It’s Sunday morning. You touch down in a new country to promote an album you made back in ’09. Your shiny Learjet comes to a halt on Lanseria’s tarmac. You stick your hand out the window and sense it’s going to be a scorcher. You fling open the cupboard and pick out the thinnest black […]
Lifestyle
Posted inLifestyle
In praise of the perfect fruit
Yeah, yeah, I know some of you will have seen that title and assumed that I was making some sort of satirical reference to some of our more flamboyant celebrities, but I really am talking about fresh produce. In this case, I am choosing to honour the humble apple. For the past week, I’ve been […]
Posted inGeneral, Lifestyle
The unforgettable Vusi Ximba
Several years ago, I started a lecture on orality and popular culture with a reference to a song by comedian, traditional rapper, singer, story teller, concertina player and maskandi musician Vusi Ximba. In the song, Ximba tells the story of how a rural woman — let’s call her Ma Dlamini — who could neither read […]
Posted inLifestyle, News/Politics
Johnny Issel: What he meant to me
The first thing I did when I heard last Sunday that Johnny Issel had passed away was to listen to my vinyl of Bob Marley’s Buffalo Soldier. I thought it appropriate because this was the theme song of the United Democratic Front (UDF) in the early 1980s and Issel was a founder member. As I […]
Posted inLifestyle, News/Politics
The Mona Lisa conspiracy
Now they’re saying the Mona Lisa was a MAN? I’ve always suspected it! I’ve suspected it even more when I saw that picture — it’s a famous picture by now — on the front page of a Cape Town newspaper the other day! It was the story — “Zille, You Can’t Touch This” — by […]
Posted inBusiness, Environment, Lifestyle
Nuclear: A phone call away?
The good news is that energy department officials have been facing pressure from MPs to cut South Africa’s dependence on coal. The bad news is that a few MPs seem to think that nuclear energy can help achieve this. Following some time with French nuclear company Areva, DA MP David Ross recently told the portfolio […]
Posted inLifestyle, Media, News/Politics
Time for a gay revolution
Gays and lesbians unite. It is time to rise up. Homosexuals, transsexuals, intersexuals, transgendered, everyone queer, gather your friends and allies, open your Twitter accounts, prepare your placards, and take a note from our friends in North Africa: it is time for a gay revolution. We have been nice for too long, we have been […]
Posted inLifestyle
How to act foreign at a local backpackers
I recently slipped up at a backpackers in Cape Town and greeted the guy behind reception with a friendly “howzit”. He gave me one look and asked me to leave. It’s no secret SA backpackers have a dirty habit of turning away locals. As a local I can’t afford mistakes like that. I’m living in […]
Posted inLifestyle
Do you give to beggars?
To give or not to give. That is the question that many of us are confronted with every single day, though we usually avoid it by pretending that the man standing at the robots — nine times out of ten it’s a man — staring at you with a bin bag in his hands and […]
Posted inLifestyle
The day I fell off the top of a mountain
Plunging down the side of a mountain today, incapacitating both my right leg and my bike as I did so, my mind was driven back to what might have been my first lie. In the years before I became a teenager, I would have a recurring dream. It was both bland and vivid, and it […]
Posted inLifestyle
A reason to get on my bike
“Were you smoking something this weekend? Because whatever you’ve got …” My new colleague lunged towards my face, forcing up my Wayfarers to peer into my glazed eyeballs. “Look at his eyes. I want some of that,” she said to her companion. Dark rings. Bloodshot. Vacant. I’d been peacefully sauntering up Long Street, fixated on my […]
Posted inLifestyle, Media, News/Politics
Me and Nelson Mandela
I love to cook and so there came a point during the struggle, where I gave up full-time journalism, became a full-time activist, part of the underground, and after long, endless meetings, would cook for strugglistas. Murphy Morobe loved my veal Marengo, Cyril Ramaphosa would call at 11pm after going to mines and speaking to […]