Thought Leader

Cape Town, like any urban area, is a city on the move. You can see it in every corner of its 2 461km2 metropolitan area, where 3.7-million people jostle for space on our roads. From Mitchells Plain to Milnerton, Sea Point to Strand, congestion is commonplace and smog levels are rising. Traffic jams mean lost…

The city where I live colours the experience I have on this planet and it frames my future, not just my present. The lack of opportunities to truly connect with others has swiftly removed my ability to understand this city, and in many ways, this country. Though a foreigner to start with, I thought that…

I remember my mother speaking of “guardian angels” when I was a child. Though I became sceptical of their existence as I grew up, those stories stayed with me longer than my religious faith. Somehow I had the feeling someone or something was my guardian. Little did I know, it was sleeping inside.   On…

By Michelle October What a time to be alive, students revolting and the flames of rebellion licking at the doors of the colonisers. The Rhodes Must Fall movement’s reignited its efforts and burning historic artworks at the University of Cape Town. This activism could just as easily be airlifted and placed outside Parliament’s doors because…

(Continued from here) What I know is this: on January 12 2015 my friend the Diplomat left his iPhone unattended for five minutes, someone nicked the phone and a week later the “new owner” replaced the phone’s cloud data with his own phone book. Whoever is now in the possession of the phone has a…

Over the weekend I met up with my friend the Diplomat and he presented me with an opportunity that I could not resist. We had not chatted since December when he spent his holidays in Cape Town and it was time to catch up. Although his time in the Mother city delivered on all the…

By Andrew Ihsaan Gasnolar We have seen the distractions all around us. We have been confronted with a great deal of flash but not much substance: from the protection orders urgently brought (and then discharged), to the newsletters from Helen Zille to the battle between a Chester and Ms Zille. However, this sideshow distracts us…

Approximately six months ago, the City of Cape Town began a poster campaign, explicitly aimed at highlighting the prevalence and social consequences of drug use in the city. The posters all feature a stern-looking local celebrity – most often Chester Williams, Patricia de Lille, and Ian Bredenkamp – with the following bold words: I am…

By Nicola Soekoe Okay, I said it. I’m from Cape Town and, sure, I love the place, but still my reply to the come-from question usually takes the form of: “My family is from Joburg, but I live in Cape Town.” Four years ago when I first went abroad alone Cape Town wasn’t the sexy…

By Dariusz Dziewanski Gangsterism on the Cape Flats is typically thought of a man’s game. But women have always played an important role in gangs — in the Western Cape and elsewhere in the world. Victimisation surveys estimate that 60% to 70% of serious violent crime on the Cape Peninsula may be gang-related. Authorities approximate…