‘In ferocious anger I bit the hand that controls’ – The Rise of Afrikaans Punk Rock Music
On a night in 2006, a Cape Town’s night club, its floor littered with cigarette butts, plays host to an Afrikaner (sub)cultural gathering. Guys with seventies’ glam rock hairstyles, wearing old school uniform-like blazers decorated with a collection of pins and buttons and teamed up with tight jeans, sneakers and loose shoelaces keep one eagerly [...]
Time to say Goodbye. Again.
Prologue You are cordially invited to read the following notes – but please accept: though reading the reflections is hopefully at times entertaining, the notes are not easy to comprehend, presenting thoughts as they are: interconnected, being a complex structure that cannot be easily deconstructed without doing damage to the overall existence. It had been [...]
Organic!
This is a diatribe written for the benefit of those of you who occasionally suffer from bad consciences because you grow roses. When I met Gerhard Verdoorn he was the Executive Director of Birdlife South Africa. We sat together through a long day devoted to the presentation of the outcomes of research into the harm [...]
Far from the Costas: Monroy – a village in the Extremadura
Extremadura is the most western province of Spain, along the Portuguese border. Only a few foreigners have heard of the region, and sometimes somebody has travelled through the area. A hidden country, of which you hope that it will always remain this way. A spacious area where tranquility is so common, where the sun sets [...]
Joseph Semah: After Paul Celan, Tango and Fugue
Being a Dutch art historian, working in Germany, I was asked to give a short introduction in English to an Israeli artist working in the Netherlands. The inherent confusion, the mingling of languages, that follows from this is a good starting point to talk about the work of Joseph Semah. Because there is even another [...]
The Ndundulu Invasion – Chapter One – Jesus Cristos
Bongi realised that now he had the time and the appetite to start and finish something, a novel, an African novel full of love, passion, tradition and soccer, not necessarily in that order. Something that could push young people open a book, escape poverty and Playstation 2 and read. He now remembered vividly when he [...]
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