Pictures by Paul Fetters 

Travelling into Durban’s CBD from the Berea, one is met by two iconic and historic city landmarks.  In the foreground the spires of the red brick Roman Catholic Emmanuel Cathedral while just behind, the two gilt-domed minarets of the Juma Musjid Mosque.

In what can be described as a profound demonstration of interfaith solidarity, respected leaders across the faith spectrum, including leaders of the Juma Musjid Mosque gathered earlier this year to pledge their support for the Denis Hurley Centre project: a community outreach initiative spear headed by the Emmanuel Cathedral under the guidance of Fr Stephen Tully and project coordinator Paddy Kearney.

The new centre will be an innovative outreach facility to better serve the growing number of poor and homeless people in the area.

The proposed centre is to be named after the late Archbishop Emeritus Denis Hurley who served at the Emmanuel Cathedral for 60 years of his life and is remembered for his many and significant altruistic contributions to the city of Durban. Read the rest of this entry »

The scrape of their spades recalls your shoes on the driveway, heavy, home from work. Around five, winter dusk, sky murky purple. Often I’d pass you on your final stretch, turning up Tividale: peace in a moment, the now. Steps steady, slow. Your legs were tricky since childhood.

You should have taken the ride your boss offered you after work. He told me on the morning of your funeral, said he was giving you a lift but was delayed by some last minute paper work. You had decided not to wait, thought it better to take the bus. Said your mother was waiting at the stop to walk you home.

We shuffle down the slope of the Kwanangezi cemetery, clusters of gravediggers taking twenty beneath the shades of the only acacia. Spliffs and spades exchanging hands till one takes mine. A man with peep holes for eyes, two fingers missing.

 “Don’t cry, don’t cry” he says mocking the Ray Banded white boy, a visitor accustomed to the clinical rites of a Doves cremation parlour: Time to Say Goodbye misplayed on the organ, inanimate doominie at the podium. In and out. Far from this hellish descent, these injured dirges, mists of marijuana and dust making mud of the brain.

 At the foot of the grave (beneath purple Gazebo) sat your mother.  No matter how hard your brothers shovelled they could not conceal you. The heap beside the hole refused to lessen and your Dudu ,resolute as a stone and wrung of all grief, never once looked away. Not when they tossed in your pillow, blankets and clothes, a wilting plastic bouquet.

I hid your denim skirt the day before she returned to work.  Tucked it in the corner of a laundry cupboard. Memories less painful than ones material remains. Pocket’s an inventory of the living: bank slips, buttons, a pencil, bus fare shrapnel, balls of unravelled thread.

An hour, minute, milli second, a minor interruption and all this might have been avoided. Retrospect is torture still we play the scenario over and over. Your legs were unreliable, tricky since childhood.

So you tumbled as the bus left the stop, not into her waiting arms, but past. Under wheels, torn on tar, pressed like the flowers we laid this afternoon to mark the merciless place.

The following is an extract taken from an essay I wrote in 2008 exploring South African politics and the Performative turn.

I print an extract of this paper as I think it sheds some interesting light on the notorious Mr Julius Malema and his more recent “Kill the Boer” comments.

 This was an Academic essay written during the succession battle between Zuma (who at time was awaiting his corruption trial) and Mbeki in 2008, during which (a comparatively ‘milder’) Mr Malema was just beginning to make himself known.

 I have decided not to re- edit the extract even though my thoughts and feelings have shifted significantly over the last two years. Still I think it illustrates just how little changes.

Read the rest of this entry »

The creative process can be hell on earth. I won’t lie to you, trying to tell a great story is the hardest thing I know. It’s agonising, reduces me every time to a dribbling, chain-smoking wreck. It takes huge amounts of focus and dedication. Years of research, sitting in a room, alone, wrestling with words and images and trying to make sense of things.

Of course your hard work will pay off. I love the part where the script gets taken into the rehearsal room and ideas that have been living in your head emerge in the flesh. In this part of the process the script and idea is re-worked with suggestions from actors and director. The creative process, contrary to popular belief, is not a place for rampant egos and creative dictatorships—let’s leave that to the politicians please.

It must be the opposite– an open, collaborative, sharing space. A space where ideas are encouraged to meet and never compete .If it is your project then you have to honour the people that work on it, inspire everyone from the person who works at the box office, to the stage sweeper to the actors to the technicians to invest in your vision.  Read the rest of this entry »

A renowned hip-hop poet and Graffiti artist friend of mine and I recently engaged into a drunken dinner-party debate/row over the ubiquitous tagging of public property going down in Durban.

Tagging to my “mother-Grundy” mind, is a creatively hollow pastime appropriated and practised by bored “Banksy-befok” adolescents who like to think of themselves as “urban anarchists”.

The subject of our row was a local Durban tagger who had been recently trialed in court for 850 counts of tagging and now found himself slapped with a hefty prison sentence.

While I would not wish a prison sentence upon anyone, I would imagine that after 850 counts of tagging, one might decide to shift their lacklustre modes of rebellion in favour of a more effective means of urban commentary.

Time it would seem to grow up and move on. 

“It’s not considered vandalism” my friend had argued, “if it doesn’t break or defeat the purpose of the object. Spraying something on a wall doesn’t destroy its function, the wall still stands. How can you tell me this is a punishable crime” he ranted, “when murderers and rapists in this country get off from their charges scott free?”

While (sub)urban hip-hoppers may consider it an “innocuous” and even “subversive” act, one must pity the grouchy local residents digging weekly into pensions for the buckets of paint to erase the offending marks from their walls.

Offering a refreshing and very welcome take on the contentious art form, is a group of ex Durban Vega Brand and Communications School students, who were inspired by the work of British street artist Paul Curtis (AKA “Moose”) who began pioneering his form ‘Green’ or ‘reverse Graffiti’ three years ago.

Curtis (legend has it) first hit upon the idea while working as a kitchen porter in a restaurant scrubbing mountains of pots and pans. One dreary evening while trying to erase a grease stain on the sink wall before him, he discovered he had cleaned a large white patch onto the grimy surface.

It didn’t take long before the aspirant street artist began conquering the cityscapes of London, applying his vigorous selective scrubbing to more prominent walls and bridges. (see 2 images below)

Read the rest of this entry »

Tree Boy tells a deceptively simple story: set in 1960’s South Africa, an eleven year old boy’s mother dies, his father is unable to cope with the loss and turns to alcohol, they move from a farming area to an industrial town and hope is born again through the example of the life cycle of trees. Voila! But the script is something of a banyan tree, spreading its branches into related territory and sending its many roots into the earth. Read the rest of this entry »

Stupidity plummeted to new lows in Durban this week (with Sunday newspaper headlines that even satirists like Haibo might have been hard pressed to come up with) with the report that acclaimed artist and sculptor Andries Botha’s R1.5 million life-size elephant sculptures, made of recycled wood, metal and rubber, were ordered to be removed from a Durban free-way island, after passing ANC megalomaniacs found them reminiscent of the –shock horror— same unwieldy mammals gracing the IFP logo.

Let’s get one thing straight. With three sculptures, costing as much as this and weighing over six tons each, this was no trivial commission. This was no beaded chandelier or beach-front curio City- managers commissioned to dangle in their reception areas.

Predictably, Durban City-Manager Mike Sutcliff (currently enjoying the more wintry climes of Vancouver, Canada, where he is attending the opening of the Winter Olympics) issued his usual diss to Durbanites for “over dramatising” the situation and claiming that Botha’s Elephants were not passed through the correct procedures and committees before going ahead.

At the cost of R1.5 million one would imagine (but hardly hope) that the that city leaders and planners had pontificated long and hard enough before blowing tax payer’s money on an art work that is now in danger of being reduced to a pile of rubble because it has irked certain “elephant-sized” insecurities within the ANC.

At the same time, can we blame those who commissioned the sculptures? Should we pity eThekwini Municipality head: international and government relations Mr Eric Applegreen?

Could Mr Applegreen have ever in his wildest, woolliest dreams imagine that such preposterous claims would be laid against the sculptures and, more bizarrely, that such claims would seriously ever come to threaten the fate of Botha’s art-works.

The Elephant it seems is no longer allowed to be considered just an Elephant. No longer can we see it as a quintessential African symbol of power, freedom and grace. Rather the ANC would like us to believe that the Elephant© was created exclusively by and for the Inkatha Freedom Party, conceived, not by some higher power, but rather by a loopy illustrator armed with copious amounts of Ganja and a pencil.  Read the rest of this entry »

It is strange to be standing this side of the stage, when not so long ago, I was sitting in blazer and tie and sweating where you are, praying that self important ponce at the podium would keep it short and let us all get the hell out of here. So I will do my utmost to keep this presentation as short and valuable as possible.

I will not stand here today and give you a patriotic rant on having pride in your school and yourself.  These are all givens. I will try to avoid giving you an essay on tradition and discipline.

While I am extremely proud of my ties with DHS, it is not, I feel, in the limiting sense that some of the school’s old boys are.

The type of old boys who often claim that they attended DHS in its so called “glory days” and that after they left (and perhaps because they left) it all went to pot.

Given half the chance these types of men will bend your ear about what true discipline and respect was. Over a beer– or in their cases several– they might claim that DHS has gone to the dogs and that things, regrettably, just aren’t what they used to be. Read the rest of this entry »

Durban based furniture designer and artist Xavier Clarrise is unmistakably French. French ,you could say, in the way film maker Jean-Pierre Jeunet (Amelie) makes cinema and Marcel Duchamp once conceived sculpture.

He is a tempest of energy, ideas and creativity, speaking with a musical accent and at a rapid pace (his eeees elongated for emphasis.). He is unbridled in his levels of invention and flamboyant in his enthusiasms. Get him on a subject he loves (his interests are many and varied) and he will unleash a torrent of philosophical musings and observations. Get him on a subject he loathes (mention the word ‘Unique’) and he will pace the room, gesticulating like a conductor coaxing his orchestra towards a Wagnerian crescendo.

Clarisse was born in Lyon, France and claims that as long as he can remember he has been obsessed with making things.  He studied mechanical theory and technical drawing before attending the prestigious “L’ecole nationale des beaux art” of Saint Etienn. After specialising in sculpture and product design, he began to travel the world working as a freelance designer. It was in London that he met and married his wife Suzanne, relocating back to her hometown of Durban three years ago.

In recent years, Clarisse has applied himself in many areas and arena’s, working in furniture design, sculpture and installation. He has collaborated on various international and sight specific art projects in between launching a furniture range (vanities and the like) alongside Durban manufacturer Marco Bertacco for ITALTILE outlets.

His more idiosyncratic commissions can currently be found gracing many a trendy Durban household, eatery and more recently,  soccer stadium presidential suite. Read the rest of this entry »

To kick start each morning of the South African Military Societies International Anglo Boer War History conference, held in Ladysmith two weeks ago, a blank was fired from a British Naval 12 pounder. This I soon discover is the Military equivalent of slugging back a double Espresso first thing the morning. A reverberating shock to attendees’ ear drums and pace makers, prepping us all for the illuminating and often arduous day of battle-speak ahead.

Held at the Platrad Lodge, overlooking significant Anglo Boer War battle terrain, the conference boasted a range of international and local speakers talking on topics that ranged from this War’s many myths, tactics and military blunders as well as revisionist takes on controversial and largely misunderstood historical figures of the time.

With one hundred and ten years having passed since the War, it seems Boer and Brit can now comfortably share the same room without wanting to ‘bliksem’ each other every time things get a little heated. Throughout the conference, areas of research and interest were analysed with healthy amounts of objectivity and the atmosphere reminded one of a jovial old boy’s reunion.

The aim of the conference was to provide a new source of understandings around the causes, events and consequences of Anglo Boer War. As organiser and military historian Ken Gillings stated in his opening address: “Such a conference is arranged so we can learn from the past and ensure that such atrocities never again occur in the future.”

Certainly the seminal purpose of any historical gathering– the very hook on which history’s precarious future hangs– is how to ensure that younger generations of South Africans are made privy to such findings. Read the rest of this entry »