Dancing shoes: Bidvest Wits under 19s prepare for a tournament in Denmark. Photo: Mfuneko Toyana
BIDVEST Wits’ under-19 football team jets off to Denmark this Sunday to test their mettle in two international tournaments.
The academy team was invited by Danish giants Brondby IF to take part in the two-day competition, as well as the Lyngby Cup.
Head coach, Ashley Makhanya, says they are looking to do well in their third appearance at the Brondby Cup.
The team achieved second place in 2011 and then went on to clinch the cup in 2012 with some breathtaking performances that saw them score a total 34 goals on their way to victory.
SAFA develop plan not happening
The team’s performances are all the more impressive considering South Africa has no national under-19 league and, perhaps as a consequence, the national under-20 team is largely inactive and spends very little time playing competitive games.
Despite hugely publicised promises by the South African Football Association (SAFA) to reinvest 2010 World Cup profits into grassroots football and development structures, administrative bungles and infighting have prevented the good intentions turning into action.
On Monday The Times newspaper reported SAFA stands to lose its R120-million a year sponsorship deal with Puma due to maladministration and allegations of some Bafana Bafana games being fixed.
An attempt to find the national under-20 team’s 2013 fixtures illustrates the point: SAFA’s official website only had 2012 fixtures. The football manager at SAFA referred Wits Vuvuzela to technical director Fran Hilton-Smith when asked about fixtures. Hilton-Smith, in turn, said the manager should have these details.
At the time of going to press, no one from SAFA had been able to provide Wits Vuvuzela with updated fixture details.
Makhanya, head coach since 2009, said the team relied on playing in the SAFA Gauteng Development League against other academy teams in the province.
He said it was “important to expose our players to international football at an early age” to improve the level of local football.
“There’s a need for coaching at youth level. As a country we need to put more effort and more resources to expose the talent. A lot of young players are not being seen … If youth structures can improve we will be better off as a country.”
The Bidvest Wits academy appears to be playing its part in youth development.
In June, former under-19 player Lebogang Phiri signed a four-year deal to play for Brondby’s first team after impressing at the youth tournament last year.
The player is just one of many young talents nurtured by Bidvest who have gone on to become professionals. Stanton Fredericks, Josta Dladla, Sibusiso Vilakazi, Sifiso Myeni are just a few of the academy’s luminaries.
MILK and Honey, directed by newly minted Market Theatre chief James Ngcobo,tackles the paradox of memory and blackness in a swift and surreal 70 minutes of time travel.
The exposition of the play is prosaic without being boring, as it sets out the main character’s dilemma.
Thekiso Moekesti is a young and ambitious lawyer—needing only to relocate a rural community from their mineral rich land on behalf of his company to gain unqualified membership into the comfortable, nouveau rich stratosphere he and his fiancé Mamasti desire.
The problem is the paradox; the irony being Thekiso’s invidious position of being an “Other” amongst others.
Thekiso is haunted to a point of sleepless anxiety by the ghosts of his ancestors urging him to find his motherland and reconnect with the soil. Doubtless, his ancestors are also not pleased with his role as neo-coloniser.
Through a number of dream sequences and flashbacks we are whisked back and forth between past and present; between Thekiso and Mamasti’s impending marriage and the pastoral, whimsical courtship between Thekiso’s grandparents.
Both are set against the large shadow of displacement: in the present, Thekiso must ‘negotiate’ a community out of its land; in the past, his grandparents are kept from marrying by their separate tribes’ reaction to violent appropriation of their land by colonisers.
Thekiso’s physical journey to the land of ancestors, and his psychological journey through the story of his grandparents: through their experience of being black, and the painful experience of displacement.
A choice of interpretation
We are given two sides of a familiar coin. With one side of the coin, we might purchase the lessons and victories of irony. The catch is that while these things are on offer, they are at the same time concealed from us.
With the other side of the coin, if you wish, you can purchase a crudely political interpretation of the play.
Ignore theme, and consider only the context.
Choose this route, and Milk and Honey becomes an empty marker of the Land Act centenary; reminding us of the effects it still has today and nothing else; a justification for certain kind of political racialised myopia.
Thankfully, this is exactly what Milk and Honey is not.
Milk and Honey is part of the 969 Festival showing at the Wits Theatre
Oh Captain my captain: Director of the Wits Theater Gitanjali Pather Photo: Mfuneko Toyana
Attendance at Wits Theatre’s 969 Festival have been far from overwhelming.
This is despite the fact that plays being staged were hand-picked from the best productions recently on stage at the National Arts Festival in Grahamstown.
Director of Wits Theatre and curator of the festival, Gitanjali Pather, said she was disappointed that out of student population of 30 000, 5 000 of whom live on campus residences, the audiences have only been about half full.
Lady on a mission
“My chief challenge is to change this… I love this university and I want to make Wits Theatre and festivals like the 969 integral to the life of the university,” said Pather, who surprisingly—for all her enthusiasm and passion for Wits Theatre—is only five months into the job.
But once she began explaining why she thought theatre was so important, her enthusiasm became easy to understand.
“The theatre is an arena of contestations, of opinions, of ideas, of world views, of realities and it requires us to think. No one walks away from theatre unchanged,” she said speaking about the differences between theatre and more popular entertainment mediums like television.
“We are a lazy world. We are constantly bombarded by media and we also want instant gratification. We want to be told what to think and the level of interaction with our world is miniscule.”
Pather explained that since her four years as CEO of the Market Theatre, and right through her “sabbatical” from the politics of being a theatre manager, when worked in advertising while still teaching theatre, she always felt the stage offered a powerful avenue for social activism.
“What people take away from a performance is so unique. The act is such a personal one. It is a relationship established moment by moment between an audience member and the performance. Everyone walks away with something completely different. That is the magic of theatre and the creative arts.”
A history in the arts
Pather’s 27 years in the arts run almost parallel to the 30 year history of Wits Theatre; the coincidences telling and almost poetic.
“When I entered the profession, the arts and the cultural aspirations of the majority of people were never seen on our stages,” said Pather.
However, she also recalled the journey South African theatre has made from protesting minority rule, to offering therapy and hope for the masses.
“It allows people to experience change and catharsis and insight”, she said.
More importantly, she said, the arts offered students a “hemispherically balanced” experience, drawing on left brain and right brain.
“Wits needs to be a cosmopolitan and sophisticated campus. Students need to know that education goes far beyond the perimeters of a degree.”
Witsies, according to her, have everything to gain from attending the 969 Festival.
The festival closes with Skierlik showing on Saturday and Writer’s Block on Sunday.
Police pull out the driver of a “blue light brigade” vehicle after it collided with another car on the corner of De Korte and Bertha streets. Photo: Mfuneko Toyana
A blue light BMW travelling in convoy through Braamfontein was involved in an accident today resulting in 2 casualties.
According to an eyewitness, the blue light vehicle skipped a red robot and crashed into a white Corolla. SAPS officers responded to the scene immediately and cordoned off the area with police tape.
An emergency vehicle arrived some minutes later and struggled to remove the driver of the BMW who was not visibly injured but stretched off nonetheless.
According to an EMS paramedic on the scene, the black BMW is “government owned.” The white Corolla belonged to the Department of Labour. The passenger of this vehicle, a middle-aged woman, was also loaded into the same ambulance.
According to eyewitnesses, the BMW spun out of control, destroyed a set of robots and hit the paper trolley of an informal recycler. The recycler ran off after the incident leaving his belongings behind.
In a related incident, a tow truck driver on his way to the accident scene, crashed into a white Honda Jazz.
Onlookers speaking to Wits Vuvuzela expressed their anger at the blue light vehicles which disregard the traffic rules.
A driver of a Blue Light vehicle is stretchered off after an accident in the CBD. Photo: Dinesh Balliah
These are the People was billed as a photographic exhibition aimed at showcasing and selling the work of young photographers in Johannesburg, and took place in the nascent art precinct of Newtown at the Mills, a day after national Youth Day.
The idea itself is unique when it comes to Youth day celebrations, and photographic prints pegged on thin metal wire in the shell of what used to be the popular club Carfax signaled the brave charting of relatively new territory.
One of the organisers, director and filmmaker Bucks, explained that the aim was to provide a “platform for talented photographers to showcase their art … and because many people haven’t had the opportunity to see photography in this way”.
The exhibition consisted of five photographers who had a selection of their photography displayed in various print-sizes for revellers to view and purchase.
Between the music and mingling amongst the small crowd that had gathered, Bucks called up each photographer to come up on to the makeshift stage in the centre of the room and say a few a words about their photographs.
Unfortunately, most of the photographers had little to say about their works and seemed almost shy to express in words what they had captured in images. A common refrain though, was that of photography as expression.
Kamogelo Mokoena pictured next to her row of photo’s. Photo: Pheladi Sethusa
Kamogelo Mokoena, a strategic communications student at the University of Johannesburg, said that she started taking photography seriously after she won a competition held by Head Honcho clothing store, which saw her photographs being printed on a limited range of tee shirts.
“It’s my form of storytelling. I talk a lot and taking photographs helps,” she said.
Her photographs varied in theme, from portraits of human faces juxtaposed with side walk statues, shots from the backstage of a fashion show to a street staging of a Jack and Jill scene .
Mokoena called this “liking where we live” – her own form of street photography.
Another photographer, Bakang who hails from Mafikeng, said he had only been taking photographs for eight months, and said that because photography was an “art”, it was about showing people what he sees and how he sees it.
Bakang aka Shordy, showing his work to a potential buyer. Photo: Pheladi Sethusa
Bakang said he did not focus on any particular elements in his photography, and rather preferred to “go with the moment”.
Brian Molepo, a photographer who specialises in black and white portraits, said it was his “eye” that made his photographs unique.
His part of the exhibition was series of half-length portraits, which he described as “personality shots”; photographs which “captured the spirit” of the subject.
Brian echoed a common sentiment among the photographers, one where theme took second place to expression.
It was, however, the lack of a theme unifying the different photographs that limited the full expression of the photographs from being realised.
Some themes screamed out from the photographs, fragments of life that captured moments, landscapes and emotions but stopped short of suggesting something more profound than that moment itself.
Other themes hid beneath the surface of the photographs and merely required, perhaps, the subtle hand of curation to draw a viewer’s attention to them by placing them in a sequence that formed and spoke to a wider narrative context.
Brian Molepo hanging up his black and white portraits. Photo: Pheladi Sethusa
Without this, unfortunately, the exhibition had the feeling of a random, chaotic collage, of photographers and their photography.
Or perhaps this was the theme; to show in its full diversity the kaleidoscope of perspectives, bearing down on every and any fragment of Johannesburg, like curious insect eyes bristling with the curiosity of seeing.
A second incident involving a white Toyota Quantum minibus, alleged to be bundling people into the vehicle and robbing them of their possessions at gun-point, happened again yesterday afternoon in Orlando East, Soweto.
This is after Wits Vuvuzela reported the kidnapping and robbery at gun-point of an Ethiopian store-owner on Saturday in Orlando East, under similar circumstances.
Latest kidnap and robbery
The same store-owner said today that three of his cousins were robbed of cellphones, cash and other valuables after they stopped a taxi hoping it would take them into the Johannesburg CBD.
A fourth man is alleged to have been with the three Ethiopian nationals, and boarded the taxi along with them, also under the impression that it would ferry them to town.
The man, thought to be a local, was also robbed at gun-point.
Residents who spoke to Wits Vuvuzela and had heard about the two incidents expressed shock, and feared that the criminal incidents might somehow be linked to the use of the drug naoype.
One resident, Collen, said he had only heard about incident that happened on Saturday.
“Eish, that means now we must start to boarding taxis early otherwise,” he said in isiZulu.
Another resident, Philile Mtanti, who uses the Metro bus service to get to and from work, said she was worried because sometimes she caught a taxi in the morning if she missed the bus.
“Maybe it’s the naoype boys. But where would they get a taxi?” Mthanti speculated.
Drugs or xenophobia?
While there is no conclusive evidence to show that the incidents are either naoype-linked or xenophobia-related, neither can be completely ruled out.
Many Orlando East residents fear what they call “nyaope boys”, and often blame them for petty crimes like theft of copper material from house numbers and tap fittings, as well as for more dangerous crimes such as early morning muggings and house break-ins.
Residents believe they commit crimes in order to feed their addiction to the drug, which is a mixture of any number of substances, but mainly heroin, antiretroviral medication, and rat poison.
The xenophobia link is less likely, but foreign shop owners are increasingly seen as easy targets, and because of their foreign status, as “outsiders” who deserve what they get.
So far, none of the cases have been reported to the police.
Early yesterday evening in Orlando East, a group of men in a mini-bus forced an Ethiopian shop owner into their vehicle, robbed him of his stock, and after driving around with him captive in the taxi eventually dropped him off in another part of Soweto.
The shopkeeper, known as Nathi in the Soweto township where he has had a spaza shop since 2011, said he was on his way from buying airtime, chips, sweets and biscuits from Bara Mall when a group of men jumped out from a white Toyota Quantum, cornered him, and forced him inside the vehicle.
“It was in front of the Somali shop that side [signalling around the corner]. I was coming from buying stock there at Bara Mall. They were waiting for me there and put me inside the taxi,” the Ethiopian national explained.
He said the men did not beat him, all they did was take his stock and the cash he had on him.
“Yah and then they dropped me off in Meadowlands. I asked somebody to help me with transport,” he said, explaining how he had managed to make it back home.
The Ethiopian national, who says he moved to South Africa because of the war in his country that made it difficult to find a job and support himself and family, was reluctant to report the incident to the police, because he felt there was nothing they could do.
In a telephone conversation Warrant Officer Mabaso, from Orlando East Police Station, said the SAPS station had not received a report of the incident and no case had been filed.
The officer did mention that he remembered two similar incidents that happened last year, one in Dube and another in Mzimhlope.
Although he could not remember the details and whether or not any suspects had been arrested, both cases involved foreign-owned spaza shops that had been robbed by men in taxi buses.
Despite the incident, Nathi had carried on trading as usual, till late into the night.
At ten in the evening his was the sole light to be seen on an otherwise dark street of lightless lamp posts.
Out With A Bang: Stanton Fredericks has retired from pro-football after helping Bidvest Wits to 4th place this season. Photo: Provided
As of this week, you are more likely to find Stanton “Stiga” Fredericks on the lush greens of a golf course than on the soccer pitches of the Premier Soccer League where he made his name as a footballer.
The 34 year-old veteran and former Bidvest captain decided to retire from professional football on Tuesday, ending his career at the same club where it began.
For the sake of his handicap, Stiga’s fans will hope he approaches golf with the same kind of gritty determination and fierce competitiveness he showed throughout a career spanning almost two decades including stints playing in Switzerland, Greece and Moscow.
After making his professional debut for Wits in 1996, the west-Johannesburg born midfielder went on to play for the national under-23 team at the 2000 Sydney Olympics, and also earned 14 caps for Bafana Bafana.
Besides often being handed the mythical number 10 jersey at most of the clubs he represented, the playmaker is also part of an elite club in local football circles.
Fredericks has played for both Soweto giants Kaizer Chiefs and Orlando Pirates.
And even though he did not move directly from one club to the other, he played for the teams at a time when the rivalry between the two, especially among their supporters, still bordered on violent proportions.
In interviews, Fredericks stated that a lack of game time with Bidvest this season made the decision to retire easier.
In the last two seasons combined, Fredericks has only started 4 league games for the Clever Boys, without scoring. In comparison, he started 20 games in the 2010/2011 season, finding the net 4 times.
Fredericks will be remembered by football fans for his ability to “skin” an opponent, with the kind of inventive turn-of-skill that sent idiski purists into raptures.
He will also be remembered as a clean-living, dedicated footballer, a genuine role-model.
A meme is popularly defined as an “element of culture or behaviour that may be passed from one person to another by non-genetic means, especially imitation”.
The concept was coined by famous British scientist Richard Dawkins.
Our own national health minister, Dr Aaron Motsoaledi, recently announced government plans to tighten South Africa’s already strict tobacco and smoking legislation, seeking to completely prohibit what he called the “familiar sight” of smokers gathering outside of buildings to “pollute the air around them”.
The minister seems to buy in to the idea of meme’s, even if unwittingly.
He has not only been consistently pushing for legislation that will prevent smoking in public, but also for a complete black-out on any form of marketing around tobacco products.
A maximum fine of R100 000 for smoking less than 10 meters from the entrance of a building is already in place, and the minister also hopes to emulate laws already enforced in Australia and New Zealand where cigarettes are sold only in plain, unbranded packaging.
The minister draws his thinking from the work of international behavioural scientists, whose studies have found that the less children and young adults observed people smoking and the less the habit was “glamorised” by fancy marketing, the fewer of these age-groups would start smoking.
Despite the minister’s and government’s determined campaign against tobacco products, South Africans continue to puff away.
Research has shown that 7.7 million South Africans smoke 11.4 cigarettes a day. In total, that amounts 29 billion cigarette sticks a year.
The figure, however, only covers the legal tobacco trade. The South African Revenue Services (SARS) claims it loses up R4.5 billion in tax revenue to illicit cigarette trade every year.
South African’s are really puffing away, and Wits Campus is no different. Smokers can be seen around campus huddled in intimate groups enjoying cigarettes, and more recently hookah pipes.
Pharmacology honours student Cassandra Geldenhuys said she had started smoking because both her parents were smokers and because it “looked decent”.
“There’s one road to your lungs, you might as well tar it,” Geldenhuys joked.
A fellow Pharmacology student, who asked not to be named in case her mother read the paper, said she stared smoking when she was 12 years-old.
“I really liked the look of smoking and I forced myself to do it,” she said.
She said she had heard about the new regulations, and had been threatened with a R1 500 fine while smoking outside a Wimpy by the manger.
She wondered why it was such big deal. “In movies in the 80s you would see everyone smoking”, she said.
Another Witsie, a 2nd year medical student, said he started smoking in high school for “social acceptance”.
That both smokers and those pushing for tougher laws against smoking seem to consider the habit something taken up through imitation, lends some credibility to the idea of smoking as “cultural meme”.
Stubble bearded and glass-eyed, dressed in army-green knit sweater and soil-brown slacks, author Imraan Coovadia cut a weary figure on Wednesday evening at WISER’s discussion of an initiative, to put poetry on Johannesburg taxi’s, that sprung from Coovadia’s 2012 novel The Institute for Taxi Poetry.
But he steadily warmed to the occasion. And while the mercury dropped in Braamfontein’s solemn streets, the temperature inside WISER’s modern conference room climbed, as the concept of Taxi Poetry was “uncoiled in the ears” of the attentive, expectant audience. The University of Cape Town creative writing professor was at the tail-end of his Joburg lecture tour and looked like he was courting exhaustion.
The WISER event was billed “From Fiction to Reality”, and sought to “present and explore the Taxi Poetry project that has resulted in poetry being written for and placed on 70 taxis in Johannesburg over the last few weeks.”
In Coovadia’s experimental book unusual tales are told of poets and a form of poetry that emerges somewhere beneath the skin of Cape Town’s murky taxi industry –ruled and populated by some of the most imaginative and cosmopolitan characters to be found in South African literature.
Observer: Author Imraan Coovadia engaged with audience members after the event. Photo: Mfuneko Toyana
Director at WISER and collaborator on the project, Sarah Nuttall, spoke in her introduction of a “tradition of transportation poetry in South Africa that was mostly found in trains”.
It was this idea, and a meeting with Coovadia in Cape Town about the possibilities of his novel, that led to the conception of Taxi Poetry.
Nuttall then co-opted Wits fine arts lecturer Zen Marie, and media polyglot and poet Karabo Kgoleng, with the backing of the Goethe Institute, to build a project around the novel.
The result: a group of Johannesburg poets wrote pieces about Johannesburg; a line each from the poems was transposed on to large “fridge magnets”; and off the poets went into CBD to convince taxi drivers to display the poetry on their taxis.
“The idea of magnets came from realising that in Joburg taxi drivers don’t have the agency to intervene on the taxi,” explained Marie, who did research for the project by collaborating with a Durban taxi driver to produce a music video about his taxi- Big Boss.
The main difference, Marie said, was that “in Durban most drivers owned the taxi they drove, while in Joburg drivers worked for owners who owned large fleets [of taxis]”.
Kgoleng picked up the thread where Nuttall had left it, and spoke at length of poetic inspiration and its relationship to the “aspirational quality of Joburg”.
“Poetry is the medium which the personal can become public,” she said. “Coovadia has used his creative licence to characterise the poet as a player in the taxi area”.
And from this, the poets were able to take poetry and expression outside of the commercial realms and return it to the people.
When Coovadia addressed the audience, reading now and again from his smartphone, his energy was palpable.
With artful simplicity, he explained the complex process that his book both captured and unleashed. A concept that all the speakers on the night had alluded to, that of the fragmented associational patterns that emerged in small, overlooked pockets of our urban society.
“Novelists are like carthorses, and poets are grasshoppers”, he said describing how the process of writing the novel had pushed him into different areas of expression and working with others.
“You realise that social reform is possible precisely because of how human feeling can pass from one person to another,” Coovadia concluded.
Dull-yellow fluorescent lights and the smell of industrial-strength antiseptic meet you when you enter the mortuary at the very edge of Braamfontein in Johannesburg.
THE DEAD DON’T BITE: 5th year MBBCh students at the Johannesburg Mortuary Photo: Mfuneko Toyana
A sense of dread, of being in a mortuary, accompanies you when you enter the grey building wedged between Constitutional Hill and the Wits Esselen Residence.
What these experiences don’t prepare you for is the warmth and passion of the Wits medical students you find inside – there to fulfill the requirement that they learn to work with “fresh corpses”.
Hill explained how the small number of medical students who specialise in forensics end up working as pathologists. Most choose lucrative jobs as anatomical pathologists for private labs.
This leaves state pathologists working in one of the two main mortuaries in the province Germiston and Johannesburg doing nothing less than 20 autopsies a week, almost double the weekly average.
Hill was frank about the difficulties of dealing with corpses on a daily basis and the kind of effect it can have on you.
“We see everything from [people who were] stabbed to death, jumped off of buildings, car accidents and burns victims who mostly came from informal settlements,” said Hill.
He said counselling was provided to students at the Charlotte Maxeke Hospital and they were encouraged to talk in groups about their experiences.
Scary reality
Fifth year MBBCh students, gathered at the mortuary on Wednesday morning for practical classes in dissecting corpses, had varying opinions of the experience:
A student called Trudie said the “scary reality didn’t really hit you” until you were faced with a recently deceased body.
“On Monday we saw a child who’d been hit by a car. It was terrible.” [pullquote align=”right”]”I had never seen a dead body”[/pullquote]
Asked how she coped with seeing death close up, she said: “As students we are not offered any debriefing. All you can do is go home and talk to your friends and family.”
Kirsten Morley-Jepherson said she was “really lucky to have a good support system at home”.
“Once you vent you really feel a lot better”.
Morley-Jepherson said although she had been fascinated by biology and the human body since her school days, she would not consider specialising in forensic pathology:
“I need something where I can have a life.”
Masello Phasha recalled how she was “literally shaking” when she faced a corpse for the first time.
“It was in our 2nd year andI had never seen a dead body. The toes of the cadaver were sticking out and I kept as far away as I could.”
Phasha said Monday was “very different”.
“The child was still fully dressed and still had shoes on,” Phasha said.
Despite this, Phasha said she’d “surprisingly” had no nightmares and she hoped to go into trauma surgery but feared the always-on-call lifestyle would be “too demanding”.
Abigail Keane is a student whose entire family is in the medical field. She said, despite realising “how quickly things can go wrong and how many lives we lose”, it was the daily opportunity of helping people in a tangible way that made it all worth it.
The mortuary serves as the “academic seat” of the Wits division of forensic medicine and pathology. It provides forensic pathology services to the SA Police Service and the Department of Justice and families of the deceased. This is over and above its teaching and research responsibilities at the university’s Faculty of Health Sciences.
Since her announcement as the Democratic Alliance’s mayoral candidate for Johannesburg, Helen Zille has dominated national headlines. In this bonus episode of We Should Be Writing podcast, hosts Lulah Mapiye and Bonolo Mokonoto dissect a media meet-and-greet with the mayoral hopeful. From her extensive political résumé to her controversial public utterance, we examine why the Democratic Alliance has chosen Hellen Zille as their candidate for the 2027 local mayoral elections. Additionally, […]
