Travelling north on the N1 highway from Johannesburg to Pretoria a sight can be seen which might have students and lovers of architecture rubbing their eyes – a three-quarter replica of the famous Selimiye Mosque in Edirne, Turkey, stands on a rise to the east with...
“They looked up and saw the eye of death.” – Time magazine, 7 August 1995 A group of schoolgirls were helping clean the streets of Hiroshima at about 08h16 on Monday, 6 August 1945, when a B-29 Flying Fortress flew high overhead. Their teacher drew attention to...
Philosophy is often regarded as impractical, something separate from “real life”—whatever that might be! Actually, as author Edward Craig writes in the interesting book Philosophy – a very short introduction (Oxford, 2002): “In fact philosophy is extremely hard...
In the midst of the furore of the Limpopo textbook crisis and the gloom of the world’s economic failures a book arrived serendipitously on my desk and helped to keep my spirits positive. From Apartheid to Zaamheid is a readable and practical book about making a...
“Nothing on earth consumes a man more quickly than the passion of resentment.” – Friedrich Nietzsche South Africa has always been, in Allan Drury’s words, “A very strange society” so it should perhaps not surprise us that 20 or so years after the official death of...
Two mutinies, a man presumably lost overboard, two women crew members and a wreck off the coast of Australia are just some of the colourful incidents in the life of this four-masted, iron-hulled barque which was painted in 1927 by marine artist Jack Spurling. The...
“Jack Spurling was the pilot who sailed many a pretty clipper ship through memory straits and anchored her again before the eyes of those who knew her best and loved her most.” – from the Sydney Morning Herald of 30 September 1933: obituary of Jack Spurling...
In 1990 two great South African musicians died within weeks of each other. They died in exile in Europe, and their deaths took away something special for their fellow-musicians and their myriads of fans. The two musicians were pianist/composer/arranger Chris McGregor...
“Then along came Ayler. Holy shit! Brash and bold . . . Wailing, parading Albert Ayler – Psalm-swinging, Song-singing to you. Free at last, free at last. Thank God Almighty free at last.” – Hal Russell Albert Ayler (pronounced “Eyeler”), the...
“I’m gonna stay with the youngsters. When these get too old I’ll get some younger ones. Keeps the mind active.” – Art Blakey (1954) In a career that spanned more than 40 years in jazz master drummer Art Blakey, also known by his Islamic...
