He stood day-in-day-out peddling reality to cynical commuters. I’d roll by with my window down anticipating the familiar greeting, ‘Hullo Mees Unives!’
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"I can only tell you things that happened as I saw them, and what the rest was about only Africa knows." – Oom Schalk Lourens
The Queen is dead. I’m in church. We rise to sing the national anthem. God Save the King. I’m ready… I can’t do it.
Picking pieces of dry grass from her school jersey, the girl braces as she bites. Butter overload (a sort of PTSD). But, you know, mom wouldn’t be mom if she wasn’t hacking a block of unsalted cooking butter and depositing the wedges onto brown bread with marmite…
Often young children would run up and down the gravel on the side of the busy rural roads, their fresh produce lifted above their heads, displayed proudly in the air.
I was born in a borderland; a strange pocket of time that obscured context like a great celestial body eclipsing the luminescence of the all-seeing moon.
Everyone in South Africa knows that walking around in dodgy areas at night (especially with a wallet and cell phone; even without a wallet and cell phone) is just dumb. But when one runs out of petrol, what’s the option?
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I look across the road to where he is pointing and there is a big tree, with a broken-down bush shelter lurking beneath…and, indeed, a photocopy machine.
Many years ago, there was a boy who lived on a Mission Station in a small village in Zambia, where the cheetah and hyena roamed under vast, twinkling African skies. He breathed in the dust of the land from the moment he woke until the moment he fell asleep…
If there is one thing I love to remember about my childhood living in South Africa, it’s beach holidays…
What do you get when you mix green parsley with some Boesak and a Parktown Prawn on the way to school? A whole stack of momisms.