Johannesburg

Each morning, an old Toyota arrives at the park, its engine protesting but its light blue paint work spotless. A sprightly woman with neatly coiffed snow-white hair alights. She and her arthritic dog, part border collie, part mutt, walk once around the park. Passing, she nods and smiles. A man, wearing only his briefs, sits in the sun on a rock in the middle of the park's river, his clothes laid out to dry. On the riverbank, faded yellow signs with skulls and crossbones warn against drinking, swimming or washing there.

Spoek Mathambo grew up in the Johannesburg township of Soweto, where his adolescence was defined by the end of apartheid. Now 27, this South African singer-rapper-producer has emerged as one of the year's most exciting new artists, with a bold sound bent on stylistic desegregation and an unlikely relationship with an American indie-rock label. Mathambo funnels a dizzying number of influences - both musical and cultural - into “Father Creeper,” due out Tuesday on Seattle's Sub Pop. His music is an electro-acoustic melee of swaggering rap verses, scratchy rock guitar, singsong vocal hooks and staticky white noise.

The spring, just over 20 miles northwest of Johannesburg, flows blood red. It is toxic, highly acidic and full of heavy metals, so nasty that newly weaned impala and other animals in the Krugersdorp Game Reserve downstream can't drink the water ? and some of them die of thirst. The water, a poisonous legacy of the gold mining industry, is dead. Not one living organism survives in it. Millions of gallons of the same kind of toxic water lie underneath Johannesburg, a city of nearly 4 million people, and it's rising 50 feet a month.

Preparing to move to Africa two years ago, the 26-year-old Londoner looked at her beloved pair of 6-inch gold platform shoes, sensing she might not get the chance to wear them again. "But I packed them anyway," Sharna Darko recalled. Sister-in-law Louise Darko, meanwhile, took her entire 30-pair shoe collection. A generation earlier, Sharna's parents had left their home in Jamaica and Louise's parents had departed their Ghana homestead to go to a land of opportunity: Britain.

Preparing to move to Africa two years ago, the 26-year-old Londoner looked at her beloved pair of 6-inch gold platform shoes, sensing she might not get the chance to wear them again. "But I packed them anyway," Sharna Darko recalled. Sister-in-law Louise Darko, meanwhile, took her entire 30-pair shoe collection. A generation earlier, Sharna's parents had left their home in Jamaica and Louise's parents had departed their Ghana homestead to go to a land of opportunity: Britain.

Regarding "New Shine on City of Gold" (Nov. 16): Former resident Ted Botha's rosy picture of Johannesburg as a tourist destination was rather typical of many of my South African friends, who grossly understate the epidemic of crime that plagues the city and the country. This is not an issue to be marginalized. Before 2001, Johannesburg had a murder rate 16 times that of London, and one in 110 people was a victim of aggravated robbery with a firearm each year -- exponentially higher than any other place Americans are likely to travel.

A delegation of the International Olympic Committee arrives Friday in Johannesburg on a fact-finding mission that many South Africans are predicting will lead to the country's speedy return to world sporting competition, perhaps in time for the 1992 games in Barcelona, Spain. South African sporting administrators previously won praise from longtime opponent and head of Africa's National Olympic Committee, Jean Claude Ganga, for establishing multiracial bodies to control sports in the country.

Five exiled leaders of the African National Congress return to South Africa under a temporary amnesty this week to prepare for next month's historic talks with President Frederik W. de Klerk's government. The returnees, including the chief of the once-outlawed group's 30-year guerrilla war against the white leadership, will meet with deputy president Nelson Mandela and other internal ANC leaders.

The Supreme Court today turned down black activist Winnie Mandela's bid to overturn a government order barring her from Johannesburg and the neighboring Soweto black township. In Cape Town, meanwhile, U.S. envoy Chester Crocker met with President Pieter W. Botha to discuss Namibian independence and deliver a personal letter from President Reagan. Mandela, known in black dissident circles as "the Mother of the Nation," was barred by a government order issued Dec.

When apartheid ended a decade ago, this was a tidy, all-white suburb of 20,000 squeezed between the sprawling black township of Soweto and the economic engine of white rule, Johannesburg. But the residents who converged on a local school to vote in elections Wednesday reflected, like so much of South Africa, a nation transformed. Now a teeming suburb of 50,000, Rosettenville is a racial melange.

Derek Mutigo's home is pitch black and as cold as a fridge. To reach it, he descends broken steps into a cavernous basement and edges along a corridor holding a small plastic flashlight, its pale beam revealing haphazard plasterboard walls that don't reach the ceiling. Numbers are scrawled in black ink on rickety doors. Nothing's painted; everything looks as though it was filched from a building site. "Warning, strictly no alcohol, smoking and fighting," says a scribbled sign on a wall.

Gil Scott-Heron, a singer, songwriter, poet and author whose social commentary and combination of spoken words with musical grooves are widely cited as a seminal influence on rap music, died Friday. He was 62. The Associated Press reported that a friend, Doris C. Nolan, who answered the telephone number listed for Scott-Heron's Manhattan recording company, said he died at St. Luke's Hospital in New York after becoming sick upon returning from a trip to Europe. Scott-Heron, who recorded and performed prolifically from the early 1970s until the mid-'80s before being derailed by drug addiction, was a vital link between the percussive polemics of New York's the Last Poets of the 1960s and such politically charged hip-hop forces as Public Enemy and Talib Kweli.

The spring, just over 20 miles northwest of Johannesburg, flows blood red. It is toxic, highly acidic and full of heavy metals, so nasty that newly weaned impala and other animals in the Krugersdorp Game Reserve downstream can't drink the water ? and some of them die of thirst. The water, a poisonous legacy of the gold mining industry, is dead. Not one living organism survives in it. Millions of gallons of the same kind of toxic water lie underneath Johannesburg, a city of nearly 4 million people, and it's rising 50 feet a month.

Each morning, an old Toyota arrives at the park, its engine protesting but its light blue paint work spotless. A sprightly woman with neatly coiffed snow-white hair alights. She and her arthritic dog, part border collie, part mutt, walk once around the park. Passing, she nods and smiles. A man, wearing only his briefs, sits in the sun on a rock in the middle of the park's river, his clothes laid out to dry. On the riverbank, faded yellow signs with skulls and crossbones warn against drinking, swimming or washing there.

A strike by 1.3 million South African public servants threatened Thursday to drag on for a third week as unions signaled that they would reject the government's latest compromise offer, a wage hike that would be more than double the rate of inflation. Zwelinzima Vavi, secretary-general of the main trade union federation, COSATU, said his organization had rejected the offer but that talks continued. Unions representing nurses, health and education workers, and police also said they would reject the offer, and other unions said they would follow suit in the coming days.

Reporting from Johannesburg, South Africa — A strike by stadium stewards over pay had spread to half the World Cup venues by Tuesday, forcing police to bring in more than 1,000 officers to guarantee security for a night game between Brazil and North Korea at Ellis Park. Several hundred protesting workers, clad all in black, were singing, chanting and whistling as fans and journalists began arriving at the downtown Johannesburg stadium Tuesday afternoon. Grim-faced police officers toting shotguns looked on from just a few feet away.

Day two, it turns out, is the worst. When the power goes off in my neighborhood, it takes awhile for the consequences to seep in. So, OK, no Facebook, no Twitter, no e-mail, no Google, no hourly news check. No computer. No fax, printer or photocopier. Worse: No stove, no reading lights. No bathroom light, which brings me to . . . no hot water. Then, more dire consequences. In one of the world's worst crime cities, no alarm, no lighting around the house. And not to mention that it's cold with no heater on a wintry day in Johannesburg.

Reporting from Johannesburg, South Africa — Five days ahead of the most significant sporting event ever to take place on the African continent, soccer's 2010 World Cup on Sunday ran slap bang into the reality that is Africa. A tune-up game between Nigeria and North Korea in the northern Johannesburg neighborhood of Tembisa suddenly became a news event when hundreds of fans stampeded twice while trying to enter a small stadium. Before order had been restored, a policeman had been seriously injured when he was crushed against a gate, and 14 fans had to be taken to hospital with assorted injuries, none of them believed serious.

South Africa's fast train was so new when it carried its first passengers Tuesday that it wasn't quite finished. Builders had left string tacked to a wall in the underground station in upscale Sandton, and their notes were still scrawled on walls. There were patches of rough unfinished concrete, paint drips and the earthy cement smell of a building site. But it didn't matter. For South Africans, the Gautrain (pronounced how-train), traveling at 100 mph and linking the area's airport with Sandton, is a powerful symbol of modern Africa, and their country's advancement and preparedness for the World Cup beginning late this week.

Reporting from Johannesburg, South Africa — Five days ahead of the most significant sporting event ever to take place on the African continent, soccer's 2010 World Cup on Sunday ran slap bang into the reality that is Africa. A tune-up game between Nigeria and North Korea in the northern Johannesburg neighborhood of Tembisa suddenly became a news event when hundreds of fans stampeded twice while trying to enter a small stadium. Before order had been restored, a policeman had been seriously injured when he was crushed against a gate, and 14 fans had to be taken to hospital with assorted injuries, none of them believed serious.