South Africa is home to a world of African delights, offering diversity in culture and experience
Siemon Allen’s Stamps V 2010 All four of the Otherscapes installations at JCAF are intriguing and through-provoking. But for me the initial visual impact of Seimon Allen’s Stamps V 2010 was the most powerful. From afar this installation reads as some huge, abstract, gridded colour-field painting. As one goes closer the miniature images, comprising over […]
Read More »Umaf’ evuka, nje ngenyanga /Dying and Rising as the Moon Does This is the title of the exhibition of tapestries made by the artists’ collective: Keiskamma Art Project, currently displayed at Constitution Hill. Constitution Hill is a site of contradiction. It has a painful past where men and women were imprisoned: a few were criminals, […]
Read More »Turmoil in South Africa The events of the week of 11th July 2021 left South Africa reeling. Much has been written about what happened; why; and what needs to be done so that it does not happen again. Many “Joe and Jill Does” have resorted to the all too superficial view of both generalizing and […]
Read More »Liz at Lancaster is a bird friendly establishment Liz at Lancaster is recognized by BirdLife South Africa as a birding friendly establishment and we have hosted several members of Birdlife SA and arranged tours for international birders. I’m a very amateurish birder, tending to glaze over when it comes to warblers, pippits, larks and cisticolas ((but […]
Read More »Parks as sites of activism In addition to being places of leisure and recreation, parks and public spaces are containers of values, bounded spaces of inclusion and exclusion, sites of political, social and cultural activism whether overtly or by default. During the 1980s in the height of Apartheid repression people’s parks in South Africa were […]
Read More »Please don’t treat South African citizens like fools You had us all on-side Mr President. Only yesterday I sung your praises. But then the Minister of Cooperative governance and Traditional Affairs (CoGTA) announced the Level 4 Lockdown regulations due to come into effect tomorrow 1st May. The reversal of the lifting of the ban on […]
Read More »On Thursday 23rd April (4 weeks after Lockdown), President Ramaphosa addressed the nation to announce a phased relaxation of lockdown measures in South Africa. Nobody could give a more cogent response than Herman Le Roux in his Facebook post which has been dubbed “Saluting Our President“. I have copied it verbatim here: I just listened […]
Read More »The post below however, is a bit of a cheat as it simply takes (word for word) a communication from Andrew Delmont, a financial Planner at Toro Financial Planners. And yes, I have his permission to use it – as my son, what else could he say to his mother but “Of course”! I hope […]
Read More »Tapping into the economic potential of the birding community A few months back an article in Tourism Update caught my eye: Avitourism may have same economic potential as gorillas – Rwanda. Even though there are over 700 bird species in Rwanda, surely these little feathered friends can’t hold the same fascination as the huge iconic […]
Read More »The Kruger National Park is one of my favourite places in the world. There is nothing like those early mornings edging slowly down a gravel road, squinting into the rising sun, sipping hot coffee – all the while wondering what is around the next corner or what is happening a metre off the road in […]
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