Sketches

  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...