Along Noupoort’s featureless plains, the Siemens 2.3MW wind turbines loom like a majestic import among the encircling flat-topped koppies. Enormous all 35 of them, almost futuristic surrounded as they are by the usual, unpretentious suspects of sparse shrubbery, uniform matchbox homes and the windpompe on this prehistoric Karoo promenade. At an imposing 99m tall, the …
Scores in the Northern Cape will have little idea that this Tuesday, 9 September, the world will be commemorating International Fetal Alcohol Spectrum Disorder (FASD) Day. Estelle Jacobs is not one of them. Neither is Dr Leanna Olivier. As project manager of the Hantam Community Education Trust (HCET), this is an issue very close to …
Be a laggard around the web long enough and you might wake up a relic. Antiquated, obsolete, convinced that the world’s gone mad and sure that there’s some super ingredient in the stuff both the senile and infantile are eating nowadays. Such is the world I woke up to thanks to signing up to TikTok …
Odd pastors and dancing old men in the TikTok universe Read More »
Who will the ANC have to blame when beset with the inevitable day of reckoning come 2029? That is, its support dips even further, and the mighty Khongolose is the former heavyweight – his best years behind him – and forced to lick his wounds from outside the ring of glory as he agonises over …
How do dialogues and commissions fix the broken? Read More »
The Netherlands, Circa 1942. Hiding in rooms discreetly concealed behind a bookcase, 13-year old Anne Frank and her family communicate in hushed tones, treading about cautiously. Isolated from ordinary life, the young girl takes to jotting down the miseries of that confined hardscrabble into her diary. Meanwhile, the Nazis are rounding up Jewish people like …
Few things will rattle a man into pondering his own mortality than a wary peer ambling through the gate to plead for ‘i-raad.‘ Potion, snake oil, a quick fix – whatever term you give it is a footling concern to the reason that – let’s call him Ghost – is practically ramming down my door, …
President Cyril Ramaphosa’s Cabinet Oversight visit last month to the Northern Cape may have come across as a rehash of established setbacks from two years ago. Forgive us if this smacks of resentful criticism from one with an axe to grind against the 7th administration, and instead revisit the nostalgia of issues raised at his …
Ramaphosa visits the Northern Cape and life goes on Read More »
One cat who’s never sulked over most of it is Hugh Masekela. Never clutched at the usual excuses or milked the tropes to make a hero or, for that matter, a victim of himself. No matter how the news anchor tried to spin the narrative or harangue him into another moping soliloquy around the godforsaken …
Four years ago this week SA was burning, the state apparatus caught so unawares that our nation’s finest could only haplessly look on as businesses were looted, torched and some 354 people lost their lives in the bedlam. Bheki Cele, the cowboyish Minister who’d popularized the buddy cop ‘shoot to kill’ was seemingly out of …
If you thought Donald J Trump is the big kahuna, you obviously have been paying scant attention to his former geeky sidekick. Elon Musk, the cantankerous brainiac, MAGA benefactor, and once-celebrated other half of Washington’s most famous bromance has – since the much-publicised first visit with his son to the Oval Office – left the …
