countries.

America in the early 21st century is more likely to need Africa as much as Africa needs America, both in terms of natural resources and energy as in political support on the global stage. And African leaders, from Kenya to South Africa, and from Angola to Congo to Nigeria, know this.

“America needs Africa on a number of areas: It needs Africa in multilateral structures such as the United Nations and the World Trade Organization, it needs Africa in the War against terror,” says David Monyae, an independent political analyst based in Johannesburg. “And given that Africa accounts for the largest number of conflicts where UN peacekeepers play a role,” the Obama administration does not have luxury of ignoring African conflicts, no matter how intransigent. “The US cannot think at this stage that a war in Somalia, for instance, has no effect on America.”

Most of the victims are young, but so far, no one in the country has died from the A(H1N1) virus, the institute said.

“We are not seeing severe illness,” said the institute’s deputy director, Lucille Blumberg, according to the South African Press Association.

South Africa’s first swine flu case was recorded on June 14.

Health authorities recommend that only people with moderate to severe symptoms or chronic illnesses, such as HIV, seek medical attention.

Anyone with flu symptoms is urged to stay at home as much as possible for seven days and practice good hygiene such as hand washing.

Forty HIV-positive women in Namibia have been made infertile against their will, according to the International Community of Women Living with HIV/Aids (ICW). The group is preparing to sue the Namibian government over at least 15 cases.

Campaigners also report coerced sterilisation in the Democratic Republic of Congo, Zambia and South Africa, where according to one report a 14-year-old girl was told she could have an abortion only on condition that she agreed to sacrifice her reproductive rights.

In a matter of minutes, the small village’s harvest was gone — and the Zambian inhabitants had lost another round in the battle against the elephants fleeing across the border from Zimbabwe.

“This year the problem has got worse. There is nothing we can do. The elephants have become so dangerous, sometimes they even destroy our homes. They eat all the mangoes — everything,” said Edna Mwamubi, an elder who organised the lighting of bonfires to try to frighten off the beasts. “They know the smoke will not last and just go off a little distance and then come back. Even firecrackers no longer scare them.”

The village, on the Zambian side of the mighty Zambezi River, just a few miles from the spectacular Victoria Falls, lies on the traditional migratory route for elephants from game parks in Zimbabwe, Botswana, Namibia and Zambia. The resident elephant population has doubled from 3,000 a few years ago to more than 7,000 today — but it is the influx of animals from Zimbabwe, where they are being poached in increasing numbers by unpaid soldiers in Robert Mugabe’s army, that is of particular concern.

Mr. Zuma must now manage the high expectations of South Africa’s unemployed multitudes and the trade unions that helped bring him to power even as he faces post-apartheid South Africa’s first-ever recession. It has arrived like a malevolent gift from the United States and Europe, authors of the global financial crisis, just as he assumed the presidency.