This article first appeared in SIGNATURE magazine

November 2009

“If I tell you, you’ll forget it. If I show you, you might remember. But if you feel it, then you’ll understand.”

With these words of what he wryly calls “a bit of ancient Chinese wisdom”, Martin Briede welcomes me onto the practice tee at the Royal Johannesburg and Kensington Golf Club. It’s been one of those glorious spring days in Gauteng, and the late afternoon light is catching every blade of grass on the greens. Regular fourballs of golfers who have taken Friday afternoon off approach the final hole, three-putt, swear and stalk off to console themselves at the nineteenth.

This article first appeared in SAWUBONA magazine

November 2009

Unsure of how the ancient Romans would feel about their twenty-first century presence at Emperors Palace in Johannesburg, CHRIS THURMAN seeks out some African flavours at Tribes Grillhouse. 

There’s a wonderful moment in the recent film The Hangover in which, as the protagonists are checking into the Caesars Palace hotel in Las Vegas for a stag party, the groom-to-be’s oddball future brother-in-law asks: “This isn’t the real Caesar’s Palace, is it? I mean, did Caesar actually live here?”

This article first appeared in THE WEEKENDER

31st October 2009

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There are many facets to the Joburg aesthetic. There’s the ‘minedumps and highways’ cliché that out-of-towners hold so dear when they deride SA’s biggest city. There’s the capitalist/consumerist synthesis expressed in corporate palaces, coffee shops and couture boutiques. There’s the leafy suburban street, complete with high walls and grassy pavements.

Driving along the roads of this heavily-treed metropolis and listening to the mild inanities of afternoon talk radio has its own particular appeal. But after hearing yet another show in which the host bemoans the lack of village cricket in Parkhurst, solicits ice-cream recipes, promotes the delights of Jacaranda blossom viewing from the Westcliff Hotel or panders in some other way to the petit- and haute-bourgeois ambitions of Gauteng’s denizens, one begins to think: surely there are other (more interesting) ways of representing Johannesburg, of exploring its multiple contradictions, of experiencing the city?

This article first appeared in SAWUBONA magazine 

September 2009

Let me tell you about a certain country.

Like the other countries with which it shares a vast continent, this land was for centuries a colony exploited by European powers. When it established independence from its “mother country” many years ago, this did not bring freedom to most of its people – the colonial legacy of ethnicity-based inequality remained. After a twentieth century dominated by militaristic and totalitarian rule, it has only comparatively recently emerged as a civil democracy and is now one of the leading “countries of the South”.

This article first appeared in THE WEEKENDER

25th April 2009

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We tend to think of the ancient Greeks as a serious bunch: bearded men in flowing robes engaged in earnest conversation about life, the universe and everything. This, certainly, is the image bequeathed to us by Italian Renaissance painters – Plato and Aristotle discussing philosophy at the Athenian Academy and so on.

But life in Athens had another side. The Greeks, like the Romans after them, preferred being entertained. In the theatre, comedies were written and staged more often than tragedies. While tragic tales of the suffering of noble individuals were depicted for moral or religious edification, the experiences of everyday citizens were portrayed comically. Moreover, commentary on current events was the terrain of comedy rather than tragedy.

This article first appeared in THE WEEKENDER

11th April 2009

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Things haven’t always been rosy in the relationship between Oasis and Coke (the cola, that is – although the same could be said, no doubt, of their relationship with the white powdery stuff).

The British supergroup, driven by the love-hate relationship and creative genius of Gallagher brothers Noel and Liam, has leapt from fame to infamy across the global music scene since it first topped the charts in 1995. But even before their second album (What’s the Story) Morning Glory? established them as bad-boy Britpop icons, the brothers had achieved a certain notoriety in the beverage industry.

This article first appeared in THE WEEKENDER

4th April 2009

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The Main programme of this year’s National Arts Festival was launched earlier this week, heralding a “new face” for the Festival in 2009 – or, more accurately, faces.

Two of those new faces are CEO Tony Lankester and Director Ismail Mahomed, who continue to joke modestly that the departure of former Festival head Lynette Marais after twenty years at the helm left a void that could only be filled by making two appointments.

This article first appeared in THE WEEKENDER

15th November 2008

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Tuesday 4th November 2008 will be remembered by most global citizens as the day Barack Obama was voted in as president of the United States. For a small group of South Africans, however, the day will have additional resonance.

As Americans went to the polls in their millions, the results of a different vote were announced at a ceremony in Johannesburg: the Standard Bank Young Artist awards in the categories of dance, drama, visual art, music and jazz.

This article first appeared in THE WEEKENDER

8th November 2008

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Some time ago, I spent a week with a group of journalists from Russia, Poland and the Czech Republic. After a few days, conversation began to dwindle – and, in a misguided attempt to fill the awkward silence one dinnertime, I remarked on the twentieth-century connections between South Africa and Eastern Europe, and Russia in particular. I went through a brief list of apartheid-era exiles who spent time in Moscow, mentioned the support the resistance movement received from the Soviets, and concluded by observing that the SA Communist Party was an ally of the current ruling party and active in matters of government.

Perhaps I had seemed too light-hearted or too smug in rattling off these facts, because my Russian colleague wasted no time in telling me off: “You think that’s good? I can tell you, it’s not good. You ask any of the people at this table – we all lived behind the Iron Curtain. Communism was terrible! Communism is terrible!”