<figure class="wp-block-gallery columns-3 is-cropped wp-block-gallery-1 is-layout-flex wp-block-gallery-is-layout-flex"><ul class="blocks-gallery-grid"><li class="blocks-gallery-item"><figure><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" width="1024" height="683" src="https://cms.forbesafrica.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/06/Fight-With-Insight-2-of-13-1024x683.jpg" alt="" data-id="51362" data-full-url="https://cms.forbesafrica.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/06/Fight-With-Insight-2-of-13-scaled.jpg" data-link="https://www.forbesafrica.com/?attachment_id=51362" class="wp-image-51362" srcset="https://cms.forbesafrica.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/06/Fight-With-Insight-2-of-13-1024x683.jpg 1024w, https://cms.forbesafrica.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/06/Fight-With-Insight-2-of-13-300x200.jpg 300w, https://cms.forbesafrica.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/06/Fight-With-Insight-2-of-13-768x512.jpg 768w, https://cms.forbesafrica.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/06/Fight-With-Insight-2-of-13-1536x1024.jpg 1536w, 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https://cms.forbesafrica.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/06/Fight-With-Insight-4-of-13-768x409.jpg 768w, https://cms.forbesafrica.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/06/Fight-With-Insight-4-of-13-1536x818.jpg 1536w, https://cms.forbesafrica.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/06/Fight-With-Insight-4-of-13-2048x1091.jpg 2048w" sizes="auto, (max-width: 1024px) 100vw, 1024px" /><figcaption class="blocks-gallery-item__caption"> </figcaption></figure></li><li class="blocks-gallery-item"><figure><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" width="1024" height="683" src="https://cms.forbesafrica.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/06/Fight-With-Insight-5-of-13-1024x683.jpg" alt="" data-id="51365" data-full-url="https://cms.forbesafrica.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/06/Fight-With-Insight-5-of-13-scaled.jpg" data-link="https://www.forbesafrica.com/?attachment_id=51365" class="wp-image-51365" srcset="https://cms.forbesafrica.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/06/Fight-With-Insight-5-of-13-1024x683.jpg 1024w, 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srcset="https://cms.forbesafrica.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/06/Fight-With-Insight-7-of-13-1024x683.jpg 1024w, https://cms.forbesafrica.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/06/Fight-With-Insight-7-of-13-300x200.jpg 300w, https://cms.forbesafrica.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/06/Fight-With-Insight-7-of-13-768x512.jpg 768w, https://cms.forbesafrica.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/06/Fight-With-Insight-7-of-13-1536x1024.jpg 1536w, https://cms.forbesafrica.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/06/Fight-With-Insight-7-of-13-2048x1365.jpg 2048w" sizes="auto, (max-width: 1024px) 100vw, 1024px" /></figure></li><li class="blocks-gallery-item"><figure><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" width="1024" height="683" src="https://cms.forbesafrica.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/06/Fight-With-Insight-8-of-13-1024x683.jpg" alt="" data-id="51368" data-full-url="https://cms.forbesafrica.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/06/Fight-With-Insight-8-of-13-scaled.jpg" data-link="https://www.forbesafrica.com/?attachment_id=51368" class="wp-image-51368" srcset="https://cms.forbesafrica.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/06/Fight-With-Insight-8-of-13-1024x683.jpg 1024w, https://cms.forbesafrica.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/06/Fight-With-Insight-8-of-13-300x200.jpg 300w, https://cms.forbesafrica.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/06/Fight-With-Insight-8-of-13-768x512.jpg 768w, https://cms.forbesafrica.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/06/Fight-With-Insight-8-of-13-1536x1024.jpg 1536w, https://cms.forbesafrica.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/06/Fight-With-Insight-8-of-13-2048x1365.jpg 2048w" sizes="auto, (max-width: 1024px) 100vw, 1024px" /></figure></li><li class="blocks-gallery-item"><figure><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" width="1024" height="683" src="https://cms.forbesafrica.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/06/Fight-With-Insight-9-of-13-1024x683.jpg" alt="" data-id="51369" data-full-url="https://cms.forbesafrica.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/06/Fight-With-Insight-9-of-13-scaled.jpg" data-link="https://www.forbesafrica.com/?attachment_id=51369" class="wp-image-51369" srcset="https://cms.forbesafrica.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/06/Fight-With-Insight-9-of-13-1024x683.jpg 1024w, https://cms.forbesafrica.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/06/Fight-With-Insight-9-of-13-300x200.jpg 300w, https://cms.forbesafrica.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/06/Fight-With-Insight-9-of-13-768x512.jpg 768w, https://cms.forbesafrica.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/06/Fight-With-Insight-9-of-13-1536x1024.jpg 1536w, https://cms.forbesafrica.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/06/Fight-With-Insight-9-of-13-2048x1365.jpg 2048w" sizes="auto, (max-width: 1024px) 100vw, 1024px" /></figure></li><li class="blocks-gallery-item"><figure><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" width="1024" height="683" src="https://cms.forbesafrica.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/06/Fight-With-Insight-10-of-13-1024x683.jpg" alt="" data-id="51370" data-full-url="https://cms.forbesafrica.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/06/Fight-With-Insight-10-of-13-scaled.jpg" data-link="https://www.forbesafrica.com/?attachment_id=51370" class="wp-image-51370" srcset="https://cms.forbesafrica.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/06/Fight-With-Insight-10-of-13-1024x683.jpg 1024w, https://cms.forbesafrica.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/06/Fight-With-Insight-10-of-13-300x200.jpg 300w, https://cms.forbesafrica.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/06/Fight-With-Insight-10-of-13-768x512.jpg 768w, https://cms.forbesafrica.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/06/Fight-With-Insight-10-of-13-1536x1024.jpg 1536w, https://cms.forbesafrica.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/06/Fight-With-Insight-10-of-13-2048x1365.jpg 2048w" sizes="auto, (max-width: 1024px) 100vw, 1024px" /><figcaption class="blocks-gallery-item__caption"> </figcaption></figure></li><li class="blocks-gallery-item"><figure><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" width="1024" height="683" src="https://cms.forbesafrica.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/06/Fight-With-Insight-11-of-13-1024x683.jpg" alt="" data-id="51371" data-full-url="https://cms.forbesafrica.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/06/Fight-With-Insight-11-of-13-scaled.jpg" data-link="https://www.forbesafrica.com/?attachment_id=51371" class="wp-image-51371" srcset="https://cms.forbesafrica.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/06/Fight-With-Insight-11-of-13-1024x683.jpg 1024w, https://cms.forbesafrica.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/06/Fight-With-Insight-11-of-13-300x200.jpg 300w, https://cms.forbesafrica.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/06/Fight-With-Insight-11-of-13-768x512.jpg 768w, https://cms.forbesafrica.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/06/Fight-With-Insight-11-of-13-1536x1024.jpg 1536w, https://cms.forbesafrica.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/06/Fight-With-Insight-11-of-13-2048x1365.jpg 2048w" sizes="auto, (max-width: 1024px) 100vw, 1024px" /><figcaption class="blocks-gallery-item__caption"> </figcaption></figure></li><li class="blocks-gallery-item"><figure><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" width="1024" height="683" src="https://cms.forbesafrica.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/06/Fight-With-Insight-12-of-13-1024x683.jpg" alt="" data-id="51372" data-full-url="https://cms.forbesafrica.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/06/Fight-With-Insight-12-of-13-scaled.jpg" data-link="https://www.forbesafrica.com/?attachment_id=51372" class="wp-image-51372" srcset="https://cms.forbesafrica.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/06/Fight-With-Insight-12-of-13-1024x683.jpg 1024w, https://cms.forbesafrica.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/06/Fight-With-Insight-12-of-13-300x200.jpg 300w, https://cms.forbesafrica.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/06/Fight-With-Insight-12-of-13-768x512.jpg 768w, https://cms.forbesafrica.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/06/Fight-With-Insight-12-of-13-1536x1024.jpg 1536w, https://cms.forbesafrica.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/06/Fight-With-Insight-12-of-13-2048x1365.jpg 2048w" sizes="auto, (max-width: 1024px) 100vw, 1024px" /></figure></li><li class="blocks-gallery-item"><figure><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" width="1024" height="683" src="https://cms.forbesafrica.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/06/Fight-With-Insight-13-of-13-1024x683.jpg" alt="" data-id="51373" data-full-url="https://cms.forbesafrica.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/06/Fight-With-Insight-13-of-13-scaled.jpg" data-link="https://www.forbesafrica.com/?attachment_id=51373" class="wp-image-51373" srcset="https://cms.forbesafrica.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/06/Fight-With-Insight-13-of-13-1024x683.jpg 1024w, https://cms.forbesafrica.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/06/Fight-With-Insight-13-of-13-300x200.jpg 300w, https://cms.forbesafrica.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/06/Fight-With-Insight-13-of-13-768x512.jpg 768w, https://cms.forbesafrica.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/06/Fight-With-Insight-13-of-13-1536x1024.jpg 1536w, https://cms.forbesafrica.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/06/Fight-With-Insight-13-of-13-2048x1365.jpg 2048w" sizes="auto, (max-width: 1024px) 100vw, 1024px" /></figure></li></ul><figcaption class="blocks-gallery-caption">Young boxers participate in activities at a new Fight With Insight boxing gym, launched on Youth Day at Hillbrow in Johannesburg, South Africa, with founder Luke Lamprecht, the gyms assist in training and feeding inner-city youth in Johannesburg; photographs by Yeshiel Panchia</figcaption></figure>



Today marks 45 years of the Soweto Uprising in South Africa, when thousands of unhappy schoolchildren challenging an apartheid regime fearlessly took to the streets protesting being taught in Afrikaans. June 16 1976 ended in fire, fear and tears. Commemorated as Youth Day in South Africa, FORBES AFRICA captures the rousing emotions of today, but in a boxing ring in inner city Johannesburg, where the youth now bond over sport as part of a broader upliftment program.



June 16 is a hallowed day in South African history, observed as Youth Day commemorating the student uprising of 1976 in Soweto which saw students lead demonstrations against an education system that would eventually lead to menial jobs. Some 20,000 students partook in what was to be a peaceful protest, but when the day was over, at least 176 had been killed by the bullets and brutality of apartheid. The children laid down their lives but it marked a new chapter in South Africa’s liberation struggle.



Across South Africa today are events marking the memory of that fateful day, and FORBES AFRICA joined one such occasion of hope and healing in Hillbrow, a residential neighborhood in Johannesburg, for the opening of a third gym for inner-city youth by Fight With Insight, a youth empowerment initiative directed by Luke Lamprecht, a child protection and development specialist.



<blockquote class="wp-block-quote is-layout-flow wp-block-quote-is-layout-flow">“Children have had dreams put on hold or broken altogether; schooling has been disrupted; families separated; and food and social security systems taken away from them.”</blockquote>



Lamprecht founded the first such gym in Johannesburg in 2006, and chose Youth Day this year to mark the opening of his latest outlet, offering daily training to aspiring boxers as also supplying healthy meals to them. “2020 has been a bad year to be a child,” says Lamprecht to FORBES AFRICA, referring to the Covid-19 pandemic that put the brakes on the social and psychological development of young children, and dried up the support networks and sustenance that many of them depended on to lead normal lives.



“Children have had dreams put on hold or broken altogether; schooling has been disrupted; families separated; and food and social security systems taken away from them.”



His initiative aims to meet some of these deficiencies, offering camaraderie, exercise, food and above all, belief and purpose to children in need. The advocacy aspect is not new to the personnel at Fight With Insight, as they have provided training and food even within Covid-19 lockdown restrictions all of last year. At their height, they served 1.4 tonnes of food a day. However, this June 16 marks an easier time than the last, with children ending training before their meal by breaking a paper chain – symbolizing breaking free of the challenges and restrictions that hold them back.



Many of the urban youth at the center say they find both their physical and emotional sustenance inside the ring. They are in it to win this perennial fight called life.

Fight With Insight (2 of 13)

Youth Day Photo Essay: Gloves On For The Big Fight Called Life

I have taken a sabbatical from corporate life and as I write this I am experiencing, first hand, the cultures, history and architecture of the ancient world in Eastern Europe and Asia Minor.
Travelling through Turkey, the Balkans and the new countries born of the collapse of the Soviet Union, one cannot escape the striking diversity of the infrastructure that modern citizens of these countries have inherited. There are important lessons we should have learned from the past, but have we?
Roman engineering and construction techniques laid the foundation for our modern construction technology and methods – they created massive infrastructure across 5,000 kilometers of territory from northern Europe to northern Africa and the Black Sea in the east over a period of around 500 years from 27 BC. The Romans were dedicated master civil engineers and constructors using marble and hard rock, such as granite, transported from all corners of their empire to create cities comprising massive structures, water and transport systems, as well as public facilities that could accommodate thousands in stadiums. They invented concrete and the manufacture of kiln-fired red brick. They recycled materials and large building components as the empire expanded and contracted.
“Why did the Romans build so many ruins?” asked a tourist to our great amusement – fact is that their structures have outlasted most others, hence these are still with us. The Romans worked from a master plan, used detailed design techniques, the best materials, and skilled craftsmen. They mastered logistics, manpower and project management like the ancient Egyptians had done 3,000 years earlier.
The Ottoman Empire usurped the Romans in Eastern Europe and Asia Minor for the next 400 years into the 15th century before Eastern European communities started to win back their countries from the oppression of the Ottoman Turks and re-establish their own art, culture and architecture. During their reign, the Ottomans, while perfecting the construction of large domes in their places of worship, chose interlocking soft sandstone and used simpler construction methods. Their structures have not survived as well, with some notable exceptions, requiring regular restoration and preservation, at great cost.
In Istanbul there are two obelisks a hundred meters apart. One is sandstone from the Ottoman era around 1400 AD, but now a crumbling image of its former self. The second is an Egyptian granite obelisk still in almost pristine condition from around 2000 BC, situated upon a still substantial foundation of a Roman hippodrome built circa 330 AD of solid granite, marble and red brick and mortar (cement).
Fast forward to my visit to Romania and Bulgaria, where the fabulous granite and marble structures of the Renaissance period, through to the 18th century post the defeat of the Ottoman Turks, stand proudly while all around are the crumbling relics of Soviet Russia era multi-story mass housing blocks and public buildings – falling apart after only a few decades. The new democracies in these countries have massive restoration and rebuilding programs – substantially funded with EU contributions, which fuels the British, French and German taxpayer debate on who benefits from the EU.
The contrast with the structures of the ancient and antique world is remarkable.
Spotlight moves to Africa and what has been achieved in infrastructure delivery.
The crumbling RDP houses, the years of time and cost overruns on public sector power plants and pipelines, roads and railways. The lack of infrastructure planning and maintenance across our region is in stark contrast to the world class private sector delivery of mines, toll roads, World Cup stadiums, renewable energy plants, commercial and retail infrastructure and private hospitals delivered in recent years.
It would seem obvious, and history tells us, that infrastructure is best delivered by professionals using proven design processes, skilled craftsmen, the appropriate materials and technologies, effective planning and project management techniques.
Infrastructure delivery should not be controlled by politics, cadre deployment, state institutions that have limited technical capacity, tenderpreneurs, or cobbled-together contractors who may be well-networked.
By nature of their training, demonstrable skills and track record, infrastructure delivery is the domain of professional individuals and companies who should, but still wait patiently, be invited into the inner sanctum of government to discuss the master plan for both South Africa and the regional infrastructure backlog that will unlock the future.
The Romans had this sorted – why can’t we?

Where is caesar   when you need him

They were led by cavalier gentlemen who believed they could overthrow an African government with 600 men, eight Maxim machine guns and three light artillery pieces. It was a band of brigands, aristocrats, adventurers and opportunists who carried out the so-called Jameson Raid on Johannesburg in December 1895 – one of the greatest botched coups in African history. On July 28, it will be 120 years since their trial ended in London in 1896 where the raiders got a slap on the wrist for trying to jump a country – their leader, Leander Starr Jameson, was one of many who walked free from prison five months later.
FORBES AFRICA looks at what would have been made of the Jameson Raid in the 21st century. For a start, it would have been the cellphone and not the gun as the lethal weapon, according to strategists.
“In some aspects war has never changed. For a start, it’s getting the right amount of men into the right position. Today your first prize would have to be an attack on a digital level,” says Colin Webster, Secretary General of Mind Sports South Africa (MSSA).
By day, Webster is a tax consultant living in Germiston, in the east of Johannesburg. On weekends, he is a three-time World Champion of Ancients Warfare of the International Wargames Federation.
<div id="attachment_5014" style="width: 218px" class="wp-caption alignleft"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" aria-describedby="caption-attachment-5014" class="size-medium wp-image-5014" src="/wp-content/uploads/2017/05/GettyImages-463894213-208x300.jpg" alt="" width="208" height="300" />Leander Starr Jameson, Scottish-born South African politician, </div>
“What you would want to do is, like in the Jameson Raid, rely on the chaotic state of affairs between different nationalities. To attack a country you need to create the chaos. For example, in World War Two, the Germans created huge printing presses to create counterfeit currency. The idea was to devalue the British pound.”
“With technology it’s become so much more complicated. You would have to disable the entire country’s electronic infrastructure. A country sitting without its internet, TV and radio, makes it difficult to get information out to different regiments. It’s not impossible because all you need is a couple of electromagnetic pulses (a bomb that will fry your electronics) in the right places.”
Webster’s great grandfather was a commandant at Pilgrim’s Rest, in Limpopo after the South African War.
“I prefer the historical gaming, to computer games like Age of Empires, because it is all interactive with people. There are three different types of wargames that you will play. One is competitive. Two is recreating a battle from history. The third is simulating a battle.”
“Warfare today has become a very different kettle of fish. A lot of it is computerized. Your whole way of conducting a battle is different from the less technological society during the Jameson Raid. You have to realize the ranges of weaponry today far outrange anything that’s previously handled. These days you are able to pinpoint where you are going to fire your shells.”
Another strategist is John Smith, not his real name, an investment analyst living in Johannesburg and a World War Two re-enactor hobbyist since 2012.
“Your main goal is to consolidate your power as quickly as possible. You want to seize the initiative – always attack, always strike first, always keep your opponent reacting instead of planning – and you want to cover as much ground as quickly as possible.”
Winning over the masses, controlling utilities such as water and electricity, and controlling the media are all part and parcel of success, says Smith.
“In the modern world, your most important technology is the media. Mobile phones, social media sites – you must control them. War in the 21st century is not about who has the smartest tank or the lightest assault rifle – Iraqi IEDs and Afghan tank traps and Syrian barrel bombs have proven that. Your most important tech is that which allows you to control the media – and to sell your ideology. Take internet servers offline, hack into television broadcasters, breach government websites or take them offline through DDOS attacks &#8211; that is the tech that will count. Whether your protestors are armed with AK47s or the latest German assault rifles means little when you are losing the media war.”
There was little media back in 1895 when doctor and magistrate-turned-soldier adventurer, Jameson, set off from the small town of Pitsane, just across the now Botswana border on December 29, 1895. The idea was to overthrow the gold-rich Transvaal run by Paul Kruger, the President of the South African Republic (SAR). Jameson banked on the raid triggering an uprising of so-called Uitlanders, foreigners, working in the mines in Johannesburg.
The mainly British Uitlanders outnumbered the Afrikaners two to one, paid taxes and had no vote. The plan was for them to seize the armory in Pretoria as Jameson rode in to Johannesburg.
It all fell apart when Transvaal troops stopped the raid dead in its tracks in Doornkop, 26 kilometers west of Johannesburg. The Transvaal soldiers had tracked the raiders from the minute they crossed the border. Jameson’s men believed, mistakenly, they were safe because they had cut telegraph wires to Pretoria; all they had cut was a fence.
Jameson suffered the ignominy of borrowing a white apron from an old woman as a makeshift flag of truce. The prisoners were sent to Pretoria and then to London for trial, after diplomatic horse trading.
“The Jameson Raid could have worked if it had successfully divided society. The Jameson Raiders were backing on the Uitlanders to support them against the Transvaal government. They were relying on Uitlanders, who were mainly British, however the [Uitlanders] had no intention of supporting the Jameson Raiders as they were quite happy with the SAR,” says Webster.
These days, an attack on a government would be a different story.
“Any battle relies on surprise. It would be extremely difficult today to do a raid on South Africa because of South Africa’s infrastructure&#8230; South Africa has one of the best armies in Africa, you would have to have the backing of a foreign government. That’s not going to happen today. From that point of view South Africa is very safe and secure,” says Webster.
“There are a number of international arms dealing laws and treaties in place, making it difficult for the nefarious plotter to get his hands on weaponry in general. This leaves the darker avenues. Seize existing stockpiles of weaponry from the current government, like the Arab Spring in Libya or Syria, or on the black market. This is usually an expensive and low-quantity proposition, and is better suited for getting niche items like a shoulder-launched anti-air missile for shooting down a civilian airliner than arming large numbers of insurrectionists at a time,” says Smith.
The full force in Jameson’s repercussions were felt in South Africa. Its backer, Cecil John Rhodes, mining magnate and Prime Minister of the Cape Colony, was forced to step down. His British South Africa Company paid £1 million in compensation. Other conspirators were found guilty of high treason and sentenced to death; this was commuted to 15 years.
As for Jameson himself, he was sentenced to 15 months and released after five. Eight years later, in 1904, Jameson went on to become the Prime Minister of the Cape Colony. Not a bad outcome for a gentleman convicted of treason who botched a raid to remove an African government. Jameson was buried on a high rock outcrop in the Matobo Hills, near Bulawayo, Zimbabwe, a few hundred meters from the right hand of Rhodes. What stories they could tell.

The Havoc Gentlemen Raiders Could Have Caused With A Cellphone

David Adjaye, the renowned architect born in Tanzania to Ghanaian parents, has been busy. He is leading the design team behind the Smithsonian’s $500-million National Museum of African American History and Culture in Washington D.C. He is also the frontrunner to design Barack Obama’s presidential library in Chicago. These two buildings will be the most high-profile pieces of more than a decade of work.
Although Adjaye’s work, which focuses heavily on historical cultures, is spread all over the world, it can now be appreciated, by many. He recently released his latest book, David Adjaye: Form, Heft, Material, which was published to complement his exhibition at the Haus der Kunst museum in Munich. In September, it was extended to Chicago.
“It is the most comprehensive survey of my work to date. The concept of the book was to offer an insight into current projects within the context of the trajectory of my work over the past 15 years, and framed within a broad social, cultural and historical discourse,” says Adjaye.
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The discourse to which Adjaye refers has informed his multiculturalist work across every continent, and has led to projects that have placed Adjaye as one of the most distinguished architects in the world.
Adjaye’s work has shifted to public architecture.
“I think that design can provide a critical inquiry into social responsibility and civic consciousness.”
Despite this shift, Adjaye maintains a certain audacity to his work; the kind of trait that can only make a building indelible to the most discerning eye. His work surpasses the mediocrity of simply fulfilling the mere function of shelter. Adjaye is more of an artist than an architect. His work is often as much of a visual sculpture as a constructional design.
“I have always sought to cross creative platforms, collaborating with artists and designers from different disciplines and focusing on the creative discourse surrounding the act of making things. It is the dialogue – the cultural intersection – which excites me.”
Adjaye has also been embraced by the world of politics. He was commissioned by Obama to lead the design of the National Museum of African American History and Culture. Such a responsibility has not been taken lightly. Adjaye describes it as “a career defining project.” The monument, in Washington D.C.’s National Mall, has been built to commemorate the momentous milestones in African American history.
“It is an incredibly exciting project and it has been a real honor to be involved in the creation of this monumental building,” he says.
Like most of the museums the architect has designed, the National Museum will be as iconic as the exhibitions inside it. It is  to open to the public in early 2016. The timing of the building’s inaugural opening could not be more perfect; Obama’s term is coming to a close, and racial antipathy continues to plague the country.
“My hope is that the museum will transcend the uneasy fact of racial tension through an open exploration of history, culture and society – thereby addressing profound aspects of the human condition and the positive value inherent in creating a forum for multiple interpretations of America’s history and demography, however uncomfortable those may be.”
Adjaye has a different hope for Africa – a continent often riddled with political instability that threatens to derail progress made in the private and public sector.
“Politics can hinder development. The four-year electoral window is often at odds with urban and infrastructure projects which can require a decade of political commitment. Nevertheless, [I] am excited about all of my work in Africa.”
A few of the projects that Adjaye has been working on across the continent include; a luxury concept store in Lagos called Alara, a school campus and residential project in Accra, building the headquarters of the International Finance Corporation (IFC) in Dakar, residential projects in Johannesburg, and a hospital in Rwanda.
Over the last few years, Adjaye has collaborated with Propertuity to develop one of the Johannesburg CBD’s many timeworn buildings in the Maboneng Precinct – Hallmark House. The area is undergoing urban changes, with many buildings being redeveloped and perhaps gentrified.
“The project is a dramatic transformation of a former commercial building into apartments and cultural facilities in Johannesburg’s CBD. Its proximity to the already vibrant Maboneng district will mean that it will extend this extraordinary new city quarter.”
The inspiration behind Hallmark House’s transformation has been driven by the same principles Adjaye places on all of his work. His designs are often a reflection of social, historical and environmental context. In the case of his work in Maboneng, the design of the residential building was inspired by what Adjaye lauds as “an icon of the Joburg city skyline”. The 66-meter-high structure, initially designed in the 1970s by Greg Cohen, was built to house a burgeoning diamond polishing company.
Adjaye is a firm believer that the story of a city is written in its buildings. Johannesburg reflects the complex challenges of its past.
“Johannesburg, sadly, is one of the few cities in the world that has a specific spatial architecture that is born from division,” he says.
Such a landscape does not wean Adjaye away from the potential possibilities awaiting this historically rich part of Johannesburg, but rather encourages an admiration of the city.
“Johannesburg is the most cosmopolitan city I have visited in Africa. You see in its buildings a story of a tragic past but also a city that is being very intentional about confronting its history and seeking ways to move forward.”
Adjaye dismisses the idea that his work has a clear and definitive aesthetic.
“I am part of a generation of architects which has moved away from the idea of a signature.”
He does, however, pull much of his inspiration from the continent.
“I draw from Africa, but I also draw from many other things. That’s what architects do – we are planetary creatures.”
Adjaye adds that all of his projects have been memorable.
“Each one is part of a curve, a critical piece of a narrative that is still unfolding.”
This is a story that will bring many more milestones for the successful architect on a mission in Africa.

The Brain of Africa more of an artist  than an architect

History will have to record that the greatest tragedy of this period of social transition was not the strident clamour of the bad people, but, the appalling silence of the good people.” This Martin Luther King Jr quote brought courage to Mike Tshishonga’s soul, inspired him to be a whistleblower and ushered in his two worst days.
The first cost him his home and pride, leading to seven years in the wilderness. The second cost him humiliation, vilification and yet another job he loved.
The fury and conflict that raged around Tshishonga belies the peace and quiet of where he was born in 1946; in rural Venda located in Louis Trichardt, a small town nestled in South Africa’s northern Limpopo province; a peaceful place were wild animals roam. Even though the harsh apartheid regime was in force, Tshishonga grew up in a loving home and left to study law. He took King’s quote with him.
He hates crime and corruption. His battle for justice began in 1985, when he was the Secretary of Justice in the old Bantu system. At the time, Venda chiefs carried out ritual murders for strength and power. This was a burden on Tshishonga’s shoulders.
“They wanted human parts. One chief, Ramovha, was involved in these ritual killings. He was tried and found guilty of murder. His friends wanted me to recommend he be removed from the death sentence but I refused,” says Tshishonga.
Tshishonga became detested and resented among Ramovha’s friends and family. But he felt it was the right thing to do. Justice had to prevail.
Another ritual murder occurred; this time involving Chief AA Tshivhase, who was also hung for his crime.
“Tshivhase had a lot of political capital. As a result, parliament passed an act saying the president has the power to demote, transfer or reduce the salary of any public servant without giving any reason.”
This prompted Tshishonga’s dismissal.
“The president had been told that a lot of chiefs were involved in this and I was the problem that needed to be taken care of.”
Tshishonga had fought a losing battle in a place he called home. He left with nothing and had to stay with his in-laws.
“When you are a man and supposed to take care of your family but you can’t, and your mother-in-law has to take up the responsibility, it is traumatic, but pain makes us grow. It is a stepping stone to another level. It is not there to kill one but rather to give strength and greater wisdom,” he says.
After seven years of pain and penury, Tshishonga was rehabilitated in a new democratic South Africa; appointed as the Deputy Director General of the South African Justice Department in 1994.
“I was happy when someone who respected how I had stood up for justice recognized I was right and traced me down for this position. Those were very tough years for me but I will always speak up against wrongdoing,” says Tshishonga.
“During the years when Mandela was the president, everything was smooth. I was responsible for the liquidation division at the department.”
Little did he know, an even worse day was yet to come.
In 2003, Tshishonga was in hot water, again, for opposing the appointment of Enver Motala as liquidator for the Retail Apparel Group (RAG), then worth more than a billion rand. Penuell Maduna, the then Minister of Justice, ordered Tshishonga’s department to appoint Motala as liquidator for RAG. It was to be the biggest liquidation in the country’s history.
“We had a panel that decided which liquidator, out of 300, got which job. This was to avoid corruption because liquidation is a lucrative business. It is not, according to the law of insolvency, the minister who dictates who gets what job.”
“I think Maduna and Motala wanted to share the spoils. As always, I was very vocal about fighting corruption. Maduna then tried to get rid of me but they didn’t have any legal grounds to stand on.”
Tshishonga invoked the Protected Disclosures Act. He lodged a complaint about the irregularity with the Public Protector, the Auditor-General and even Essop Pahad, the then Minister in the Presidency under Thabo Mbeki.
“Essop suggested we sit around the table and address the matter but Maduna did not cooperate with me. No one seemed to care that such corruption and nepotism was taking place,” he says.
Pahad, when contacted by FORBES AFRICA, claims he has no knowledge of the matter.
In October 2003, when it came to light that his objections were going nowhere, he called a press conference.
“I had to become creative. I disclosed the information relating to the impropriety and nepotism of the minister to the whole country.”
Tshishonga was suspended with immediate effect. A disciplinary committee was convened. The suspension lasted nearly four years. This ushered in his second worst day. All hell broke loose.
“Vusi Pikoli, Director-General of the justice department at the time, said they can’t take me back because the trust between me and the department had been broken. They offered me a settlement and I refused. Getting rid of me was not getting rid of corruption,” he says.
Pikoli denies this.
“All I can say is that cases of fraud and corruption, where reported and detected in the Department of Justice and Constitutional Development when I was the Director-General, were dealt with,” he says.
The Labour Court ruled Tshishonga be reinstated in early 2004. He returned to his office, unaware that he faced the worst months of his life.
“I would go to the office and no job was coming to me. I had my desk, computer and everything but not work. I would go there, do nothing and leave the office at knockoff time. It was difficult for them to transfer me to another department because it would be against the Protected Disclosures Act. Any person who blows the whistle must not be redeployed because they have raised a concern that needs to be addressed.”
With no work coming his way, he started writing a book Whistleblower: The Mike Tshishonga Story, published in 2010.
“Instead of complaining about it, I decided to spend the time writing a book about the true events so that the outside world knows what happened,” he says.
Nobody spoke to him; he was in the office each day for nearly a year. He finally agreed to a settlement of R3 million (around $200,000) to leave the position. He left the department but not without suing for defamation.
“Maduna has told the media that I am a dunderhead, a relic of the apartheid regime who is a timid public servant and does not belong to the department.”
Tshishonga claimed 12 months’ salary for his trouble. The Labour Court ruled in his favor. He read self-help books and the book of Proverbs in the Bible to help him cope. He says he is strong as steel.
“The word death is not in my vocabulary. By killing another person, you are not giving yourself insurance that you would not die because one way or the other, you will.”
The then spokesperson at the office of the Public Protector, Charles Phahlane, was quoted in the media as saying the Public Protector was not provided with enough information to investigate the matter.
At a forum on November 17, 2010, South Africa’s current Public Protector, Thuli Madonsela, said she is encouraged by the existence of whistleblowers.
“I note with a sense of discomfort that one of the conference speakers is Mr Mike Tshishonga, who unsuccessfully approached the Public Protector, before my time, for relief regarding an occupational detriment… His complaint was not upheld by the Public Protector and eventually got such relief from a court of law after a costly and lengthy litigation process,” she said.
Maduna denies the allegations made by Tshishonga.
“Mike is the most timid public servant… At worst he is the sort of person who would not be able to box himself out of a wet paper bag,” he reportedly told a local newspaper.
Tshishonga’s unwillingness to yield to pressure by his corrupt peers shows his true nature. He is currently preparing to blow the whistle on a South African politician in the coming months; and he leaves us with a proverb.
“The scorpion was drowning in water. Somebody picked it up to save it. Once safe, the scorpion stung him. The person asked ‘Why would you do this after I helped you?’ and the scorpion said ‘It is my nature.’”
Let’s hope Tshishonga is not stung.

“Death Is Not In My Vocabulary”

The FORBES AFRICA Person of the Year for 1324 could very well have been a certain flamboyantly wealthy King of Mali, says Martin Meredith, the celebrated British historian of Africa.
“The richest man, that the world has ever seen, was Mansa Musa. [He] makes a Hajj to Mecca, arrives in Cairo and literally hands out gold bars to the waiters. He wrecks the money market for ten years or more&#8230; that story of his arrival eventually finds its way to Europe&#8230; the first European map, the Catalan map of 1376, has a portrait of [him] with a caption that says, ‘this is the richest man that the world has ever known.’”
<div id="attachment_3417" style="width: 226px" class="wp-caption alignleft"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" aria-describedby="caption-attachment-3417" class="size-medium wp-image-3417" src="/wp-content/uploads/2017/04/Martin-Meredith-216x300.jpg" alt="" width="216" height="300" />Martin Meredith</div>
His gold-dishing arrival in Cairo inspired the first Spanish expedition to the continent, hunting Musa’s gold. The expedition set out for West Africa, searching for the fabled ‘River of Gold’, but the crew got lost and all were presumed dead.
At his death, Musa was worth around $400 billion, which make’s Bill Gate’s $81.8 billion look paltry.
As his empire fell, so did Africa.
“I discovered the extraordinary parallel themes of African history, compared to what is going on now. It has always been that Africa has been this enormously wealthy continent and yet it is the poorest continent. There’s a paradox about it,” says Meredith, who examines this 5,000-year paradox in his latest release, The Fortunes of Africa.
Meredith has had two careers in Africa, far from gold bars; first as a journalist, then as a historian. After fulfilling his boyhood dream of navigating the Nile, when 21, he moved to Lusaka and became a journalist.
“The first president I ever interviewed was Julius Nyerere of Tanzania, at the age of 22. He was a sort of giant intellect. We were sitting out in the State Palace in Dar es Salaam, looking out across the sea and there was Nyerere, hoping for real intellectual debate. Instead, he was faced with a green, inexperienced reporter who wasn’t giving him any argument!”
After 15 years reporting on the continent, he left to become a research fellow at Oxford University which spawned a shelf of books.
“I am essentially a story-teller, which is what journalists are, but the stories I tell have a very large dimension,” he says.
His first book, 1979’s The Past is Another Country, was a story of a soon-to-be independent Zimbabwe. Since then, he has written on everything; from elephants to Nelson Mandela. His most successful was The State of Africa, a contemporary history.
His latest title came after a year’s research. He calls it a standard history of Africa, which picks apart the economic roots of conflict and poverty on the continent, drawing on years as a foreign correspondent.
“This extraordinary World Bank figure [says that] 40% of Africa’s private wealth [is] held outside Africa which [contrasts] with the Asian experience. They have levels of corruption which are pretty high too but what happens there is that wealth is ploughed back into businesses, they might be mafia-type organizations, but they build factories and industries so the money is ploughed back.”
On the other side of the gold coin, Africa has a penchant for vanity projects like the Pyramids of Giza right to Mobutu Sese Seko’s ruined Gbadolite Palace, which had a private concord airstrip so he could fly off shopping.
“The money in Africa is taken out by the ruling elite and the growing middle class, so it’s safe and secure and they can enjoy buying properties in Europe. London is awash with Nigerian millionaires! Corruption happens everywhere, you expect a certain level of it. Where the focus of ambition lies in making as much money as possible, regardless of the circumstances, that is when it becomes dangerous. It affects so many African countries.”
The greed-inspired accidents of history are at the root of Africa’s woes. The Spanish expedition, inspired by Mansa Musa’s riches, led to centuries of extraction of African wealth for foreign gain. Hence, the birth of the infamous resource ‘curse’.
If in the last 5,000 years of this continent, the past has become our country, then, as the old adage goes, those who do not learn, or remember, their history are condemned to repeat it.
Meredith is certain to write it.

Person Of The Year For 1324

Mahatma Gandhi’s philosophy of satyagraha, or the insistence on truth and passive resistance, marked the beginning of his pursuit for equality and acceptance. My great great grandfather walked the two lands I hold dear, India and South Africa, paving the way for independence in each, shifting the course of history and setting ideals that would be emulated by many.
South Africa a hundred years ago was a starkly different country engulfed by the dark shadows of colonialism. Many learnt about Gandhi, the slight, bald and bespectacled man clad in little else than a loin cloth who began his journey of passive resistance in South Africa, which paved the way for India’s independence. I learnt about Bapuji (what Gandhi is fondly called) the man who instilled the value of satyagraha in his children and grandchildren.
His legacy was this power of satyagraha. Gandhi’s willingness to risk his freedom through civil disobedience without violence was the core of this phenomenon. Converting the opposing force or resisting with love was novel. The allure of the movement is that once you are charmed by the stories of passive resistance, satyagraha becomes firmly entrenched in you.
Perhaps the one legacy that has impacted the Gandhi family the most has been his printing press. After 10 years of a relentless crusade, Gandhi realized that the twin tasks of mobilizing public opinion and influencing official decisions required a newspaper.
As a great great grandchild returning to the Phoenix settlement in Durban in South Africa, it is often quite incredible to imagine that Gandhi, the commercial lawyer, had the foresight to understand the power of the media by starting a newspaper, Indian Opinion. This is perhaps why so many members of my family, and I, often seek solace in words to articulate our thoughts. The allure is in the history of Indian Opinion, where words became the cornerstone for change and acceptance.
As a family, we are often so disillusioned by the times, the violence and the conflict that seems to have engulfed the world. Disillusionment is soothed, however, by gentle reminders.
Phoenix transformed into a place for community living, a hundred acres of land with a school, a clinic and an arena for activists to meet in the true tradition of Gandhi’s philosophy. Family reunions are often spent retracing these moments with afternoons at Phoenix settlement in the company of my great aunt Ela Gandhi who takes us on nostalgic adventures.
We sit captivated by tales of our great great grandfather who began as a timid young boy, became a lawyer and transformed into a movement. We are awe-struck by the accounts of unwavering and untainted passive resistance, we listen with bated breath at the steadfast ideals he passed on from generation to generation, beginning with his four sons who were instilled with strong work ethics, a moral compass and ideals.
The narrative of satyagraha echoes in South Africa’s own stories of struggle. Born a few years before the end of the apartheid in South Africa, I grew up listening to stories of resistance, the underlying message of peace and passivity often serving as the moral. In tales that could compete with Aessop’s fables, I regaled in South Africa’s history as told by family and friends. Growing up, there was a lot I didn’t fully understand. I didn’t understand human rights, I didn’t understand equality or freedom, because I couldn’t fathom not having them or anyone else being denied them. Herein lies the magic of my family and the legacy that follows us. My bedtime stories were mesmerizing tales of people I knew, these formidable men and dignified women who had become the personification of satyagraha. They had guaranteed me my human rights, my equality, my freedom. I was surrounded by these people who had fought vehemently for what they believed in and told me their enthralling stories while I sat wide-eyed, listening intently, scared I might miss a word. These stories reincarnated Gandhi’s legacy in a timeline of differing contexts, satyagraha was imbibed into the fight for democracy.
Satyagraha has undoubtedly become a global movement but it is a legacy deep-rooted in my family. History lessons for 45 minutes a day, reading begrudgingly from a textbook or listening to my teachers, had little impact in comparison to the firsthand accounts I received, the anecdotes on Gandhi and his quest for equality.
Bapuji’s legacy has stretched far beyond the notion of satyagraha, it is entrenched in the freedoms I hold dear today, it is deeply embedded in the history of South Africa, and is a guiding force for anything I write. For me, his legacy is the ability to create a fundamental shift in the conscience of the masses through the written word.

Sunita-Menon

Gandhi

It’s 8am and Ela Gandhi, wearing a traditional khadi kameez, is seated on a sofa by the window of her modest 13th floor apartment in the hilly Glenwood area of Durban, South Africa.
The apartment, where she lives with her youngest daughter Ashish Ramgobin and her two children, overlooks the Durban harbor and offers sweeping vistas of the city. A stately piano is next to her, which she often plays, and above it, a painting of her grandfather Mahatma Gandhi gifted to her by the Rustomjee business family in Durban.
In the living room where she is, are glass showcases filled with sepia photographs, Gandhi memorabilia, pictures of Ela with Nelson Mandela, Desmond Tutu and the Dalai Lama, and several silver and crystal plaques, medallions and awards, among them, the prestigious Padma Bhushan (India’s third highest civilian award) she received from the Indian government in 2007.
In January this year, Ela received an award for her lifetime contribution to the freedom struggle in South Africa alongside other veterans of the Umkhonto we Sizwe (Spear of the Nation) – the armed struggle wing of the African National Congress (ANC). Ela clarifies she had never been a member of the armed wing, but receiving the award was an honor.
On the other side of the room, pictures of her as a child with her grandmother Kasturba Gandhi, and in the lap of Abdul Gaffar Khan, a lifelong pacifist and friend of her grandfather’s. There is a black and white photo in the hallway that is a particular favorite: of a six-year-old Ela in a white dress standing next to Mahatma Gandhi at the height of the freedom struggle in India.
In her bedroom are bookshelves laden with tomes on her grandfather; she rates the one by author Sudheendra Kulkarni to be the best. She spends most mornings here, working on the computer, editing articles for the monthly non-profit newspaper Satyagraha published in Durban.
<div id="attachment_6385" style="width: 210px" class="wp-caption alignleft"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" aria-describedby="caption-attachment-6385" class="wp-image-6385 size-medium" src="/wp-content/uploads/2017/05/FWA-2014-Aug-Sep-030-031-Ela-Gandhi-002-200x300.jpg" alt="" width="200" height="300" />Ela at the Phoenix Settlement in Inanda; on the wall is the reproduction of a note signed “MK Gandhi”</div>
“I have been inspired by my grandfather’s teachings all my life. Be the change you wish to see, is my favorite quote of his,” says Ela.
Her daughter Ramgobin, who runs an NGO promoting sustainable livelihoods for the poor, says Gandhi is an important part of their legacy in South Africa. “In India, Mahatma Gandhi is a public holiday, but his messages are very relevant in our lives here,” she says.
Ela has upheld the family’s legacy, running several community projects, among them the Phoenix Settlement where Gandhi ran his anti-discrimination activities during his 21-year stint in South Africa. All through her illustrious political career, Ela has had the distinction of interacting with Nobel laureates – Tutu, Mandela, and Albert Luthuli who was also a close friend of the Gandhis.
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The Drive To Phoenix
Ela revs up the engine of her turquoise Toyota sedan for the 20 kilometer drive to the Phoenix Settlement in Inanda district. As she hits the N2 North freeway – she is a careful driver – she speaks of the apartheid era, when she was banned in 1973 for her political activism, and placed under house arrest for eight-and-a-half years.
“I had to report to the police station every Saturday and couldn’t leave the house between 7PM and 7AM. I had to stay indoors on weekends and public holidays,” she says.
The years roll by as she recollects the day her son Khush was shot dead, a year before South Africa’s democratic elections. He was only 29. To date, she does not know who was behind it or if it was politically motivated.
“The scar of losing a child will never leave you. [We] will never know why it happened. It was covered up,” says Ela.
In 1990, she was among the United Democratic Front team that met with Mandela at Pollsmoor Prison in Cape Town prior to his release. When the ANC government came to power in 1994, she served as an MP for nine years. She has met with Madiba many times since.
“He used to call me by name,” she says.
As still part of the Phoenix constituency, Ela developed a program against domestic violence, and started her work with the Gandhi Development Trust.
When we finally reach the Phoenix Settlement, it is clear Ela feels at home here.
This is where she was born in 1940, living here for the first six years of her life. After the Mahatma’s return to India in 1914, it was Ela’s father Manilal Gandhi who came back to Phoenix in 1917 to run the Gujarati-English newspaper Indian Opinion and continue his father’s legacy. Ela’s father was also a strong influence in her life on the Phoenix farm.
“We had a small kitchen with a chimney and a central dining room. All the children slept on the wooden floor. The place was buzzing with life. Although we had no power or water, we had very good times here,” she recalls.
When her grandfather first set up the communal farm in 1904, the homestead was a humble wood and iron dwelling. He valued simplicity, manual work and self-sufficiency. “It was a snake-infested property and my grandfather was afraid of snakes,” she says.
What was a 100-acre farm is today “a fenced-in area of about 1.5 acres” including a school and a museum, which records Mahatma Gandhi’s influences – Tolstoy being one of them – and how he influenced the world.
“This is a site of extraordinary significance in the liberation movement. John Dube, the founding president of the ANC, was his neighbor. There was so much contact between them, but it’s not talked about,” says Ela.
Ela remembers one particular conversation she had with her grandfather, while at the Sevagram (land of service) ashram in India that advocated simple living and farming.
“I told him that if they want to cook and serve pumpkins in the communal kitchens everyday, why do they call it ‘land of service’? They should call it ‘land of pumpkins’. Later during a speech, he told the people that when he asked them to live in simplicity, he did not expect them to eat pumpkins every day. I remember so distinctly that conversation with him and the aftermath of it. Everybody was curious who had leaked it to him.”
Ela says even after he left South Africa, Gandhi stayed in touch with Indians here, telling them “your destiny is connected with Africans, so work closely with them”.
Ela visits India at least twice a year, visiting her mother’s relatives in the state of Maharashtra, and never missing an opportunity to visit the Gandhi memorial at Raj Ghat in New Delhi.
“I visit India, but I am a proud South African,” says Ela. She is Gandhi’s indelible link to South Africa.

Grandfather Gandhi AND I

Delville Wood has become synonymous for South African courage in the First World War and has been described by soldier and military historian, Basil Liddell-Hart, as the bloodiest battle hell of 1916.
It was part of the Somme offensive and South Africa’s first major engagement on the Western Front. Soldiers from four battalions suffered casualties of catastrophic proportions.
They’d been ordered to hold Bois d’Elville, which lay to the north-east of the town of Longueval, because the Allies needed it to gain a tactical advantage over the Germans.
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For five days from July 14, 1916, 3,153 soldiers and officers attached to the First South African Infantry Brigade entered Delville Wood.
Showing incredible grit and determination they held on, as ordered, despite being assaulted on all sides by three crack German divisions.
The exact casualty figure is uncertain because soldiers were constantly being replenished, but by the time the South Africans were relieved on July 19, only 142 souls emerged from Delville Wood. It’s estimated that 457 men were killed in action, 120 died of their wounds and 186 were listed as missing, presumed dead.
Nancy Aucock’s father, Charles Sephton, was part of the Transvaal Scottish Regiment, and many of its men fought at Delville Wood.
A 70-something resident of the KwaZulu Natal Midlands, Nancy is fascinated by the history of the battle, perhaps because her father spoke so little about it.
“He would tell a few light-hearted stories, but that was it.”
One of the stories Charles would tell was the origin of his daughter’s name.
Nancy was the Transvaal Scottish’s mascot, a real live Springbok that accompanied troops to Europe, sometimes dressed in a tartan coat. She belonged to a Free State farmer who had volunteered her for war service.
Nancy was taught to respond to regimental calls and proudly led battalions on parade. She was the darling of the troops and after her death from pneumonia in Belgium, in 1918, Nancy was accorded full funeral honors and buried in an Allied war cemetery.
Her skin and head were preserved and after the war she was stuffed and mounted. Today, Nancy is on display at the Military Museum in Johannesburg.
Sephton didn’t keep a diary himself, but his best friend and fellow soldier Tom Leppan did. It was published in the ‘Barkly East Reporter’ in 1977 and gives some indication of the stark reality of Delville Wood.
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“Terrible shelling all day. Helped the stretcher-bearers all day. Awful work carrying through this wood… dead and wounded everywhere. This wood is an abattoir and the Longueval village too. Our men beat off several German attacks during the day and one in the night. Les Webster killed by a shell while asleep… killed outright. The very best of men, quiet and plucky… Sephton and self twice half covered by earth thrown up by shells… this has been the most awful day of my life,” reads an entry on July 16.
“Rain all night, no sleep. Helped carry Teddy Smith, then collapsed from fatigue, nervous breakdown. Dudley Pringle sent away with shellshock yesterday, a total wreck… All the South African regiments losing terribly today… Praying for relieving regiments… Solly Barker wounded through the hand and sent to the rear,” Leppan wrote the next day.
The horror continued on July 18.
“The most violent bombardments with whizz bang all day and four hours with heavy guns. Our trench blown to blazes… Tilby killed in my dugout. I was twice hit by shell pieces… only bruised. We were completely surrounded by night and got into trench with 3rd Regiment to help defend frontline. Beat off attack.”
Sephton and Leppan were captured the following day.
“Surrendered at daylight. Managed to carry all our wounded along with us. All wounded left at German dressing station to be attended to&#8230; we are being decently treated. All our possessions taken away… about 230 South Africans… 45 South African Scots. About 500 prisoners here all told.”
They spent the remainder of the war interned in a German prison camp.
“Left for Germany in trucks with seats… crossed the Rhine and saw many burned villages in Belgium.”
In November, 1918, Sephton and Leppan returned to England and got the last troop ship to Cape Town. After being demobilized, Charles caught a train home to Barkly East, in the north-eastern Cape, where his parents farmed.
After several days, his journey ended at a remote railway siding called New England Station, where he borrowed a horse and rode home. He’d been gone five years and witnessed unspeakable horrors.
In his farming notes from that day, his father, Alfred, had jotted down details of his livestock and noted the weather. And then, almost as an afterthought: “Charles returned home from Europe today”.
In 2016, Aucock, her sisters, her children and grandchildren plan to visit Deville Wood on what will be the centenary of this epic battle. Today, it is a burial site and the eternal resting place for the more than 5,000 men killed there, two thirds of them unknown.
Once a thick tangle of oak and birch trees; Delville Wood was a desolate wasteland after the battle. Shells had slammed into trees at a rate of 400 per minute, reducing them to shredded stumps. Mud and rainwater covered the bodies of South African and German forces alike.
Delville Wood was bought by the South African Government in 1920, at the instigation of Sir Percy Fitzpatrick, pioneer, politician and author of Jock of the Bushveld. Percy’s other noteworthy suggestion was the minute’s silence that is still commemorated on November 11 each year.
Acorns were germinated on a farm in Franschhoek, around 75 kilometers from Cape Town, and sent to France to replant Delville Wood. Ninety odd years on, two double rows of mature oaks lead solemnly to the Herbert Baker Memorial Arch, which carries the inscription: “Their ideal is our legacy; their sacrifice our inspiration”.
It’s a small corner of France that is forever South Africa.

The Cross  That Weeps  For The Dead

A blank projector screen hangs in the middle of a room in William V.S. Tubman High School. A handful of expatriates and Liberians mill around, waiting for the film that was scheduled to start rolling over an hour ago. Young women wait expectantly behind a table filled with snacks and baked goods. But most of the yellow plastic chairs are empty.
After plugging and unplugging a jumble of chords and tapping a few computer keys the film begins to play. Restless children and 20 or so adult members of the audience sit as a film titled No More Selections We Want Elections screens. It traces the 2005 elections that saw President Ellen Johnson Sirleaf come to power. The sound is gritty, light streaming through the sheer curtains washes out the image on the screen and the audience is small.
This is the first time Liberia has held a film festival. The brainchild of Pandora Hodge, a young Liberian student, and a collection of her colleagues from the University of Liberia and SPARK, a Dutch NGO that fosters entrepreneurship in post-conflict countries. The Image of Liberia film festival was held over three days in Monrovia in February and aired Liberian and African films in classrooms and communities throughout the city. Some screenings were packed and went off without a hitch; others ran late and attracted a sparse audience.
Through the festival, Hodge and her team hope to challenge the war-torn image of Liberia and build up interest in the art house cinema called Kriterion that she and her colleagues are trying to establish. Films about Liberia’s brutal recent history – it’s civil unrest that spanned three decades, killed 250,000 people and destroyed the nation’s infrastructure – are notably absent from the program that is filled with a small selection of Liberian and African films.
“We are creating a platform where young people can go to express themselves. A cinema is a really good way to get people involved and get people aware of what is happening in the country and abroad,” says Hodge.
Inspired by the model of a cinema that was created in Amsterdam by university students involved in the anti-Nazi resistance movement in the aftermath of World War II, Hodge hopes that Monrovia’s own Kriterion can provide part-time employment to students and also become a hub for Liberian cinema and intellectual debate. The Kriterion model has also been adopted by students in post-conflict cities like Sarajevo.
But, establishing an art house cinema will be a challenge in a country where most people get their slice of cinema in ramshackle video clubs, sitting on wooden benches watching Nigerian, American and Indian films off eerie television screens that sit small in the darkness. In Monrovia, cinemas are virtually non-existent – two of the three cinemas, remembered fondly by Liberia’s pre-war generation, have been demolished. Only Rivoli, a cinema in downtown Monrovia, is still standing and seems to screen Bollywood movies exclusively. These cinemas aired mainly American movies as films were largely limited to government public relations and propaganda. But Hodge and her team, through surveying and research, found Liberian audiences want to see more locally produced films.
Unlike some of its neighbors in the region, like Nigeria and Ghana, Liberia has never had a vibrant film culture. Liberia’s cinema scene is small and amateurish with only a handful of directors producing quality films.
Derick Snyder, a filmmaker and producer, describes most Liberian films as birthday party quality.
“You got a little camera for your daughter’s birthday and you just film the yard. We’ve still got a lot to learn,” he says.
Snyder is one of a handful of Liberian producers who are able to shoot and edit quality films. Most actors are untrained and perform for free; those with talent and ambition head to Nigeria, Ghana or Gambia. Lack of access to equipment, technical know-how and stale plotlines, have hindered the growth of Liberia’s small film industry, says Snyder.
“Everyone is doing ma, pa, daughter crying in the living room love stories,” he says, adding that Liberians prefer the drama and slick effects of many of the Nigerian films.
Snyder, like many producers, has a day job shooting events for the United Nations Mission in Liberia and produces films on the side. He says most filmmakers struggle to earn a living.
Unlike other African countries, the Liberian government provides limited funding for the arts.
But, over the past year, there have been efforts to develop filmmaking by organizations such as Accountability Lab, an NGO focused on funding small projects that encourage accountability. Nigerian-Liberian director Divine Key Anderson heads a part-time film school that helps train students to make short films focused on accountability issues.
“Since 1847, we have been writing papers and not much has changed in this country and that is because 70 percent of our population are illiterate… but with film even a blind man can see,” says Anderson, who, like Hodge, agrees that film can be instrumental in creating political debate and change.
For James Emmanuel Roberts, who made No More Selections We Want Elections, the arts play a vital role in creating national identity and broader political and social debate. Roberts, 70, headed the national cultural troupe in the 1970s and helped create a satire television series called Kotati, meaning ‘sit down there’ in the Kru language, that aired on Liberian state-run television.
Roberts argues the development of a film scene in Liberia will play an important role in creating a collective historical memory that was largely erased by the 1980 coup and civil war, during which many records and archives were destroyed.  He says that cinema could help Liberians shape the story of their nation, whose recent history has been narrated by outsiders, namely Western journalists. Roberts and his son are currently working on a film on the 2011 elections.
After I finish interviewing Roberts, the public electricity cuts out and Hodge and her team rush to fuel up a generator for the next screening.
Creating an art house cinema, in a country whose cultural scene is only just beginning to re-emerge a decade after the civil war, will be a challenge. Hodge is confident she and her Kriterions are up to the task and that the film festival will continue to attract a culture-hungry audience.

Us On Film

The rain hammered down on Maputo, as if in protest, the night the Sacred Monster died. It squalled in from the dark and rough waters of the Indian Ocean, on gusts of wind, as Mozambique mourned. It should have been gentle rain, like tears in the night, but Mario Coluna would have appreciated this mighty show of natural force over the land of his birth; after all, it was natural power and uncanny force, born in Africa, that drove the Sacred Monster to a hallowed place in world football.
Coluna could hold any football crowd in the palm of his hand; outwit any opposition in his head and launch rockets with his boots. His explosive acceleration and body strength often overpowered the world’s finest players.
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On this night, February 25, after a heart attack, Coluna lay in peace at a Maputo hospital close to the streets where he learnt the game with his father’s socks tied into a ball. He was 78, 44 years since he stopped playing, and remains one of the most determined and skilful Africans ever to lace up a pair of football boots. In this age of hyperbole, peopled by overpaid and overrated players; Coluna was a man who wore modestly the word great. His country gave him a state funeral on February 28 and declared it a public holiday.
“It is not easy to say goodbye to someone whose life was among the greatest,” Luis Filipe Viera, the president of Benfica, told the club’s official website.
“Someone whose life path is unique and whose legacy will endure far beyond him. It is said that we are born equal. Untrue! Coluna was born different, for the better, much better.”
The Portuguese journalists called him the Sacred Monster—O Monstro Sagrado—because he was both terrifying and beautiful with the ball at his feet. He helped Benfica win 10 league titles and the European Cup twice; scoring in the victories over Barcelona in 1961 and Real Madrid the following year.
The win to retain the trophy, in Amsterdam in 1962, was as much an African triumph as a European one. In goal was Alberto da Costa Pereira, from Nacala in Mozambique, the captain Jose Aguas, born in Lobito, Angola, along with Coluna and Eusebio from Maputo. Players born and bred in Africa had a hand in all five goals as Benfica came back from 2-0 down to win 5-3.
On that May evening, as Coluna smashed in a goal from 25 yards to make it 4-3, hundreds of his countrymen were listening, also far from home. In the camps in the bush of southern Tanzania, hundreds of guerrilla fighters for FRELIMO—the newly formed liberation movement for Mozambique—crowded around the radio. One of them was founder member and future president Joaquim Chissano.
“We were divided. Some of us felt Coluna was bringing glory to our country, Mozambique. Others thought he was bringing glory to our colonizers, Portugal,” says Chissano at his Maputo home, the day after Coluna died.
“He was a true leader, he was always more concerned how the team was playing rather than how he was playing. When he retired, he brought his skills back to Mozambique to help build the game here. He was truly a great man.”
Coluna played for Benfica from 1954 to 1970 and when he retired Lev Yashin, Bobby Moore, the World Cup winning captain of England, Bobby Charlton, Uwe Seeler, George Best and Denis Law played at his testimonial in Lisbon.
Coluna was born in Maputo to a Mozambique mother and Portuguese father. His father was a goalkeeper and football fanatic, who died in the stands of a heart attack while watching the club he helped to found, now known as Desportivo de Maputo. Coluna’s precocious talent shone at Desportivo and Benfica scouts spotted him and flew him to Lisbon. He played 677 times, scoring 150 goals, for Benfica. In 1966, he captained one of the greatest sides ever to play for Portugal. They called them the Magricos—the magicians—and among them were four players from Mozambique: Coluna; Eusebio; Vicente and Hilario. This talented team should have been world champions, but suffered when the semi-final was switched, at the last minute, from Liverpool to London. The Portuguese emerged exhausted from an overnight train journey and lost 2-1 to England, the eventual winners.
I was in Maputo the night the great man died. It was almost five years to the day since I was privileged to be invited into his quiet Maputo home for an interview. He was looking frail then, but I was struck by the sure-footed confidence of an athlete. I was also struck by his gentlemanly demeanor and piercing blue eyes that would smile and then flash a steely glint; just to let you know that if you faced him on a football field you wouldn’t stand a chance.
Coluna told me he played football when men were men and referees were lenient. He rolled up his trouser leg to show me an ugly criss-cross scar—a painful souvenir of a crunching tackle in Rome in the 1960s that hastened the end of his career. The defender didn’t even get a caution.
Even though they drew the crowds, the players then were paid a pittance. Coluna, a handsome gentleman, who always wore a debonair pencil moustache, would these days have made a fortune from modeling clothes.
The top players of today earn more in a month than Coluna earned in his entire career. Coluna eked out his final years on a Benfica pension, but was never bitter.
“If players are making money for the football clubs, by getting fans through the turnstiles, why shouldn’t they get good money?” Coluna asked me on that hot February afternoon in Maputo.
Money was never the spur for Coluna. In 1975, when many of his talented generation, like Pele and Franz Beckenbauer, headed to New York for the riches of the new National American Soccer League, Coluna went home. He coached Text Chimoio, a club in a small town near the border with Zimbabwe, to the first football championship of an independent Mozambique. Years later, he ran a football academy, became the head of the country’s football association as well as an MP. At the age of 74, Coluna was campaigning for Portugal to prepare in Mozambique for the 2010 World Cup over the border in South Africa, arguing that the countries shared climate and language.
Portugal ignored Coluna’s pleas and sadly the football world, to an extent, ignored his legacy and talent. I think it is a crime that the name Coluna is often forgotten in world lit by a mere mention of the name Eusebio. Both players carried the banner for African football in Europe; only one returned.
Even sadder is that, in the space of a month, both African legends have gone. Television money and the globalized game mean we will see the like of their talent again, but few African geniuses will shine so brightly and labor so hard, for so little. When African footballers everywhere lace up their boots they should think of two names for inspiration: Coluna and Eusebio, two legends, who dared to dream, from Maputo, Mozambique.

A Storm To Mourn  The Sacred Monster

More than 700 emails await Toby Shapshak, according to his Apple iPhone 4, lighting up on the retro red cabinet in the doorway of his Johannesburg home.
<div id="attachment_310" style="width: 484px" class="wp-caption alignleft"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" aria-describedby="caption-attachment-310" class="size-large wp-image-310" src="/wp-content/uploads/2017/04/CTX8990-678x1024.jpg" alt="" width="474" height="716" />“[The cellphone] changed from something you hold next to your ear, to something you hold in your hand and look at.” Toby Shaphak</div>“I’m sure there’s many more than that,” he says.
What a difference a couple of decades makes. During the late 1980s, Shapshak wouldn’t have known what an email was and would have been carrying a cellphone that you could hammer a nail in with.
Compare again the iPhone of 2011 to the Motorola DynaTAC 8000X of 1983—the iPhone has 200 hours of standby time, a global positioning system that can geographically locate where you are and can send a picture of your mother to Thailand in two seconds. You had to charge the Motorola DynaTAC for 10 hours to make a one-hour call and it was as light as a lump of lead.
Shapshak, the South African editor of international men’s electronic magazine, Stuff, was one of the first journalists in the country to own a cellphone. “I remember being one of the only journalists with a cellphone and it was completely remarkable to be able to call the newsroom and tell people where I was or what I was doing [and] for people to be able to get hold of me. I remember putting my cellphone number on my first business card. You had a land line, your office address and your postal address, then I had a cellphone number and along came email.”
Motorola came up with the mobile phone in 1983; it weighed nearly a kilogram and could only be used to make calls, nothing else, with a small black screen used to see the numbers punched in the keypad.
Two years later, it reached African shores. Its first African customer was the then government of Zaire, now the Democratic Republic of Congo.
<div id="attachment_312" style="width: 484px" class="wp-caption alignleft"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" aria-describedby="caption-attachment-312" class="size-large wp-image-312" src="/wp-content/uploads/2017/04/7-1-1024x689.jpg" alt="" width="474" height="319" />Albert Gatare 2011</div>
According to the African Leadership Academy, President Mobutu Sese Seko issued the first ever private telecommunications licence to a company called Telecel, founded by Rwanda-born, Miko Rwayitare (who died in 2007) and American, Joseph Gatt.
Rwayitare and Gatt bought 200 of Motorola’s cellphones for President Mobutu and his administration, in a bid to convince the government to switch from land lines. They sold each phone for substantially more than what they were going for in the US at the time. It meant these phones were merely for the moneyed elite of Kinshasa.
Albert Gatare, Rwayitare’s youngest brother, was one of the first Africans to use the phone and says back then it was a symbol of wealth in the city.
“That time those phones were $3,000 or $4,000. It is difficult to understand [now] how people could have bought phones for that much.
“After the commercial launch, it became a symbol of high class; everyone knew that only ministers, CEOs and rich people had those types of phones. Today you take your phone and put it in your pocket, but that time when you went to a restaurant you would put it on the table, just to show off.”
<div id="attachment_311" style="width: 484px" class="wp-caption alignleft"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" aria-describedby="caption-attachment-311" class="size-large wp-image-311" src="/wp-content/uploads/2017/04/4-717x1024.jpg" alt="" width="474" height="677" />Joan Joffe 1994</div>
Telecel’s success was also helped by the continent’s poor fixed landline system, says Gatare. According to Mobile Monday, an international networking organization run by mobile industry professionals, their 2011 Africa report showed that the number of mobile phones exceeded the number of fixed lines by the year 2000. The African Development Bank says the number of land lines is declining.
The company expanded from Zaire into nine other countries: Burundi in 1992; Guinea in 1993; Madagascar in 1994; Central African Republic in 1995; Ivory Coast in 1996; Zambia in 1997 and Zimbabwe, Niger and Togo in 1998.
In South Africa, Joan Joffe was one of the people who launched Vodacom in 1994, the same year she picked up her first cellphone.
“It was amazing that you could walk around and speak. It weighed a ton, though; you could not put it in your handbag, but it was amazing,” she says.
“Our forecast was for 250,000 subscribers in the first 10 years. I can tell you that we had a huge party when the number of connections reached 50,000 towards the middle of the first year. It was a big deal for us,” says Joffe.
Vodacom has customers in South Africa, Tanzania, Lesotho, the Democratic Republic of Congo and Mozambique, and is considered one of the top four networks on the continent along with MTN, Airtel and Orange.
“Today single operators cannot survive, they must be part of a bigger group,” says Gatare.
Rwayitare sold 80% of his Telecel shares to various telecommunication companies, including Orascom in Egypt, MTN in the Ivory Coast and other smaller companies, for
around $47 million. He moved to South Africa, where he built the most expensive house in Johannesburg’s wealthy suburb, Sandhurst.
According to the International Telecommunication Union, in 2010 41.4% of Africans had a cellular subscription.
One of them is South African entrepreneur Jenna Clifford. The founder and designer of a luxury jewellery brand, in the late 1980s, she had what she called her “porty”—short for portable telephone.
“It looked like a little metal suitcase, but it was state of the art at that time. My previous husband bought his first porty and I saw the benefit of being contacted outside of the office and bought one of my own, [but] you could not take it overseas, the costing was huge in those days,” she says.
As her finger glides along the iPhone 4 in her palm, she says: “It has liberated me. It is not rocket science; you check the picture and you click.
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“I felt intuitively that with the advent of the porty, more people would be using them and they would get smaller. Just like computers were once the size of rooms,” says Clifford. “I’m a bit of a prophet.”
Africa is second only to Asia regarding the highest number of mobile subscriptions. And it is not finished yet.

From A Brick To A Flick

They put their lives on the line for the truth. They fight for justice. Few are recognized for it. These are the gatekeepers of history. Journalists—the men and women who often risk their necks for a pittance. Many journalists pay the ultimate price for their craft. Troubled Pulitzer Prize winner Kevin Carter—who took the famous shot of a Sudanese baby under the eye of a vulture— took his own life; his colleague, Ken Oosterbroek, was shot dead in South African political violence in Thokoza; fellow photographer, Joao Silva, lost his legs in Afghanistan; Henry Nxumalo, a fearless journalist with South Africa’s Drum magazine, was killed in a Johannesburg back alley; Mohamed Hassaine is still missing in Algeria; and Emmanuel Munyenazi went missing in Rwanda. Often journalists are so busy telling other people’s stories that they forget to tell their own. A new film, released in Africa in July, tries to redress this.
<div id="attachment_94" style="width: 484px" class="wp-caption alignleft"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" aria-describedby="caption-attachment-94" class="size-large wp-image-94" src="/wp-content/uploads/2011/10/BBC-Generic-1-1024x683.jpg" alt="" width="474" height="316" />THE BANG BANG CLUB: Taylor Kitsch as Kevin Carter and Frank Rautenbach as Ken Oosterbroek</div>
The Bang Bang Club is the story of four photojournalists, including Oosterbroek, Carter Silva, who risked their necks covering the political violence in the townships of Johannesburg between 1990 and 1994—a job that took courage and dedication, where young men had to juggle professionalism with being human. Do you get your shot, or do you intervene to save a life? It’s a cinematic tale that translates to anywhere in Africa where a voice or fist is raised in anger. The film analyses the moral question: where these young adrenaline junkies eager for the fight—or were they brave crusaders for the truth whose pictures arrived on breakfast tables around the world, turning world opinion against the oppressors? Johannesburg in 2011 is a world away from the apartheid days of South Africa. Voices blare unfettered on the airwaves and in the newspapers on any subject you can name. But, like many countries in Africa, the press faces looming restriction at the hands of legislators. It appears another struggle for the truth may be on the cards, begging the question: is the journalist class of 2011 as ready to get their hands dirty as the gritty street fighters of The Bang Bang Club?
Anton Harber, a Caxton Professor of Journalism and Media Studies at the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg, began his career in 1980. Like the rest, he too ran the streets in apartheid days towards the action, while others ran away. He describes journalism as being twosided at the time, with repression on the one hand and creativity on the other. How would the class of 2011 measure up? According to Harber, it is like comparing apples and pears: “We are looking for different things in the class of 2011 and it is not fair to expect the same from them as the journalists who came before.” The test will come in how the current generation handles the proposed Protection of Information Bill, which is stirring up the debate regarding media censorship and more responsible journalism.
This is also the digital age, where videos can go viral. The people of Egypt and Libya took their revolt to the world through social sites where YouTube thwarted government attempts to shut them up. Many journalists fear this social wave could take over their age-old craft. Harber disagrees: “Although technology changes what journalists do, it can never replace them.” Also, there are fewer journalists around the world running between the bullets and the bombs. These days, more and more journalists are glued safely to their cubicles, typing away about markets and finance. It appears the world is more concerned with commodities than it is about politics and public interest has plunged towards matters more trivial.
Harber said: “I see the trend moving towards softer lifestyle pieces.” Journalism has come a long way from the violent days of The Bang Bang Club. Watching the film evokes the old adage attributed to many swashbuckling young journalists: “Live fast, die young, and leave a good looking corpse.” It appears many of the class of 2011 would be happy with merely the former.
<h3>Armed with a lens</h3>
Alf Kumalo—the grandfather of The Bang Bang Club—spent years risking his life to capture the beauty and brutality of South Africa’s tough streets.
<div id="attachment_91" style="width: 484px" class="wp-caption alignleft"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" aria-describedby="caption-attachment-91" class="size-large wp-image-91" src="/wp-content/uploads/2017/04/ALF_KUMALO_012-683x1024.jpg" alt="" width="474" height="711" />Alf Kumalo—the grandfather of The Bang Bang Club—spent years risking his life to capture the beauty and brutality of South Africa’s tough streets.</div>
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He stands fi rm and sprightly in the gentle sunshine warming his lush suburban garden. He belies his age of 81. He has been beaten, tear-gassed, imprisoned and shot at for his craft. Yet there is fi re in his eyes and as always, a camera around his neck. This is Alf Kumalo, veteran photojournalist and arguably the grandfather of The Bang Bang Club. “The ‘Bang Bang’ started in the 1990s, but we’d been banging on for years,” laughs Kumalo.
It was the life Kumalo chose for himself. With camera inhand he traveled the world and chronicled South Africa’s turbulent political history from before Nelson Mandela’s imprisonment, through his release, to the present day. He is one of the few people in the world who can count both Mandela and Muhammad Ali as friends Kumalo is an award-winning photographer, as well as a journalist, author, mentor and well-traveled businessman— a far cry from where he started. He was born in 1930 in Alexandra, Johannesburg in a tough world for a young black man. With a Beautyfl ex Twin Lens in hand, he set out to capture the world. He worked for a string of Johannesburg titles: Bantu World, a newspaper shut down by the authorities; the Golden City Post; Drum magazine and The Star.
The 1950s and 1960s were dangerous days for a black man bent on exposing the brutality of the apartheid government with its dogs and secret police. Times were tough back then and there was a lot of hatred. Journalists were being beaten, detained, killed and some went missing.
One day, Kumalo was caught. “They cracked my skull with a gun butt,” he says. To add insult to injury, the police charged the wounded Kumalo with resisting arrest and fighting the police. The court case dragged on for nearly a year and at the end of it he was freed and told not to take pictures anymore. A defiant Kumalo refused. “I was arrested so many times, I was no longer afraid of jail. The one thing I was worried about was disappearing,”
Kumalo evaded the police to cover the Treason Trial from which Mandela was acquitted, the Rivonia Trial in which Mandela was imprisoned, and the 1976 Soweto uprising. Generations to come will be able to look at his photographs and get a true sense of what happened. Through it all, Kumalo is glad to be alive and remembers many friends and colleagues who weren’t so lucky. Kumalo looks to the journalists of the future with concern: “There is far less dedication now. I wish we could get our people, especially scholars, to be as dedicated as we were.” Kumalo practises what he preaches and runs a photography school in Diepkloof, Soweto. He is a selftaught photographer who is determined to teach others. Aside from this, Kumalo and his camera are always ready to go where the news is breaking. For him it is not a job, it is his life. There is no slowing Kumalo down and he will surely go down in history as gloriously as he has captured it.
<img loading="lazy" decoding="async" class="alignleft size-large wp-image-92" src="/wp-content/uploads/2017/04/THE-BANG-BANG-CLUB-Ryan-Phillippe-1024x683.jpg" alt="" width="474" height="316" />

“We live fast, we die young, and we leave a good-looking corpse”

Clues buried in the writings of William Shakespeare suggest that he may have partaken in the perceived ‘wisdom of the weed’. At least one Johannesburg-based scientist is convinced of it. And the proof may lie in The Bard’s Stratford grave in England.
It was while reading Sonnet 76 that Professor Francis Thackeray had a Eureka moment. The palaeo-anthropologist and director of the Institute for Human Evolution at Wits University recalls the moment during an ambitious project to read all 154 of Shakespeare’s 14-line poems in one sitting: “Shakespeare writes about ‘… invention in a noted weed’. And invention refers to creative writing, and we know that creative writers are known to enjoy the stimulation of cannabis.”
From behind his busy desk in a large office populated with casts of famous hominid skulls—among them the Taung Child and ‘Mrs Ples’—the tall, bespectacled academic proffers more clues garnered from the sonnet to support his hypothesis: “In the same sonnet, there’s reference to ‘…compounds strange’, which means strange drugs. And so, in my Eureka moment, I thought, ‘My goodness, is he making hidden reference to cannabis?’”
To further bolster his argument, Thackeray points out cannabis references in other Shakespeare works: “In other writings—for example, in Macbeth meeting the witches before he assassinates King Duncan, Shakespeare invents the word ‘assassination’. It’s derived from the (Arabic) word ‘hashashin’ – and ‘hashish’ is, of course, cannabis. It’s known that assassinations took place by assassins (sic) who got themselves high on cannabis before they executed their deadly deed.”
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The learned professor’s curiosity about The Bard’s smoking habits were first awakened after stumbling upon a book lying on a dusty shelf in the Shakespeare section of a second-hand bookshop in Hampstead, London. The book, Shakespeare’s Garden, referred to a 1920s excavation of the Stratford property, which threw up pipe bowl and stem fragments from a rubbish heap discovered there. Not one to pass up a good dig, Thackeray headed for Stratford to see the pipes for himself: “When I looked inside the pipe bowls from Shakespeare’s garden, and from other parts of Stratford, I could see that there was black residue.”
The palaeo-anthropologist, also a qualified chemist and mathematician, then got special permission to take 24 pipe fragments from Stratford to Pretoria, where he ran a chemical analysis at the narcotics laboratory in the police’s forensic lab. The gas chromatography technique used there revealed a plethora of compounds including vanilla, cinnamon and camphor, as well as cannabis. Until then, it was assumed that such pipes contained only the residues of tobacco from Virginia, which Sir Walter Raleigh had brought back to England. “They were experimenting!” exclaims the scientist excitedly. The findings led to his 2001 publication of a paper in the South African Journal of Science, which made a global impact.
Since then, Thackeray has hoped to prove his theory by examining The Bard’s remains, buried in a Stratford church next to his wife, Anne Hathaway, and their daughter. But his attempts have been thwarted curiously by Shakespeare himself—an epitaph written in the form of a curse has protected the grave for almost 400 years: “Cursed be he who moves my bones, and blessed be he who spares these stones.”
So Thackeray has proposed to carefully expose the skull and skeleton by excavating away the sediments without moving any bones. His team would then perform a laser surface scan, similar to those which have already been achieved by his institute on hominid fossils from the Cradle of Humankind. At best, he would hope to extract keratin from the hair and nails, which upon forensic analysis, would almost certainly provide conclusive proof of cannabis use.
DNA could also be extracted from a tooth, though that would be a more invasive procedure. A simple examination of The Bard’s exposed teeth would, however, reveal whether or not he was a regular pipe smoker. After deliberating over Thackeray’s proposal, the Holy Trinity Church Parochial Committee turned it down.
But for the Wits scientist, all is not lost. The church has more recently agreed to a proposal from archaeologists at the University of Birmingham to undertake an analysis which should determine simply whether there is indeed a body under the ground, without excavating. Technology such as ground penetrating radar could be employed to achieve this. Thackeray is delighted that the church has granted permission for such a preliminary exploratory study. He will be following these events closely and is optimistic that possibilities for him to do the kind of work he has been proposing may emerge.
The scientist first visited the church as a seven-year-old boy with his parents. Standing in the chancel by the grave, he recalls: “The thought did pass my mind. Wouldn’t it be interesting to look at the skeleton of Shakespeare?” It’s been a long wait for Thackeray and his collaborators, though he brushes it off: “We’re patient. I’m a palaeontologist. We can wait.”

Tag: History

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