Temba Bavuma: A Rock In A Hard Place

Earlier this year I noticed a strange cricketing trend: over the last decade, the Test teams most likely to be shot out for under 100 were not underachievers like the West Indies or relative minnows Bangladesh. Instead, the most implosion-prone batting lineups on the planet were South African and Australian. I examined this peculiar statistical

The Freedom Charter – Rebooted!

We, the Connected People of South Africa, declare for all our country and the world to know: screw you. We know we once said that South Africa belongs to all who live in it, black and white, but that’s obviously a ridiculously naive position, so from here on South Africa belongs to anyone with enough

Pitch and moan

Right. Hashim Amla held on heroically but we’ve been thumped, to add to our hammering in the first Test and what was probably a stay of execution in the second. We’ve lost our first away series in nine years, and we’re pretty annoyed about it, because we didn’t lose to a cricket team. We lost

It’s the President on Line 1

A picture can paint a thousand words, but sometimes it also paints just one. Like “fokkoff”. On 28 September the UN held a luncheon during its 70th session (“luncheon” is rich person for “lunch”), and just after the first course of wild platitude poached in a jus of lightly broken promises, and just before the

A watchlist

On the weekend the Sunday Independent ran a story “in the spirit of transparency and proper record-keeping” that featured a long list of names. Each name belonged to a Member of Parliament. They had two things in common: they were members of the ANC, and they had voted Yes to adopt the report that absolved

Miss Congeniality: South African fiction

Authors’ incomes collapse to ‘abject’ levels. That’s what the headline on The Guardian said, and I was frantic to know more. Which authors? Was it me? Were my annual royalty cheques of R250 about to plunge to R50? Less? Usually I read like a millenial, which is to say I base my world view on

Infinite Grey

Serial book-doer E.L. James has done it again. Grey has hit the shelves with a squelchy thud, and this time the world of not-BDSM, where non-people do not-plot things to and with each other, is told from Christian Grey’s perspective. Cleverly, the book is called Grey, because it’s about Christian Grey but it’s also from

Stupid song lyrics 1.0

You know that moment when you hear something so stupid that you sort of jolt upright and pay extra attention? That just happened to me. A song came on the radio with lyrics so monumentally tin-eared and oxygen-deprived that I had to look it up. It’s called “Headlights” and it’s by someone called Robin Schulz.

Crouching Tiger, Obliterated Rhino

We all want to know what lies around the next bend, but nobody can read the future. Nobody, that is, except futurolog futuristologists futologistogist fut people who figure out likely scenarios using computer models, statistics, and industrial quantities of marijuana. In the final chapter of my 10% TOTALLY TRUE history book, The Unauthorised History of

Going Dutch

Once upon a time this was an almost holy week in white South Africa, for lo, ’twas on April 6, in the Year of our Dutch Lords 1652, that a certain convicted embezzler with a Spaniel-ear hairdo called Jan arrived at the Cape and claimed it for Holland (Two English sailors had previously offered it