Earlier this year, hankering through those unsteady motions that unemployment is prone to come with, rang a call from Maeder “Mr Oz” Osler. “PM,” (as he calls me) “I’d like you to meet a friend of mine. Jasper Cook by name…used to play for the African Jazz Pioneers.”
Over three decades ago, 3 July 1985, four youths perished under a fusillade of gunshots in Colesberg’s Kuyasa township. Known as The Colesberg Four; Funeka Siyonzana, Thozamile “Krakra” Maciki, December Morumo and Mongezi Juda were untimely casualties in the barbarism that was South Africa’s political past. On that day, a searing Karoo winter’s evening, an …
When interviewed, Mrs Thandiwe Bhuka speaks in tones reminiscent of a Devil Wears Prada-type corporate executive – all class and well-rounded vowels. Then she takes to the stage before an audience of boisterous schoolgirls and out comes the tongue in cheek and the moves – oh those moves – an unusual hybrid of the hip-thrusting …
For a man who’s been ducking slingshots and daggers of late, it must have come as a welcome respite for President Cyril Ramaphosa to take some time away from the hostility and mingle with an altogether receptive and bubblier crowd. In quintessentially Madiba-ish fashion the president got to hang out with the toddlers of the …
ECD; Remember the Kids but don’t Forget the Staff Read More »
Every Thursday around 13:00, the Wheels on Meals minivan blares an incessant, yet eagerly anticipated hoot through the gustblown streets of Colesberg’s Zwelitsha Location. Play ceases in these untarred streets as children scurry for their lunchboxes, racing one another to join what will pretty soon unfold into a tedious queue. In dribs and drabs the …
A decidedly poignant definition of what journalism is, I once came across during the somber aftermath of some natural disaster (hurricane Katrina, I think) that ravaged parts of the US. It went something along the line of “people going in when everyone else is getting out”. No doubt a phrase that encapsulates the footing of …
The Team: Lunatics going in as everyone else bails Read More »
All her life, Martha Kerneels has had to hop over a fence and disappear behind a ditch to relieve herself. Whenever a family member had taken ill, Martha, gown swathed around her slight frame, would plod to the KFC across the road to place an emergency call. 35 years old, she has never owned a …
“No amount of alcohol is safe during pregnancy.” This quote from Foundation for Alcohol Related Research (FARR) CEO Leana Olivier was enough to jolt our collective attention from the reading material just handed to us. “Us” in this case being five (very articulate, by the way) ladies from Lebona Trust; a Grahamstown-based NPO, Estelle Jacobs; …
Little Anele, disconcertment writ explicably on his 8 year old face, looks on as his dog, Danger, is about to go under the knife. A few minutes earlier Danger had been looking a little flushed; not the playful, gnarling family pet who snags tennis balls mid-air and keeps unwanted scum out of his owner’s yard. …
One would think that J.M. Coetzee’s critically-acclaimed novel, Disgrace , which garnered the author both a Booker Prize and a Nobel Prize In Literature would crescendo into a dynamic multicultural clinking of calabashes. But as fate would have it, in certain quarters the man’s otherwise extinguished work was considered so sacrilegious as to have a …
