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 »

Working towards a philosophy of architecture without walls, Mauritian born and Durban based architect Doung Anwar Jahangeer’s guided  city- walks  have been  reshaping and shifting perceptions around the cities ’in-between’ spaces. Neil Coppen treads the pot- holed asphalt.

Uniting a love of architecture with art and activism with imagining, Doung (who completed a Bachelor of Architecture degree from the then University of Natal in 1996) labels his city-walk initiative as an exuberant exploration, as well as a humbling cautionary tale, an allegory on the infinite complexities of spaces and timings in the city of Durban.

I have lived in Durbs all my life, yet after a five-hour meander alongside this urban Shaman and his toret’s of inner-city- insight returned feeling as if I had just visited a foreign country. The result is of course an unsettling wake-up call–one that tends to highlight the apathy with which engage our seemingly ‘inane’ everyday. Read the rest of this entry »

My brother Gregg and his wife Angella (a web developer and illustrator) live on a mountainside in Fishhoek in the Western Cape. Their house overlooks the main swimming beach. On a balmy summer’s day their lounge window frames an idyllic picture: a stretch of white beach lining an azure coastline littered with bathers, surfers, tourists and the like.

From such a height the people on the beach tend to resemble the miniature figurines populating a model train-set or the busy layout of a Where’s Wally picture book.

On Tuesday afternoon, around 15:35 Gregg and Angella heard a commotion on the Fishhoek beach and ran outside to see what was happening. Glancing down at the Fishhoek bay they spotted a giant shadow (of about 150m) gunning towards a colourful bobbing object.  From such a distance they were unable to make out whether this object was a bather, bouy or beach ball?

It’s now pretty well known that the shadow turned out to be a Great White Shark, a suspicion confirmed when they saw the creature break the waves and wrap its jaws around the bobbing lump before submerging itself again and taking the object with it. Gregg being the techno savvy guy he is– with i-phone permanently attached to hip– Tweeted the sighting on micro blogging portal Twitter as fast as it seemed to happen.

His first Tweet read……

Tue 12 Jan at 15:40: Holy shit, we just saw a GIGANTIC shark eat what looked like a person right in front of our house in Fishhoek. Unbelievable.

Seven minutes later he posted a new update……

Tue 12 Jan at 15:47: We are dumbstruck, that was so surreal. That shark was HUGE. Like dinosaur huge.

This was followed by further tweets over the next few hours that included details on the arrival of the emergency services and confirmation that the colourful bobbing lump was indeed a human-being.

What is both fascinating and disturbing to see was how quickly these ‘tweets’ were snapped up by Internet news agencies and how fast news, via the rapid and tangled broadband grapevine, is capable of getting around these days. Read the rest of this entry »

For any sane person (that is one not overly fond of dental sadism) a trip to the dentist’s chair is avoided at all costs. No one enjoys a gloved hand poking around their mouth. No one looks forward to the injections, the drills. The saliva vacuum cleaner which makes me feel as if I have just leapt out of an aeroplane and forgotten to shut my mouth on the free fall.

For most of my life I have managed to avoid the Dentist for anything other than the odd check up and clean. That was until a few months ago, when I woke to discover a rumbling in my gums, a headache that threatened to split my cranium in two. Days later an X- ray confirmed that after years of waiting patiently in the wings, my wisdom teeth had at finally decided to make their entrance

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To this day the Art Deco style remains a contentious and oft disputed entry into the Architectural journals and history books. With its penchant for excessive ornamentation, non functional frills and outlandish colour schemes, the style is all too often dismissed by contemporary Architects as a brief and embarrassing rush of blood to depression era architects’ heads.  Certainly the conservative colonial population of Durban thought so, when in 1931 the veritable anti- Christ of architecture reared it unsightly head in the form of Art Deco apartment block known as the Enterprise Building in Aliwal Street. Unhappily for its detractors, the style would flourish like an overly flamboyant fungus in city and suburb across the country before petering out during the outbreak of the second -world war.

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Imagine a South African suburb without electricity- it’s easy if you try. Now imagine it without water. No fuel to sate the now stagnant Land Cruisers and stand-by generators. A not so distant future, where escalating inflation and galloping food costs will mean only Cabinet ministers can ever afford to stop off at Woolies. Imagine two beleaguered couples in this affluent suburb, the Dlaminis and the Goldbergs say, living on opposite sides of the formerly electrified picket fence. Shacked up, waiting in their three-storey mansions, for their numbers to be called on the overcrowded emigration list for Aus!

Pity Madame Dlamini, who in the absence of her microwave and electric grill, has resorted to cooking on her show- piece fireplace in the dining room, its synthetic rock embers replaced by wood salvaged from last season’s Weatherly’s lounge suite. Certainly, the wood- smoke redolence of a Transkei hut would take a little getting used to, as would doing her daily dishes and laundry in the now fizzless Jacuzzi. Read the rest of this entry »

On a hospital slab. Insides out, body parts in plastic bags, cotton wool taped over eyes. The anaesthetist reaches over and touches a braid of his dying patient’s hair.

Admiring the simple tapestry, he meditates on the day when devoted fingers (whose?) combed and collected each thread of fine hair. Each tightly woven braid the product of what? A mother’s love? Aunt’s persistence? Daughter’s reluctance? Hairdressers indifference?

He will never know though he likes to imagine she laughed at least once during the sitting. Laughter in between shrieks of hair wrenched at the root, laughter delirious on some stoep out in the August sunshine.

As he detaches his machine and watches her body  wheeled unceremoniously from the theatre, he focuses again on this head of knitted hair. Zigzagging contours rising from the neckline.

Each braid: three rapids, tributaries tumbling and tied inseparably into one. Unity, he thinks, unity when everything else has unravelled. Unity in a body come so irrevocably undone.

Beauty in my review mirror

Squinting nonchalant into the sun

Friday

5 o’clock traffic

Head cocked in half thought

Lips shaping the lyrics to some song

Beauty but a bumper away

Shifting lanes

Parts the pestilential smog

Drifts indifferent

through scorned swarms

  Read the rest of this entry »

Last Thursday I happened upon an episode of Top Billing on SABC 3. What ensued over the next hour was something, that as much as I try, I will never be able to forget.Excuse me then if you are one of the brides who have in past flashed your million-rand wedding ring at the camera (while the impoverished masses watch on) or if you happen to be one of the interior decorators or house owners responsible for the over the top atrocities that weekly assault our disbelieving eye- balls.

 You need only posses a reasonable sliver of intellect to see that Top Billing (henceforth and aptly abbreviated in this column as T.B) is full of utterly useless information. One minute seducing you with a calorie infested cooking master-class and the next showing you how to burn it all off in time for the summer.  In fact here is a show that aims to teach you a hundred and one ways how to guiltlessly indulge yourself to death in the new South Africa.

Of course if scrap booking, paper mache or mosaic are how you choose to idle your precious minutes away then you will find this essential viewing or if you are one of those house bound mommies who spend fortunes on a themed children’s party for a two year old– who let’s face it– will have absolutely no recollection of the costly celebration in a day’s time. Read the rest of this entry »

Slide open my bathroom window framing a far- off freeway.

Clear sleep from crusty eyes.

Three am.

Suburbs still

except for the sound of just woken hounds

machinery sawing metal

moans from the interior of mangled cars.

Medics and firemen

all hands on deck

Sirens respectfully on silent

still winking blue and red

proceeding with the procedure

cutting limb from carnage

life from crumpled tin- foil wreck.