It is exactly the description proffered in cultural magazines. An animal skin is draped on the wall, a bamboo mat is set in deep, handmade potions line the wooden shelves and liquor – bottles of it – are splayed out on the linoleum floor. In thick dreadlocks Lihle Matebese, a ward councillor by occupation but …
Sangomas, Witch doctors, The Karoo is Home to All Read More »
Broach the cadre deployment topic even with acquaintances, I’ve found, and expect either an anticlimactic ‘agreeing to disagree’ or to simply lose a friend. Best not to go there. Also, it tends to come with a pervasive affinity to the ‘winner-takes-all’ mentality, which holds that by virtue of clinching a majority vote, the ANC enjoys …
Dear Comrade President His Excellency Bra Cyril Ramaphosa. It is with great offence – by no means directed at you, Mr President, more than the sourgrapes who would dare speak ill of our Commander in Chief – that I labour at this missive. Thanks to their incorrigible slander I’ve been chain-smoking through the ganja plot …
“History’s first draft,” they say of journalism, the so-called fourth estate. Although many such drafts have been written on Colesberg since its days as a vulgar frontier town, these have mostly been confined to colonial history and the traditionally”white” side of town. The stone court house, Kemper Museum, the Anglo-Boer (South African) War…brandy-guzzling bootleggers and …
Debonair in a gleaming Brentwood trouser and designer golfer, Sipho Sandi, sat at his porch is the archetypal township tavern baron. A sharp dresser with an expansive demeanour even at times when things aren’t always as good as they seem. For starters there’s heavy competition from foreign nationals who’ve infiltrated the liquor trade, driving many …
SMMMEs; With or without Government, the Hustle Never Sleeps. Read More »
Around this time last year President Cyril Ramaphosa was readying himself to deliver the yearly State of the Nation address. High on most people’s minds was whether his “fellow South Africans” would hear the entirety of the First Citizen’s (FC) soliloquy without the power going out or the EFF, well, eish, just being the jeering …
SONA 2024; Same story but the EFF weren’t there to hear it. Read More »
“Why race continues to matter in South Africa when it shouldn’t,” reads Sandile Vabaza’s opinion piece heading on the Daily Friend, online publication of the Institute for Race Relations (IRR). That the article puts forth a sensible argument doesn’t spare the author from the barrage of crude comments – many bordering on racist – that …
At only 16, Gayton McKenzie’s polite way of asking for pocket money was to press a cold AK-47 against an unsuspecting guard’s temple. Seemingly he has put away the illegal firearms, reinventing himself as a doughty politician, still, it is his former incarnation that the world continues to talk most about. It’s how some remember …
In a turnabout that has got his former underlings – who once respectfully referred to him as uBaba – incensed, former president Jacob Zuma’s latest move is akin to that middle finger he’s known to show when adjusting his spectacles. Except this time it’s less out of mere habit than a pointed “stuff you!” at …
Barely out of adolescence, the multi-purpose stadium at Colesberg’s Riemvasmaak has long deteriorated into a limping, incontinent senility. The courts show signs of early ageing, are pock-marked and riddled with cracks. Shattered bottles and litter lie strewn everywhere, and those posts that aren’t completely broken are tinkering on their last legs. Nobody to swing a …
Big Budgets, Crumbling Facilities and the Lone Ranger Read More »
