Sunday Times books editor Tymon Smith has a wide-ranging conversation with Ja, No, Man! author Richard Poplak about the effect of American pop culture in the so-called Muslim world, which is the subject of Poplak’s latest book, The Sheikh’s Batmobile.
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Podcast: Tymon Smith in conversation with Richard Poplak
As Trevor Manuel’s biographer, Pippa Green has the inside scoop on the events of the day that Nelson Mandela was released from prison (11 Feb 1990). Twenty years down the line, she re-tracks the movements of the Mandela Reception Committee:
Eight days after FW de Klerk made his pathbreaking speech of February 2 1990, Trevor Manuel got a message from the office of General Johan Willemse, the commissioner of prisons. So did Dullah Omar. So did Bulelani Ngcuka. They passed it on to Saki Macozoma, a young South African Council of Churches activist who was visiting the Western Cape.
Could they be at the HF Verwoerd Building in the parliamentary complex — the Cape Town offices of the Cabinet — at 2.30 pm?
All of them were members of the Mandela Reception Committee. The committee had been set up country wide to receive Nelson Mandela from jail. It grew directly out of the prescience of several months before, when the internal resistance movement, battered by the emergency, backed their exiled comrades by preparing their own embittered constituency for negotiations with the apartheid regime.
South Africa-born, Canada-based Richard Poplak, author of Ja, No Man! and The Sheikh’s Batmobile, returns to the SA pop culture beat with this investigation of the of the Die Antwoord phenomenon, presented for his Canadian audience:
Over the course of the past ten days or so, the band have been propelled by the likes of Boing Boing, Twitter, Pitchfork, Reuters, et al into the very maw of Fame 3.0. As lead rapper Waddy, a.k.a. Ninja, puts it: “Look at me now! All over the interweb.” Indeed, only two weeks ago, Ninja and his sidekicks Yo-landi “Rich Bitch” Vi$$er and the flabby DJ Hi-Tek were paying dues; now they’re rolling in nunchaku. For their international fans, Die Antwoord are exotic, furious, and, most importantly, new. But what their lyrics mean — or what they stand for precisely — no one in Brooklyn or Paris or São Paulo can say.
Ninja is, at first glance, your typical white trash rapper. He wears his hoodie low; his rangy body is marked with crude tattoos. It takes a second or two to realize that Run-D.M.C. were playing Applebee’s buffets by the time they were of Ninja’s vintage: he is closer to middle age than middle school. He raps in a scattershot mixture of English and Afrikaans; his accent is unfathomable. His lyrics reference the minutely specific to the hip-hop generic: “If you don’t like funerals, Ninja says don’t kick sand in his face,” recalls a South African peanut-butter commercial from the ’80s; “too hot to handle, to cold to hold,” fist-bumps vintage MC Hammer. The clue to Die Antwoord’s raison d’être hides in the intro of their astonishing debut album $O$, where Ninja informs us that, “I represent South African culture. In this place, you get a lot of different things…Blacks. Whites. Coloureds. English. Afrikans. Xhosa. Zulu. Watookal. I’m like all these different people, fucked into one person.” Then Ms. Vi$$er pipes in, dismissing him with a high-pitched “Whateva, man.”
The day of Nelson Mandela’s release from Victor Verster prison was a tumultuous one, to say the least. Trevor Manuel was part of the Madiba handling committee, and he remembers just how hectic things got, twenty years ago today:
“You will see from the footage… it is early in the afternoon when we leave Victor Verster (prison) and it is dark when he (Mandela) talks to the crowd… the reason is that we lost Madiba. Thankfully, we found him,” said Manuel, now the head of the National Planning Commission in President Jacob Zuma’s office.
Manuel was speaking on SAfm on Thursday morning, remembering the hectic arrangements that went on behind the scenes on the day of Mandela’s release, on February 11, 1990.
By freeing Mandela, Carlin writes, de Klerk helped South Africa take a first step into becoming a place where “respect has replaced hatred”. He was at Mandela’s first post-imprisonment press conference:
FW de Klerk, South Africa’s last white president, stunned the world on 2 February 1990 when he announced the lifting of the ban on the African National Congress, after three decades of illegality, and the imminent release of its leader, Nelson Mandela, after more than 27 years in prison. Black South Africans reacted with joyful stupefaction; white South Africans, programmed to view Mandela as the vengeful terrorist who would thrown them all into the sea, were in shock, none more so than the parliamentary caucus of the far right Conservative party.
The caucus held an emergency meeting at which their leader, Andries Treurnicht, better known as “Dr No”, read a thunderous passage from the Old Testament, preparing his co-religionists for holy war. A conservative MP there recalled later that they had long been fearing the day might come when they would have to unleash “the Afrikaner tiger”. “And, well,” the MP said, “this was the tiger moment.”
Nine days later, Mandela was out and the next morning he gave a press conference which I attended in the garden of Archbishop Desmond Tutu’s Cape Town home. If Mandela had ever been a “terrorist” – he was jailed for founding and leading the armed wing of the ANC – he did not look much like one now. A fit, good-humoured, serene and kingly figure aged 71, he committed himself to finding a negotiated solution to a conflict that had been threatening during the violent Eighties to spill over into civil war.
It was a gala affair as guests gathered at Emperors Palace in Johannesburg on Tuesday, for the launch of Rose of Soweto, the biography of boxer Dingaan Thobela. Held at the Palace’s night club venue, 64 @ The Palace, boxing fans, book lovers and sportsmen mingled among the tables and filled out the VIP area.
Edem Foli from Penguin Books introduced the night’s programme with author, Deon Potgieter first at the mic. Potgieter told why he wrote the book, saying, “There is only one ‘Rose of Soweto’. … When you go into [Thobela’s] story and you see where he came from, all the challenges he had, he always maintained a positive attitude and went forward.”
Potgieter continued, “The book is not just for sports fans. It is a book about a man, about his story. The message in the book is no matter what circumstances you are born into, no matter what challenges you face or obstacles are put in front of you, if you believe and you hold onto your dream and you remain true, you can succeed. The other message is that good guys can also win”.
Sports promoter Thinus Strydom then spoke about the privilege of working with Thobela, calling him “one of the best boxers ever produced” in South Africa, and ranking as “one of the best in the world”. Strydom called Thobela a role model: “he has lived his life with honour, integrity and passion”.
Next up was the rose himself, Dingaan Thobela. He thanked Strydom for giving him a chance to prove himself. He spoke about the importance of his WBC title and what it meant to him, and how he had “opened up” his heart to Potgieter for the book. He finished by saying that if the book was a good read to him, with a “Bantu Education”, it “means it’s good” – period!
Boxing SA’s Dr Peter Ngatane stepped up to the podium and shared his thoughts on how we write the pages of our lives day-to-day. He called Dingaan Thobela “one of the best loved boxers in South Africa”, and surprised Thobela with a certificate from the WBC President.
Junior Motsei brought the house down with his address, which included his powerful and infectious belly laugh. A proliferation of alliteration and humour peppered his captivating speech including this gem, “… a pinpoint excellent puncher with picture-perfect precision”. After the speeches, guests lined up for a once-in-a-lifetime book signing opportunity with both writer and subject.
Chris Beswick’s Classic fM Companion contains a selection of easily accessible biographies of some of the world’s major classic composers and is the perfect Christmas gift for classical music fans.
In this essential companion, Beswick presents a collection of concise biographies that illuminate the lives of the greatest composers from the Renaissance to the twentieth century. Not only does the Classic fM Companion highlight some of the composers’ most successful works and explore their relationships with their composer contemporaries, but it also provides a brief outline of the major historical and cultural events that occurred during their lifetimes, giving an idea of the world they lived in and how it may have influenced their music.
Chris Beswick was born and educated in the UK, and has always had passion for classical music. He has been a spare time researcher of family and social history for the past 30 years, and has written articles on family and social history for magazines. Recently retired from a long career in the IT industry, he is able to devote his time to larger projects dear to his heart. This is his first book.
Quite likely the most naturally talented boxer ever to come from South Africa, Dingaan Thobela became a boxing legend. In Rose of Soweto, Deon Potgeiter has chronicled the life of this remarkable sportsman. Here’s a video interview with Thobela about his life: (more…)
Thobela, the “Rose of Soweto”, has been described as the most naturally talented boxer to ever come out of South Africa. Growing up in Tshiawelo under the watchful eye of his grandmother, this is the story of how a skinny boy from Soweto overcame adversity to become one of the greatest boxers to ever lace a pair of gloves. Starting his career as a raw 17-year-old with a passion for boxing, Dingaan Thobela would go on to become a two-time lightweight world champion by the age of 26.
Come hear more about this boxer’s extraordinary story at what is sure to be a “knockout” launch. We’ll see you there!
Described as the most talented boxer ever discovered in South Africa, Dingaan Thobela is a man with a big reputation. In this extract from his biography, Rose of Soweto, published in the Sunday Independent, Thobela talks of the first time he met Nelson Mandela, amongst other momentus developments in his personal life:
HAVING only been recently released from his 27-year stint as a political prisoner, few people had yet to have the honour of meeting Nelson Mandela in 1991. He had been invited to attend the Rivera fight but due to various obligations could not do so. He did, however, notify the Thobela camp that he would come and meet Dingaan where he was staying at the Protea Gardens Hotel. Dingaan had met Nelson Mandela's then-wife, Winnie, on a number of occasions, but this was the first time he was to meet the great man himself.
“It was a special moment for me,” says Dingaan. “After all the hype and what we had heard and seen about him fighting for the country, fighting for freedom, I was very excited. It feels good when people see the things that you do are in some way good for the country.”
“Dingaan was understandably excited at the prospect of meeting him,” says Thinus Strydom. “As were we all. We were very happy that he took the time out to come and see Dingaan.”
In years to come Mandela and Dingaan would meet on a number of occasions and Mandela would also make a point of encouraging him by calling him before and after a number of his fights.
Sunday Times books editor Tymon Smith has a wide-ranging conversation with Ja, No, Man! author Richard Poplak about the effect of American pop culture in the so-called Muslim world, which is the subject of Poplak’s latest book, The Sheikh’s Batmobile.
