Sketches

This was originally written in November of 2022, only published November 2024.  Zami Mdingi, mentioned in the story, passed away in April of 2024.  On the morning of Tuesday the 1st of November 2022, I got a call from a number I didn’t recognise. It was Sheila Tempi.  Oh hey Sheila, howsit, where are you calling from on this new number? I’m at the Guguletu hospital she told me, distraught. Blacki has just passed away.  That morning Blacki was scheduled to be at the hospital, but not for himself. He was taking fellow musician Tete Mbambisa for surgery on his eyes. Instead, it was Blacki at Guguletu Hospital, after a heart attack at home.  Blacki and Sheila and I had been talking the day before, planning a Jazz dinner at their home for a group of 30 guests later in November. It would have been the biggest gig at their home since the Covid 19 pandemic had begun, and the beginning of a return to a consistent schedule of Jazz Safaris and Cuisine Safaris at Blacki and...

  My radio sessions all in one place. Also accessible at https://www.mixcloud.com/oneiain/

  Early 2021 I was determined that I would produce one podcast a month for a year... A year later and here comes episode 2, titled "16 Tons".  16 Tons starts in the year 2000 in Sao Paolo, Brazil, with a band called Funk Como Le Gusta performing a cover of a hit Brazilian samba called 16 Toneladas, and travels back in time through the unlikely evolution of a song about Kentucky coal miners that became one of the greatest selling singles of all time .  At the time of publishing episode 2 I have already started on episode 3, and, God willing, it will not take a year to finish. The working title of episode 3 is "Songs that TikTok Taught Me". 

Back in 2005 I was a producer on the Cape Africa Platform, a large-scale art event in Cape Town. I curated a festival of concerts across the breadth of the city, with a shuttle system connecting these events so that festival goers could move seamlessly between shows, and experience Cape Town in a totally new way.  The event never happened as the funding from the Lotto never arrived.  The event was scaled back dramatically to a beautiful once-off concert.  To commemorate the event that never happened, I created an audio movie that gave a sense of the journey we had envisaged. It was called Taxi Alibama, and it was a ride through Cape Town in a mini-bus, connecting different musics and artists and voices in the city. I rode taxis all over the city, and recorded ambient sound to be used as the context that connected the music. The tracks featured were all recorded by me in my work as a music producer. It is a collection of some of my favourite music ever. Enjoy the ride!

I studied film-making in 1994 at the Cape Town Film and TV School. I had a great time, and loved the film learning, but the school wasn't the right place for me.  In 1995 I started at UCT majoring in English and Drama, joined UCT Radio, did film courses and continued making films. My first project was with Akin Omotoso, assisting with his first film project together with Kurt Isaacs. Over the years I continued to make my own short films and radio programmes.  On this page visitors will find highlights from a wide selection of the inserts I've produced over the years. My skills include camera, sound, editing, directing, producing.   For the full portfolio please visit: https://www.youtube.com/user/mycapetown021/videos https://www.youtube.com/c/Coffeebeansroutes/videos https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLERmPgay_a4T2c22kNW0tCinlIo3N8AX4  

  About a 100 years ago, as a university student, I was fortunate to be one of the first DJs to broadcast legally when UCT radio got its broadcast licence. This was in 1995.  ICASA, the regulatory authority, had just opened up the airwaves, and our little campus station, which had been a pirate station, became legit. I had a late night show, and got to do pretty much what I wanted. Like play 30 seconds of dead air as the 1995 remix of Simon and Garfunkel's Sound of Silence. Ha ha ha.  I had planned to become a commercial radio DJ, stars in my eyes, wads of cash on the horizon. But I quickly realised that the future of radio would be playlists without droning egotistical DJs like myself, and listeners being able to listen to whatever they wanted whenever they wanted without the big record labels and the DJs telling them what to listen to. I got bored. I tried my hand at talk radio but wasn't mature enough, or secure enough in my own understanding of the world to...

Written by me for Travel Africa Magazine, published June 2019. The official link for the piece is dead, and so I’m posting images of each page. Readers may have to zoom in a little to read properly. Apologies for that. In brief, the piece seeks to show how Cape Town (pre COVID-19!) had been moving the centre: that is, mainstreaming the so-called periphery.

INTERGALACTIC CULTURAL TRAVEL As far as I can see, this is the first entry onto the internet that looks at cultural travel from an intergalactic point of view. The premise was: we can hardly engage with each other on earth as a single species, how are we going to manage meeting other species on different planets? What tools can we draw on in assisting us to deal with intergalactic cultural exchange? I was drawing on what Coffeebeans Routes has been doing since 2005 with cultural and creative travel, to provide a sense of how deep into the future we might be gracious intergalactic travelers with a deep respect for intergalactic cultural diversity. With space travel taking off, we need to be ready not for space travel 1.0 or 2.0 but space travel 10.0... and that means we have to already be beyond just the sites, but immersed in culture. How do we begin to understand how to interact with species that don't look like us, and don't confirm to the rules of our physical and i...

CLICK HERE TO READ THE VISION2020 In late 2015, I was commissioned by Open Africa , a rural tourism route development organisation, to develop a tourism route in the Dwars River Valley. The Dwars River Valley is that stretch of winelands on the Helshoogte road between Stellenbosch and Franschoek, centred by the towns of Pniel, Kylemore and Lanquedoch. It must be one of the most magnificent valleys on earth. Open Africa had started a route 10 years earlier in the valley, but for various reasons the route had fizzled out. So this time around was an attempt to give it another go with 10 years of new learning to draw on, and financing from the European Union over a 3 year period. The work started in late August 2015, and at the time of writing this page, we been on the project for 10 months now. In May 2016, we - myself as route mentor, together with the 9 founding members, all businesses in the valley - started to solidify a vision for the valley, drawing on months of conversati...

Innovation is a big buzz word in South Africa at the moment. Stellenbosch, the 2nd oldest town in SA, has claimed the title of South Africa's innovation capital. Innovation seminars are happening all over the place, with plenty of exclamation marks. And squadrons of innovation gurus are jetted in to share with us their secrets to accelerating innovation. In corporate SA, you ain't on point if your tongue ain't talking innovation. And it is all tragically anti-innovation. Stellenbosch is the least innovative place, and the most unequal. The maths is clear. And the emptiness of it all is clear - desperate attempts by the old guard to keep themselves relevant by using what they perceive to be the language of the day. It's quite a circus to watch, those chinos and old school tie brigades slapping each other on the back with craft lager in the other hand, keeping things exactly as they have always been. The real innovation hub of Cape Town, I think, is the R310 corri...

This piece was commissioned by Virgin Australia for their inflight magazine. Below is my text version, click the image below for the .PDF edited version that made publication.  Insider's Guide CAPE TOWN Table Mountain is flanked by two iconic collaborators: to the left is Devil’s Peak, and to the right, Lion’s Head. If you look at Devil’s Peak from the foot of Lion’s Head, you will see the form of a woman lying in the mountain. And once you see her, you will never stop seeing her.  She’s lying on her back, her dreadlocks flowing into Table Bay at Salt River. She has just given birth, and the baby lies peacefully at her feet, forming the left slope of Table Mountain’s table top. The woman’s head and breast are the two peaks of Devil’s Peak. Take your time to find her, because it changes everything about the city once you see her.  This image is the reason Cape Town is called The Mother City . She is a maternal city, with all the contradictions and po...

#IfYouCantSeeMe So this is how it's looking now: 25 June. Loit Sols & Churchil Naude 30 July. Mandla Mlangeni 27 August. Derek Gripper and Reza Khota 24 September. Provisionally Mac McKenzie, but perhaps Hilton can move here, and Burni Aman does October? This is also Coffeebeans official 10th birthday party. 29 October. Hilton Schilder, but maybe he does September and Burni does this gig? 26 November. The Khoi Khonnexion, feat Garth Erasmus, Jethro Louw, Glen Arendse. 31 December. This is something of a wild card. Potentially Ntlantla with As Is (featuring L2Z). That would be the right riot. Maybe Ernestine? 28 January. Keenan Ahrends 25 February. Ernestine? 31 March. State of Kassava, featuring Ncebakazi Mnukwana and Viki Mangaliso I've also been thinking about Tebogo Louw, and his Zayn Adams tribute. The day before Zayn passed, we were talking over our backyard fences.  We spoke about the industry, about composing and performing original material, about a...

Have you tried to find snoek in a restaurant in the Central City? What about umngqusho or chakalaka? Why is it that if you want `culture' you visit a township? Why is a City Tour a tour of only the original Cape Town city, and not the broader city, as if nothing out of the City Bowl is Cape Town? Why is the East City the neighbourhood surrounding the City Hall and the Granary, and not as far as Khayelitsha and Muizenberg? Can we change the city by changing the language we use to describe it? Can we tell its story well if we as citizens are excluded from the narrative? Cape Town is a great place to be, don't get me wrong. One of the reason's it is great is that it's a city that demands a lot of questions, which makes it challenging and stimulating. And isn't that fantastically, disgustingly, middle class? That the extremes of the city make it stimulating? How different would the perspective be of someone who lives on the poor extreme, where the quest is for surv...

Our Beer Route , launched in November 2011, was featured in a story in the New York Times on 10 August about the explosion of craft beer in South Africa. Beer Route in New York Times

Goema is a music of liberation.  It is a music of transcendence. Cape Town is a pirate city. We are a pirate of cultures. It's like Cape Town has pirated pieces of the whole world. Everything is gathered here. Cape Town is a port city after all, absorbing the world over hundreds of years. It's a touch of Europe, a little bit of India and Malaysia, it is a piece of Africa, there's Brazil in here and there's America and Israel and Maputo. Cape Town is not one thing: it is many things in one. The music of this city with multiple identities is called goema. The name originates with the Khoe people. The Khoe women played a drum, it was called a goma, because of the ox skin that covered the drum. The women would play and the men would dance. Over hundreds of years, bantu tribes migrated south, missionaries arrived, colonisers laid claim and slaves were imported to the city. As the music of these worlds collided and became a common language, the goma became goema. Th...

Goemarati - you are welcome. Designing an inclusive intervention I'm not a designer. I trained as an actor and film-maker, and became an entrepreneur. But I've learned that design is at the heart of everything that we do - if not always entirely by design. So that makes us all designers, in an unconscious way. In people's homes, decisions have been made about where to put this painting in relation to that picture, where the chair stands in relation to the sofa, the pot plant in relation to the graduation certificate. These are all design decisions, but very few people doing this would consider themselves as designers.  Enjoying the foodcourt at the Manenberg Goemarati I watch my son, he's 14 months old, plot his routes. Even at this early stage of life, design is central. When we walk out of the apartment, he has a specific routine. He always turns right out of the door. He touches the geyser outlet pipe on the wall. He touches the neighbour's g...