From young boys playing around with friends at the nearby dam or river to those more adventurous diving off cliffs into the sea, the art of diving has been with us for a long time.

The divers will meet again next year in the 2012 London Summer Olympic Games.

Within a few days one town after another slipped from the Libyan leader’s grip, from Tobruk, Darna, al-Bayda, Benghazi and Ajdabiya in the east, to Zintan and Zawiya in the west. After a brief hiatus, important oil towns such as Ras Lanuf fell to rebels advancing from Benghazi and pledging to march on to Col Gaddafi’s home town of Sirte and, ultimately, the capital Tripoli.

One of the most hard fought towns was the town of Ras Naluf on the Eastern seaboard of Libya where days of fierce fighting by the Libyan Army and rebels witnessed some of the bloodiest fighting.

The ill equipped and trained rebels are made up of some well trained fighters but most of them have had no combat experience and only days or hours of training.  That coupled with no real command structure and no commanders on the ground in the frontline means they have to rely on the numbers and courage.

For days the rebels withstood daily bombardment by air, land and sea as they tried to hold onto the junction on the main road from Benghazi to Tripoli.

Living off tuna sandwiches the rebels would fire aimlessly into the air with their AK47’s to try to down the planes flying at high altitude.

The most effective weapon used by the Libyan armed forces was the air strikes as they had a massive effect on moral and although they did not cause major causalities, they forced the rebels into retreat.

With no effective anti aircraft weapons the Libyan air force flew their missions with impunity.

Eventually after trying to repel the attacks by the Libyan army they lost Ras Naluf.

This is a look at the battle for Ras Naluf Junction.

For the bare knuckle fighters anything goes; you can head butt or knee your opponent, beat him to a pulp or put a curse on him.

Deep in the green hills of the Limpopo province of South Africa’s northern most region, the Venda tribe hold a century old traditional bare knuckle fighting tournament over the Christmas period where women are forbidden and ordinary men become warriors.

The traditional fight club was used over a century ago to decide what men from the tribe would become warriors and fight for the tribe.

Bloody and brutal to some outsiders and sacred to the Venda people, the men of the tribe gather every second day at an sacred field near a small creek and challenge other men from the tribe to a bare knuckle fight.

Called ‘Musangwe’ in Venda, the men are split into age groups starting as young as ten years old.

There are three levels of fighters. Young boys, called ‘mambibi’, encouraged to play fight by their fathers. Then there are the teenage fighters, the ‘Rovhasize’. But it’s the experienced fighters that everyone comes to see. The champions.

Men who want to fight will enter the ring and look for a challenger. Once another man from the tribe accepts the challenge the fight begins.

There are only three rules that govern the fight and can thus end it.

1: If one fighter starts to bleed the fight ends.

2: If one of the two fighters raises his hand to stop the fight.

3: If one of the two men are knocked out.

Fights may take seconds or run for minutes with no rounds, water breaks, corners or trainers it is man on man fighting.

There is no prize money on offer and men risk cuts, broken bones and possible death just for the title of ‘Legwena’ the ‘real champion’.

If one of the fighters starts to bleed during a fight the fight is stopped and the bleeding fighter is taken to a nearby creek to wash off the blood.

With hundreds of Venda men forming an impromptu ‘ring’ around the fight the energy of the fight and the noise of the crowd is intense; blow after blow the men spend all day facing their own demons as they try to show the rest of the tribe that they are men.

While the fighting may be brutal to some, the men never take the fight to far and often two fighters will stop a fight and shake each others hands thus ending their challenge.

After all everyone knows each other in the tribe so the fight club remains a form of a cultural tradition that connects the men of Venda to their forefathers.

‘Flash blood’, is the phrase that describes the sharing of needles used by heroin addicts as they huddle together in the hand-made wooden fishing boats or back alleys of the impoverished fishing harbour of Malindi, Stone Town, Zanzibar.
Walking through the bustling streets in the sweltering heat of this Indian Ocean Island’s hectic market and fishing area, one finds men sitting together rolling joints made from marijuana and laced with heroin.

With their sunken eyes and that ‘thousand yard stare’, the addicted seem to be existing in a parallel universe from that of the oblivious, tanned tourists sitting on the nearby beach in front of their 5 star hotels, sipping on cocktails while rebooting away from their busy western lives.

But it’s behind the stunningly beautiful facade of the tourist town that the sad reality hits home. Over the past two decades untold numbers of Zanzibari’s have become addicted to heroin, cocaine and marijuana.

In this World Heritage site, and only minutes away from the tiny alleys with their hand-made wooden doorways, hundreds of addicts are buying the cheap drug which is flown into the country from Pakistan and India. Small packets of foil wrapping  – ‘Brown Sugar’, as heroin is locally called -  is both smoked and injected. For less than 1USD, addicts can find a regular and easy supply of heroin.

1USD that often changes the lives of users forever.

But there is hope. One person whose life changed is Adam Lupatu (20). He started taking drugs at the age of 15, but these days you’ll find him at the sober house run by Drug Free Zanzibar, an NGO which runs 4 sober houses aimed at helping the addicted.

As the number of users grows, the assistance offered by Drug Free Zanzibar (DFZ) and other NGO’s becomes vital.

Adam and other recovering addicts live in this house, tucked away off a main road in central Zanzibar. Behind the walls of the property are addicts desperately trying to change their lives and fight what is a difficult battle; that of overcoming their addiction and trying to live as normal a life as possible.

Paying their own way into the house, the addicts – once admitted – undergo an initial four months of recovery without leaving the house. Their daily routine includes group sessions twice a day, based on the 12 step program and mediation from Narcotics Anonymous, but run by the addicts themselves.

With posters reminding all of the steps to recovery covering the walls of the communal area, addicts sleep on mattresses on the floors of the house. A tame monkey is the house’s pet…..

Another of the addicts presently recovering there is a former National soccer player, Salum Amour (35). Hailing from nearby island of Pemba, Salum is addicted to heroin. Most of his time at the sober house is now spent learning how to get to grips with his addiction and cooking the daily meal of fish and rice with local herbs with the others in the ‘meal detachment’. In the evenings after washing his clothes, he skips in the back garden of the house to keep fit.

According to many addicts the local police do very little to curb the spread of the drugs and turn a blind eye to the shockingly transparent use of drugs in public spaces such as the harbour area.

The other area of concern is the fact that some foreign tourists travel to Zanzibar to find cheap drugs. An addict, who wishes to remain anonymous, claims that drug tourists included a national Italian footballer who ordered marijuana to be brought to his hotel.

Clearly the vast majority of tourists enjoy their holidays free from drugs but the ease of access to heroin on the island is a huge concern. Users often try to attract tourists to use drugs on the main beach in full view of the main hotels in Stone Town.

Added to the wide spread addiction problem is the possible increase in the spread of HIV AIDS due to the re-use of needles – although Zanzibar has a 1% AIDS rate as compared to a 7% rate on the mainland of Tanzania. The fact remains, however, that the sharing of needles is a major concern of the local health care community.

Although the scourge of drug abuse runs deep in the veins of hundreds of addicts there is hope for some.

Take recovered user Ahmed Bombay (49) for instance.

Ahmed used hard drugs for 22 years and as recently as 19 months ago decided to change his life and enter rehabilitation. He is a travel agent and manager of one of DFZ’s sober houses and is a well-known character in Stonetown, and his zest for life and infectious energy rubs off on those users who have seen the change he has managed to make in his life.

One can only hope that there are more addicts on the near-idyllic island who want to change their lives and leave behind the ravages of these all too dreadful habits..

From this 4 metre by 4-metre gym with one broken mirror as their only refection, some of the boxers have become national champions and some have turned professional.