If I’d heard it from the friend who’d rolled by my place around 7 on the morning of Thursday, 25 June, I’d have called out his BS. Called him a bald-faced liar. But between obliging this unexpected, hungover visitor with a cigarette lighter, my timeline unusually began to act up. Rather than the usual mix …
With a modest discography on Spotify recorded from a tiny studio plonked in a busy lounge somewhere in Colesberg’s Zwelitsha Township, MekzaRsa – real name Asemahle Mekile – is less a standalone than a worn-out cliche of the near-impossible dream of ‘blowing up’ someday. To rock the cool apparel, fill up venues, make his mama …
Many years since my intermediate education days, I grapple with the right wording to describe how I felt about History. I was a self-declared ‘lost cause’ at Maths, so naturally I tended to stare up at the ceiling in Algebra but would soon regain mild ‘interest’ during English only because I was not flunking every …
With June 30 – the D-Day where illegal foreigners have been threatened into a forced exodus or else ‘we’ll see’ – not too far off, what is one to make of 19-year-old Nhlamulo Sambo? In what is already an incendiary climate, all manner of speculation has come to the fore in the wake of the …
An eerie video is doing the rounds on TikTok. In it a man, seemingly operating all alone – Iskhakhaka (traditional Zulu shield) strapped to one forearm, a sjambok in his other hand – is walking briskly through what appears to be a downtown taxi rank in Newcastle, KwaZulu-Natal. Happening upon street vendors, he viciously lets …
Since President Cyril Ramaphosa announced his application for an expeditious review of the indepent panel report, processes that are usually chronically glacial have started to chug on unusually fast. Even to the man praised as a master of the long game, the May 8 ConCourt judgment was such a blindside it had him coming out …
Blame game and regret as Farmgate grates: Part 2 Read More »
The Constitutional Court’s finding on May 8 that the National Assembly had erred in its rejection of the Section 89 panel report into the Phala Phala saga has thrown a spanner into the works. For the ANC – which had misused its parliamentary majority to effect the rejection – the judgment has set in motion …
Nkandla to Phala Phala, the law vs party. Part 1 Read More »
Against the backdrop of Worker’s Day on 1 May, alleged acts of vigilantism aimed at suspected foreign nationals were being teleported in high definition from the streets of downtown Johannesburg into international media outlets like Sky News. What ought to have been a day of remembering the struggles and celebrating gains made by the working …
Revisiting the nation’s amble towards democracy from the perspective of Colesberg and other rural areas arouses interesting stories from people of otherwise simple backgrounds. Frontline activists recall a monumental task that history had cut out for them. At the outset, it was education-driven. Brief, off-the-cuff, a night-school-like crusade with little time to assess if the …
Freedom Day: Colesberg’s nostalgia and empty seats in Bloem Read More »
This week the Economic Freedom Fighters (EFF) announced that they would be seeking to have registration fees paid to various councils like the HPCSA and SACE by unemployed professionals scrapped. In a letter to the Portfolio Committee on Higher Education and Training, EFF MP Sihle Lonzi ‘submitted a formal request to Parliament for urgent intervention …
