“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 »
Even at his most impassioned Songezo Zibi’s pastoral etiquette speaks as much to his mien as it simultaneously raises a salient question: sure, he’s one of the educated ones with an impressive resume but is the man from Mqanduli’s skin calloused enough to weather the vicissitudes of the SA political climate? At least insofar as …
On the Campaign Trail: Can the Editor Zibi RISE to the Occassion? Read More »
In what was always poised as a tinderbox long boiling to implode, overnight the streets of Kuyasa Township went from easy traffic to barricaded roads, burning tyres and angry residents telling law enforcement to ‘v*k off.’ So intense was the situation that riot police were called in from de Aar, and at a few times …
Axed ANC secretary-general, Ace Magashule. Image: South African Government.
