I could use Julius Malema’s help here in my battle with some undemocratic types Down Under. Boet, if you’re not doing anything particularly controversial this week or putting your foot in someone’s mouth, help me out here, please man. Those Nando’s guys will love you for it — and it’s a great way to tell […]
Tony Jackman
Tony Jackman is a journalist, budding playwright and sometime chef. He's written two plays, An Influence of Ghosts and Blue Train Coming, and back in the day wrote loads of songs. He paints a bit in watercolours when he remembers to, and apart from that he massages words and pushes grammar for a nice little magazine called myweek.
Posted inNews/Politics
One day, under President Malema, will we fondly remember the good old Zuma days?
Anyone who is a politician in South Africa; everyone who wants our vote today: you’re a desperately sorry bunch, every one of you. You are, to a man and woman, failing us, the voters of South Africa. From the ANC and Cope to the DA, the ID, the little lads in ANCYL and pretty much […]
Posted inNews/Politics
Muzzling Nando’s and other stupefying attacks on our freedoms
Muzzling the Nando’s chicken would be funny if it weren’t so serious: the ANC Youth League’s threat to mobilise — get that? — mobilise the people of South Africa to rise up against a manufacturer of spicy chicken takeaways is another worrying pointer to a near future that every true democrat must dread. Oh come […]
Posted inGeneral
Holding out for the JZ that the dancing, swooning people see
I’m driving through Constantia past impenetrable electrified fences, marvelling at the way some people live and reminding myself that it’s all relative. And there’s an ANC election poster, hanging disconsolately on a tree with enough wood for four shacks. Yeah, right. LOTS of votes coming their way from all these left-leaning Constantia folk. These houses […]
Posted inLifestyle
Just when you thought it was safe to go out at night
Well, there I was, back at the theatre with an open mind and two open eyes, scanning the crowd from the highest vantage point at the Baxter Theatre, when I stopped myself. “Tony,” I said, “You’re counting black people, for God’s sake”. Had it really come to this? People like my fellow Thought Leader blogger […]
Posted inGeneral
Naked or naaied — a satirist warns of the cobra under the carpet
Is there a cobra under the South African carpet like the proverbial elephant in the room, defined by Wikipedia as “an obvious truth that is being ignored or goes unaddressed”? Is there a near future in which the South African media will find itself, or parts of itself, suppressed for the first time since PW […]
Posted inGeneral
Stoppie lorrie, my English side wants to get off
Dit my groot lekkerkry gee om hierdie hondeskou oop to verklaar, Meneer Zuma. You’ll be of a certain age and have an elephantine memory to match if you can place the first 80% of that line. It was, I believe, a running gag in a Springbok Radio comedy show in the sixties called Next Stop […]
Posted inGeneral
Who turned JZ into Mr Min?
Ok, who turned the world upside down? Who turned the bad guys into the good guys and the good guys into the bad guys? Who turned the ANC into the old Nats and The Arch into PW Botha? Who turned the Dalai Lama into Pol Pot and Jacob Zuma into Mr Min? April Fool’s Day […]
Posted inNews/Politics
Spag Blog reveals the truth about Malema
Blogs and Twitter have become the hot new breaking ground for news stories, so remember that you read this here first: today, Spag Blog can reveal that there has been an imposter in our political midst for much of the past year and that all of us, from the ACDP all the way down to […]
Posted inLifestyle
Black and white and seeing red all over
At first, having returned to Cape Town after years away, I saw red when I saw all the white faces in restaurants and theatres. Where was the real change so many years after 1994? But then I read Sandile Memela’s diatribe against “white” theatre at the Cape, and I started to think. When Memela writes […]
Posted inGeneral
Are Cape theatres alive with the sound of racism?
Being in the New Space Theatre for the first time since the old New Space closed nearly three decades ago — and only hours after reading Sandile Memela’s indictment of supposedly racist Cape theatre — had me wondering about his diatribe and the state of protest theatre right now. (Yes, I know, what protest theatre? […]
Posted inGeneral
Saffron robes and sackcloth
You have to wonder what liberation really meant for the ANC if the organisation can bar one of the world’s greatest beacons of freedom and enlightenment so as not to offend a repressive but powerful regime. You have to wonder whether it was more about achieving power than attaining freedom. There are a few rare […]