Articles & Essays
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Slumming with the Sun
So you don’t like nasty tabloids that debase our society with preposterous stories of tokoloshes and gory muthi murders infused with a solid dose of xenophobia, racism and sexism? Well, the Daily Sun isn’t talking to you. Who it is talking to is the people, and the people have spoken. And four million of them…
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On Being Foreign
They were a gypsy sort of family, roaming from Italy, to Algeria, to Tunisia and, finally, America; first New York, then to California. He was a third-culture kid well before it became part of the global lexicon. I suppose that was partially why my father was never quite clear about his background. He never would…
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How America’s Next Generation Was Outclassed
A recent feature that ran in the Los Angeles Times told the story of the increase in street vendors who have set up shop selling soaps and perfumes, flowers or hot dogs. No longer is this the territory of recent immigrants but rather the increasing domain of America’s former middle classes – you know, those people…
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The Full Ponte
The ride up is bumpy. At every floor, the cramped elevator stops and bounces, as if it were hanging from a delicate bungee at the end of its rope. It’s enough to make you queasy – at least on your first ride. We’re headed for the 51st floor at One Lily Avenue in Berea. We’re…
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Fear and Loathing at South Africa’s Public Broadcaster
Sometimes the most acute afflictions present in the simplest forms – like the rusted machine that once spit out parking tickets for visitors to the hulking concrete and steel towers of the South African Broadcasting Corporation’s Johannesburg studios, or the escalators meant to glide employees from the ground floor to the lobby. On the last…
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The Broadcaster Has No Clothes
When the billboards went up at OR Tambo, Durban, and Cape Town International Airports at the end of March, they marked the first glimpse of what’s coming soon to a TV near you. Those larger-than-life faces beaming down are SABC’s international correspondents, reporting from bureaus in Jamaica, Senegal, Nigeria, China, Kenya, Harare, Sao Paolo, London,…
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Certain of My Doubt
It was not until I read Life of Pi a few years ago that I realised the extent of my sins. “It is not atheists who get stuck in my craw, but agnostics,” Pi Patel told his creator, Yann Martel. “Doubt is useful for a while. But we must move on. To choose doubt as…
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Watch Your Language
Everyone in the room thought they got the joke. When Trevor Noah announced Black Panther for Best Picture at the 2019 Oscars, a wave of laughter washed over the crowd as he talked about growing up in the fictional country of Wakanda. As T’Challa flew over his village, Noah said he was reminded of a…
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One Night in Snake Park
It was in front of the Waka Waka, a small, informal convenience store – locally known as a “spaza shop” – that things began to unravel. Six years ago, sometime in the afternoon of January 19, 2015, an argument that began at the Waka Waka spiraled out of control. Before the end of the day,…
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How Perugia (Almost) Broke My Heart
It started off at the session on education. Last week, in a corner room just off the Piazza IV Novembre, in the charming medieval town of Perugia, Italy, Alice Ross, a young journalist working for Greenpeace UK’s Unearthed bemoaned the cost of her fancy investigative journalism degree at City, University of London. The total for…
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On the Death of the Bookstore
It was the New Yorker cover that started it all. In December last year, the front of the magazine of the chattering literary classes showed a young bookshop attendant in takkies pointing a perplexed older man in a suit towards a two-tiered bookshelf. On it were William Shakespeare and Mark Twain bobble heads, baseball caps inscribed with…
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The Funny Thing About Race in South Africa
It’s 1948 and it’s the first day of apartheid in South Africa. A jazzy tune is playing, the sun is shining and some white people are lying on blankets on a grassy embankment. A familiar sign pops up: “Whites Only.” The camera pans onto a young black man who is taking his place on the…
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Mother and Daughter
Mother When I was nine, the same age as my daughter is now, my best friend and I were lying on the living room floor flipping through my family’s photo albums. She stopped on a page and delicately fingered the black-and- white photograph of my mother and father at their wedding. “Wow,” she murmured, “your…
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Making a Run for the Border
It was a stifling 35 degrees when we arrived in Musina, the kind of dry, dusty heat that makes every movement slow, even when you think you should be in a hurry. But then there is no need to dawdle in a border town. It was my first time in Musina and Grace’s* fourth. The…
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How 702 Got Its Groove Back
The digital clock glares down in red neon from its position above the Talk Radio 702 news desk. It’s 9.28 on a Thursday morning in early April and Johannesburg news editor Katy Katopodis, long unruly black hair, brown eyes, corduroy jeans and an olive-coloured sweater, is sitting cross-legged on a low slung office chair in…
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A Rumble in the Jungle
As you drive into Kinshasa, the battle lines become clear. These are not potholes, they are large ponds of water where concrete gave in to time long ago, and cars and trucks and windowless, battered taxis have no option but to exist in a constant state of near collision. One of the city’s poorest, most…
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In a Dainfern State of Mind
There are two ways to enter Dainfern. One is through the Broadacres gate. It looks much the same as the William Nicol entrance — both have grand white wooden facades with grey roofing and boomed lanes for “visitors” and “residents” — but the Broadacres gate is a more fitting way to arrive. If you try to…
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The True Believer
David Pasquarelli sits quietly, his hands folded in his lap. In his sunny lower Haight apartment, the young activist offers ice tea to his guests. He is soft-spoken and polite. He is on his best behavior. He does not resemble the image of a man with 52 civil restraining orders, who stormed into meetings full…
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In Suburbia
Victor is 43 and lives in the backyard in a small room, maybe eight feet by eight feet. I would guess it is the size of a prison cell. It has no windows. There is no paint on the walls, just raw, grey concrete that is cool to the touch. The floor is the same,…
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Peddling the American Dream
There is something about doing 140km/h on a Jo’burg highway at 4:30pm on a weekday with no car in sight — except for the thousands of poor suckers who aren’t going anywhere, backed up and blocked from every onramp — that screams: hanging out with Michelle Obama is very, very cool. Africa’s economic capital came…
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Selling Out: How I Learned to Let Go and Love (Free) Luxury Cruising
The grin on my face stretched from the deck to the point where you could just make out the last of the ship’s wake in the moonlight. I had one glass of red wine, just one. Well, and that frozen sweet-melon cocktail at this little beachfront bar in Mykonos, but no more. Yet, on my…
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BMW Buyer, You’re On Your Own
My BMW dealer is no longer speaking to me. I think it might have been something I said. Our relationship started to fall apart when a plucky salesperson by the name of Danica phoned in early July and asked if I wanted to renew my motor plan. Yes, of course, I told Danica, but my…
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Singing for His SUV’s
On a recent Wednesday afternoon in Kinshasa we sat on a marbled garden terrace waiting for Werrason, one of the Democratic Republic of Congo’s most famous musicians. There were palm trees and red roses and cactuses and, next to a grand entrance with Greek pillars, an oversized vase filled with light pink and beige nylon…
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How It Is in Paradise
This is how you arrive on Denis Island: after bouncing through the air for 25 minutes on an Air Seychelles 19-seater De Havilland Twin Otter Series 300 with a no-smoking sign, a no-cellphone sign, a barf bag and emergency procedures with helpful instructions such as “remain calm” in the seat pocket in front of you,…
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Confessions of a Walmart Shopper
I never intended to shop at Walmart. Ever. After all, Sam Walton and family represented all I was raised to sneer at. They are well known for stomping out freedom of speech by snatching “offensive” artists such as Sheryl Crow off their abundant shelves and banning any books they deem unfit for popular consumption, including Jon…
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Masters of Our Own Destruction
On a recent Monday morning some of South Africa’s most senior journalists, with two dozen fresh-faced journalism students, gathered at Hofmeyr House in a leafy corner of the Wits University campus. Crammed into a small room with low-slung ceilings, they were there to hear British journalist Nick Davies speak about the state of the world’s…
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Rehabs of the Rich and Infamous
The Fix, an addiction and recovery website run out of Los Angeles, covers subjects such as celebrity sex addictions as well as more serious topics about, say, the state of addiction research. There’s also a section called “rehab reviews” where you can take a look at independent write-ups of various facilities much like you would…
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And Now for the Bad News
Tshivis Tshivuadi sits among piles of thin, tabloid-size newspapers that sprawl in alternating heights across his wooden desk. The general secretary of Journalists in Danger (JED), a not-for-profit group funded by various British, French and Swiss organisations, has a wide face and thick fingers. He sits under the fluorescent lights, shielded from the afternoon sun…
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SADC Tribunal goes on trial
In November of 2008, Ben Freeth and a motley crew of white Zimbabwean farmers, who took their government to the Southern African Development Community Tribunal in Windhoek in an effort to win back their land, wept in open court when they heard the judgment passed down. After months of stops and starts, the court unanimously found…
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In South Africa, Anger in a Hashtag
Early one morning last year a handful of students gathered to block the main entrance to the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg to protest the university’s proposed 10 percent tuition fee hike. Their intention: to physically illustrate the economic barriers faced by those attempting to get into South Africa’s institutions of knowledge. Protests quickly…
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We Are All Africans
They came to live the African Dream. Now they sit on patches of browned grass on the edges of our cities, living in tents, their bodies battered, their homes burnt to the ground, their possessions crushed, stolen. Now they must start again. The True Believer He carries the Holy Bible with him everywhere he goes.…
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