ijusi: issue #30 The Pretoria Issue Mid 2015
Celebrating Twenty Years: 1995 - 2015 CONTRIBUTORS: Designers: Jhaveri Aalia - Am I Collective - Joe Bloggs - Mega Bonanza - Helen Borg Anjum Buckas - Shane de Lange - Jean de Wet - Rinette Dippenaar - Daniël Du Plessis Rikus Ferreira - Gerard Human - Danielle Jansen van Rensburg - Ross Juterbock Anton Kannemeyer - Matt Kay - Warwick Kay - Carla Kreuser - Wilhelm Krüger Ernest Van Der Merwe - Ruan Mynhardt - Kayla Norman - Nkanyiso Ntombela Cebo Nxumalo - Brad Purchase - Melissa Stein - Zené Stoltz - Simon Villet - Garth Walker Brent Woudberg Writers: Steve Kotze - Sean O’Toole - Oliver Payn
Published now and then by Mister Walker in Durban South Africa, ijusi aims to explore personal stories by South African graphic designers, writers and photographers, around the idea of “what makes me African - and what does that look like?
PUBLISHER: Mister Walker EDITOR: Garth Walker garth@misterwalker.net www.ijusi.com www.facebook.com/ijusi www.garthwalker.com ijusi Limited Edition Collector Portfolio’s published in association with the Rooke Gallery www.rookegallery.com/ijusi Front Cover: Garth Walker Back Cover: Melissa Stein
COPYRIGHT © MISTER WALKER 2015
Reproduction in whole or in part of any contents of ijusi without prior written permission from the publisher is strictly prohibited. The publisher accepts no responsibility for content as expressed by contributors. Contributer Notes:
* Joe Bloggs A sketch of the entrance to Camp David, a nude bar and sex club frequented by many of Pretoria’s large gay community. On entry, patrons are required to undress and socialise totally naked, save for their shoes. For many, the club is an ideal place to enjoy a quiet drink, have sex, or meet other men. ** Brad Purchase Church Street Pretoria is one of the longest and straightest urban thoroughfares on earth at 26km. A total of 27 street names in Pretoria’s central business district were changed by the City of Tshwane in early 2012 to reflect a “shared heritage”. The proposed names include the area from Nelson Mandela to Church Square, which will become Helen Joseph. On the list is the area from Nelson Mandela to the east, which will become Stanza Bopape. The area from Church Square to R511 will become WF Nkomo, and the stretch from the R511 to the west will be Elias Motswaledi. Church Street will become Oliver Tambo.
Welcome to The City of err... uhm... ah... vok! On 26 May 2005 the South African Geographical Names Council (SAGNC), which is linked to the Directorate of Heritage in the Department of Arts and Culture, approved changing the name of Pretoria to Tshwane, which is already the name of the Metropolitan Municipality in which Pretoria, and a number of surrounding towns are located. Although the name change was approved by the SAGNC, it has not yet been approved by the Minister of Arts and Culture. The matter is currently under consideration while he has requested further research on the matter. Should the Minister approve the name change, the name will be published in the Government Gazette, giving the public opportunity to comment on the matter. The Minister can then refer that public response back to the SAGNC, before presenting his recommendation before parliament, who will vote on the change. Various public interest groups have warned that the name change will be challenged in court, should the minister approve the renaming. The long process involved made it unlikely the name would change anytime soon, if ever, even assuming the Minister had approved the change in early 2006.
The Tshwane Metro Council has advertised Tshwane as “Africa’s leading capital city” since the name change was approved by the SAGNC in 2005. This has led to further controversy, however, as the name of the city had not yet been changed officially, and the council was, at best, acting prematurely. Following a complaint lodged with the Advertising Standards Authority (ASA), it was ruled that such advertisements are deliberately misleading and should be withdrawn from all media. Despite the rulings of the ASA, Tshwane Metro Council failed to discontinue their “City of Tshwane” advertisements. As a result, the ASA requested that Tshwane Metro pay for advertisements in which it admits that it has misled the public. Refusing to abide by the ASA’s request, the Metro Council was banned consequently from placing any advertisements in the South African media that refer to Tshwane as the capital. ASA may still place additional sanctions on the Metro Council that would prevent it from placing any advertisements in the South African media, including council notices and employment vacancies. After the ruling, the Metro Council continued to place Tshwane advertisements, but placed them on council-owned advertising boards and bus stops throughout the municipal area. In August 2007, an internal memo was leaked to the media in which the Tshwane mayor sought advice from the premier of Gauteng on whether the municipality could be called the “City of Tshwane” instead of just “Tshwane”. This could increase confusion about the distinction between the city of Pretoria and the municipality of Tshwane.
In early 2010 it was again rumoured that the South African government would make a decision regarding the name, however, a media briefing regarding name changes, where it may have been discussed, was cancelled shortly before taking place. Rumours of the name change provoked outrage from Afrikaner civil rights and political groups. It later emerged that the registration of the municipality as a geographic place had been published in the government gazette as it had been too late to withdraw the name from the publication, but it was announced that the name had been withdrawn, pending “further work” by officials. The following week, the registration of “Tshwane” was officially withdrawn in the Government Gazette. The retraction had reportedly been ordered at the behest of the Deputy President of South Africa Kgalema Motlanthe, acting on behalf of President Jacob Zuma, as minister of Arts and Culture Lulu Xingwana had acted contrary to the position of the ANC, which is that Pretoria and the municipality are separate entities, which was subsequently articulated by ANC secretary general Gwede Mantashe. In March 2010, the “Tshwane Royal House Committee”, claiming to be descendents of Chief Tshwane, called for the name to be changed, and for the descendents of Chief Tshwane to be recognised, and to be made part of the administration of the municipality.
According to comments made by Mayor Kgosientso Ramokgopa in late 2011, ‘the change will occur in 2012’. However there remained considerable uncertainty about the issue. As of 2015, the proposed name change has not occurred. Source: © Wikipedia
Anton Kannemeyer
DaniĂŤl Du Plessis
Am I Collective
Mega Bonanza
Warwick Kay
Mega Bonanza
Gerard Human
Carla Kreuser
Danielle Jansen van Rensburg
Matt Kay
Simon Villet
Jhaveri Aalia
* Joe Bloggs
Mega Bonanza
Ross Juterbock
Wilhelm Kr端ger
Mega Bonanza
Shane de Lange
Rinette Dippenaar
Rikus Ferreira
Anjum Buckas
Cebo Nxumalo
Jean De Wet
** Brad Purchase
Ernest Van Der Merwe
Kayla Norman
Zené Stoltz
Ruan Mynhardt
Brad Purchase
Nkanyiso Ntombela
Brent Woudberg
Helen Borg
Tainted Blood By Oliver Payn Nothing is ever the same, not after something like that happens. The discontentment crept over my soul like a wet blanket – heavy and dark. We are what we are – running is futile, I’ve been running most of my life. We can’t choose what we’ve been hardwired to do. For me, that was killing. Running was merely a useful additive – a bonus to enhance something as natural as a heartbeat. Like injecting adrenaline into the bloodstream.
A jet-black 1973 W114 Benz comes to rest on the curb, my taxi – the only one I can ride in since the procedure. It’s Saturday, he knows exactly where to take me. White smoke, thick and heavy bellows out of the sewers as we drive past. The car is old, but solid – the seats are faded and aged with scents of stale ethanol and nicotine permeating from the cracks. Worn brakes creek as we roll to a standstill. We’re here: Blondie’s joint. The locale where all of Pretoria’s lost and forsaken men crawl out of the darkness to salivate and yearn for the illusory. There she is, centre stage; her flawless physique suspended in a halo of light smoke. Shattered glass covers the stage like confetti, her heels drag through the shards with every glide. Her body is hypnotic; muscle wrapped in tight, tanned skin is contorted to your will – the Rand has never been weaker. A fist full of leopards leaks through my fingers and onto her silky, white thong. Ah Blondie – the one and only.
To my left is a smug, old bastard I despise – “Mr Justice” himself. He raises a rusty coloured drink to his lips, his eyes fixed on all that is young and oiled. His loathing of my presence can be detected – fuck him. He gases in my direction, I see the disdain seep through his brandy soaked brain and down his wrinkled forehead. I think to myself: ‘lawyers aren’t designed to be lethal with anything but their tongues’. Without notice he charges in. Blondie’s safety enters my mind, but she’s no fool – I see her take refuge behind the hefty backstage door. Justice is loaded with nothing but ego and unaware of his surroundings – ill footing will be his demise. He strikes; raising his right leg and teetering on his left, I step back, time seems to slow; I watch his foot swish past my cheek – he hits nothing but air. Instinctively I lunge forward with a countering, upward-kick. Steady and true, I feel as honed steel meets soft flesh and skull – the club becomes silent. Viscous streaks of carmine coat the side of my blade like a Jackson Pollock painting. I notice the damage done to one of the blades – bone can be thicker than you’d think. There’s only one oke who has what I need at this time – I make the call. It’s time to leave. The crunching of gravel beneath his boots gets crisper as he approaches. In time, yellow covers the side of his face as he enters the reach of a street lamp – he’s shorter than I remember. His face now illuminated enough for me to see his visage – worn-in like thrashed leather. A suggestive nod from me triggers the response I await; he drags a long and thin box out from under his jacket. His grime-blackened fingernails clutch the lid, he opens it just enough for me to approve the contents; there they are, sleek and cold – tempered steel with a perfect edge. They glisten brilliantly, despite the shadowy night.
Pretoria By Steve Kotze My first, crucial experience of Pretoria came as a young tourist from Natal. That holiday was an unusual one, the first time our family ever broke the near sacred ritual cycle of destinations, which comprised the trinity of place-types we visited away from home: 1) grandparents; Durban 2) grandparents; farm 3) fishing; South Coast or Zululand. In 1982 we ventured over the Drakensberg and up onto the Highveld, for the only time my parents ever took us out of Natal for a trip. To the Transvaal. That name now rings of ancient history, closer to the Boer War than democracy, even though it was only a few decades ago. We took a tour of the sites, to see the seats of power, the twin bastions of white authority, both financial and political. My parents never stated it that obviously, they weren’t the crowing “volkstrots”1 type – my mom, the English-speaking Roman Catholic from Durban; my dad, a multi-lingual East Griqualand farm boy. Neither of them had ever expressed any overt political views I was aware of, apart from casually racist language, which was common to all white families I knew at that point in my life. Still, it appeared that my sister and I were at the right age, on the cusp of our teens, to appreciate the grandeur of Johannesburg and Pretoria.
We stayed in Kempton Park, which was a significant disappointment, the expanse of brown veld scored with a lattice of pokey little yards, each one containing a scruffy little house. My aunt’s house was one of them, in a neighbourhood called “Birch Acres”, which seemed a pathetic attempt to convey a gracious gravity to the place, even to a teenager from Pietermaritzburg. From our base in Kempton we explored a different part of Joburg every day and then turned out attention to Pretoria. By 1982 the country was beginning to burn, protests against the apartheid government slowly rising to a pitch that resulted in the both the United Democratic Front2 being formed and the MK3 bomb at the Airforce HQ in Pretoria. That was still to come, and I wasn’t vaguely aware of the political crisis facing South Africa. Our two days spent visiting the sights of Pretoria included all the iconic symbols of white national identity, or rather white Afrikaner identity, which must have meant more to my dad than I gave credit for: the Voortrekker Monument raised over the city; Paul Kruger in bronze at the centre of town; the charging “Troepie”4 memorial for the young men who died “on the border”, as the Namibian/Angolan war was euphemistically referred to. We loved the military museum at Fort Klapperkop, heaving with cannons, tanks and other vehicles of war. The highlight of the whole trip for my sister and I though, was a ride on a double-decker city bus. We clambered up the stairs, insisting on sitting at the front seats of the upper deck.
While the bus navigated streets of Pretoria, through famously leafy tunnels of jacaranda trees, we were joined by the bus conductor who clipped our tickets and chatted with us. When he realised we were from Natal, and on the bus for a tour of Pretoria, he became our guide and pointed out significant locations we passed. A single incident on that bus ride was carved into my memory, because I had never seen anything like it before. As we approached a tall set of floodlights, craning over suburban homes, this faintly comical man, with his grey uniform, stereotypical snor5 and thick accent was transformed.
The conductor’s chest visibly puffed out as he threw up his right hand in an exaggerated gesture of revelation and, with a voice I still clearly recall brimming with emotion, he made a dramatic declaration. “And this,” followed by a full second of silence, allowing the sentiment to mount, to ensure he had the full and undivided attention of his audience as we followed his adoring gaze along his arm toward the sports stadium now opposite us, “is Loftus Versfeld. The home of Norven Transvaal.” He never mentioned anything about rugby; it was unnecessary. Clearly, among all the things he had shown us, this shrine was the most important. In the classical era of Naas Botha6 , the idea that anyone wouldn’t know what it meant simply wasn’t a part of the conductor’s world. My first glimpse of a person whose identity was tightly woven with sports, a game, stayed with me forever. The conductor had introduced me to an archetype beyond the narrow experience of my own family. On a bus outside Loftus.
1 2 3
“national pride” in Afrikaans The UDF was an anti-apartheid, pro-democracy movement, and thinly veiled front for the banned ANC Umkhonto weSizwe or “Spear of the Nation”, the ANC’s military wing
4 5 6
Infantry soldier “moustache” in Afrikaans A rugby player for the Springboks and Northern Transvaal, whose style provoked contentious debate
That thing Michael could never forget By Sean O’Toole It is not very complicated, at least as far as definitions go: a cadaver is a corpse, a vestigial thing with a determined use in medical science. But language can’t always account for the dissonance of experience, and Michael Sonnyboy Skosana, a driver at my father’s medical implant manufacturing company, had never seen a cadaver before, nor witnessed an anatomy lesson. Michael, who was always vague about his age but was born around the time Dr. Mary Xakana became South Africa’s first female black doctor in 1947, also had not seen Rembrandt’s celebrated 1632 portrait of Dr. Nicolaes Tulp’s Amsterdam anatomy lesson, painted two decades before Dutch settlers established a way station in Cape Town, and beachhead into southern Africa. Nor was he familiar with Thomas Eakins, whose portrait of Philadelphia surgeon Dr. Samuel D. Gross extemporizing over a cadaver mirrored, in broad strokes, the scene that Michael encountered in a Pretoria hospital laboratory one morning in 1993.
“What was that?” Michael asked me. We were seated in a delivery van parked outside H. F. Verwoerd Hospital, a sprawling state-run training hospital near the Union Buildings, a sandstone complex with symmetrical minarets that is home to the South African government’s administrative headquarters. Still a law student, I worked at my father’s company in my spare time, sometimes assisting with deliveries. I would convey boxes of sterilized hip and knee implants, and their attendant specialized instrumentation, to medical stores and surgeries across Pretoria and nearby Johannesburg. That is how I came to learn about Michael’s enduring belief in Mike Tyson’s innocence of rape, his desire to visit America, and his previous job driving partially built trucks from one plant to another so that they could be finally dressed in bodywork. At my father’s company, Michael delivered prosthetic implants rather than skeletal vehicles, but he viewed the trucks and the irradiated titanium and surgical-grade stainless-steel devices in the back of his van with the same Fordist indifference: someone else along the pay chain would do whatever they did with the objects once he had delivered them. His first encounter with a prone body in the laboratory upended this cool ignorance. To be fair, he had good cause to be unsettled. Unlike the Eakins painting, where four fastidiously clothed men pour over a neat vertical incision in the cadaver’s left leg, the scene Michael encountered involved neither neckties nor blood, but an anaemic leg awkwardly hiked over a torso so that the attending surgeon could view the cadaver’s acetabulum, that concave recess in the pelvis where the articulating femoral head of hip joint implants is snugly fitted.
“I’d never heard of cadavers,” Michael told me in 2001, nearly a decade after his haunting discovery. “I’d never been to a place like that before. No one had told me about that. I just thought you were buried in the ground. I didn’t think that possibly doctors do things like that. I thought they practiced with plastic dolls, not with real people.” He also spoke of how, at funerals, he was now unable to stand near the grave for fear of falling in. And of the haunting sound he later came to associate with the encounter—a clattering sound he described as “petabedeng-bedeng-deng”. He nervously laughed after relating this description. I hadn’t intended to revisit that day in 1993 during our conversation; I was interested in learning about the recent hijacking incident Michael had been involved in. One afternoon in 1999 two white men with pistols pulled Michael over and commandeered his delivery van. The incident, which challenged orthodox assumptions about race and crime, traumatized him: he was unable to sleep for three days after. Two years later he was still hesitant about speaking. Retelling what happened was “dangerous,” he said. But slowly, gradually, excitedly, as was his manner, he opened up, explaining to me how he sat jack-knifed between his silent white hijackers as they drove east out of Pretoria, thinking about the cadaver he’d seen almost ten years earlier. He sat like that for nearly two hours, contemplating death like the horror-struck man to the left of Dr. Gross in Eakins’s arresting portrait of death, science, and learning. Sickness and well being have a particular compass in Pretoria, a fact partly explainable by the ideological attitude to healing that long dominated the administration of health in this town. Take the hospital where I was born. Founded in 1890 as a modest 130-bed hospital for both white and black patients, the People’s Hospital, as it was originally known, has been called many things
during its life. In 1967, the same year the Bolivian army killed the medical doctor and socialist revolutionary Ernesto “Che” Guevara, the hospital was renamed from Pretoria General Hospital, its name since 1927, to H. F. Verwoerd Hospital, after the murdered president and apartheid ideologue. In the years I passed through the “H. F.”, as it was commonly known, initially as a careless suburban child in need of attention for various sprains and fractures, and later as a confused young man negotiating life in the disassembling white republic, South Africa’s “separate-but-equal” policy was rigidly enforced. By 1993, a year before Nelson Mandela took his presidential oath on the rolling lawn of the Union Buildings – and Michael saw his first cadaver – things were changing and the “whites-only” idea was in remission. I use this medical term intentionally. Despite two more renamings – to Pretoria Academic Hospital in 1997, and later to Steve Biko Academic Hospital (for the murdered antiapartheid activist Stephen Bantu Biko, who like Guevara and Franz Fanon, key anticolonial figures, studied medicine) – the cancer of apartheid persists.
Michael died five years ago in a former “non-whites” hospital from complications related to high blood pressure. He never visited America. By his reckoning he would have been 45 or 46, although in truth he was closer to 60. The cocktail of industrial painkillers and herbal remedies purchased from traditional healers, used to keep his blues at bay, was finally and decisively beaten. “The tiger is dying,” he told Abraham Nthebe, a work colleague, as he withered away at Kalafong Hospital. Opened in 1965, Kalafong, whose name loosely translates as “place of healing,” is a formerly segregated hospital in Atteridgeville, a black township west of Pretoria. It is now a satellite campus of the academic hospital where Michael had his traumatizing encounter with a cadaver. It also forms part of a quartet of medical structures, all located in Pretoria’s disreputable west and each linked to an epoch in the city’s history. Built in the late 1800s and located on a northern hill opposite Kalafong, West Fort Hospital was for decades a leprosy mission – and briefly an asylum for the criminally insane – before it was closed in 1996. Its preunification Boer Republic architecture, identifiable by its corrugated red iron roofs, stone plinths, and sandstone detailing, proved sufficiently compelling to a property developer, who in the early 2000s released a prospectus for a “heritage-themed” gated residential development. Keen to differentiate itself from the “white flight” estates on the eastern side of the city, the developer marketed the project to wealthier inhabitants of Atteridgeville. The project faltered. West Fort remains in limbo, a place where poor whites and blacks cohabit on the ruins of the past. West Fort was named after a French-built fort on the ridge behind the site of the hospital. The untrammelled prospect from the fort includes a view of Kalafong and the moribund iron and steelworks, which abuts No. 1 Military Hospital. Starting in the 1970s, hundreds of young gay men conscripted into the whites-only military (in a country where sodomy was a criminal offence until 1998) ended up in a shady psychiatric facility at the hospital where chemical castrations, electric shock treatment, and forced sex changes were administered. Hospitals are instruments of ideology, not just cure; but hospitals can also cure themselves. In 1996, Nelson Mandela, then president for already two years, had his knee successfully repaired at this military hospital; he visited it again in 2012 to treat a lung infection.
Set on an adjacent hill, and also visible from West Fort, Salvokop was previously the site of Pretoria’s old botanical gardens and currently houses a redbrick psychiatric hospital known as Weskoppies (West Hills). The athlete Oscar Pistorius, who was born without fibulas, was remanded to Weskoppies for observation shortly before being convicted of manslaughter in 2014. Pistorius and his prosthetics – carbon fibre running blades branded as Flex-Foot Cheetah – have nothing to do with my father’s work. Orthotics, simply put, deals with the outer world of the human body, restoring or limiting ambulatory function; orthopaedics, by contrast, concerns itself with the inner physical architecture of the organic body. The difference is really defined by the splayed cadaver that lingered for so many years in the recesses of Michael’s consciousness. The mystery of the body – its resilience and fragility, its capacity to regenerate itself after trauma, albeit not without scar – is rarely evident in the architectural spaces devoted to restorative care. Medical suites, hospital foyers, surgical theatres, medical stores, pharmaceutical laboratories, and engineering works, where blank lengths of exotic metal and plastic belie their intimate function,
are by turns brute and banal, administratively efficient and germ free. Lighting, that metonym for life and vitality, is efficient; gone is the light modelling, or chiaroscuro, that makes the work of Rembrandt and Eakins so compelling. Health care, in Pretoria as in most parts of the world, is about efficiencies, not rites of passage. And yet, for all that is recognizable and commonplace about the physical infrastructure of modern healthcare in Pretoria, it is inextricably bound to a horror. You can see it in the expression of that solitary squeamish figure in Eakins. I witnessed it in Michael’s fraught encounter with a thing neither alive nor, in his understanding, quite yet dead. An earlier draft of this essay appeared in the Harvard Design Magazine.
Michael Sonnyboy Skosana
Tintin in Pretoria By Sean O’Toole Snowy died last winter, on a steel table, near that shopping mall that looks like it was piloted by a drunk Italian sea captain who realised his game was up and decided to run it aground at the Menlyn off-ramp. It all happened so quickly. Not the shipwreck – that’s me taking license, as they say – but Snowy. One morning he started moaning at my feet. I was on Facebook, doing research. And by afternoon, there he was, laid out on a steel table in front of a veterinarian with nicotinestained teeth. ‘There is nothing to be done,’ the animal man said. Bosluiskoors. I asked him to translate his Latin learning into International English. Biliary fever, he offered. Caused by the bite of a tick. Must have happened in Faerie Glen, we agreed, in the nature reserve with the feeble stream that stumbles like a drunk without direction or home through the long grass. ‘As small as freckles,’ the animal man said, referring to the death that stalked Snowy in the long grass. I tried to picture it, death as small as floating speckles. Snowy was only three and a bit when I said goodbye to him. I watched him transform from substance to matter next to a poster with delicate colour drawings of popular dog breeds. Alsatian. Doberman. English Pointer. Cocker Spaniel. Jack Russell. Wire Fox Terrier. He was my fifth Snowy. It hurts every time I say goodbye to him. For days I felt like I was living in one of those grey paintings by Jasper Johns. ‘Regrets,’ I read the painter say in an interview, ‘belong to everybody, don’t they?’ I think Jasper might be right. What’s that? Archibald Haddock! The Captain, bless his blue blistering barnacles, passed on a long time ago. Snowy the Fourth was still in his prime. Goma had recently fallen, and with it Mobuto and my fringe, both these things victims of gravity and the overwhelming weight of time. I remember sending Richard an email about it, Goma, but he didn’t reply. My old pal, Richard: I see his name in the books pages sometimes, although I hardly recognise him when they use his birth name, Ryszard. Went back to Poland. After Snowy the Fourth died, I thought about going home too. But when I was cut loose – ‘Le Soir doesn’t need an Africa correspondent anymore,’ Didier said. ‘Africa is writing its own news.’ – I bought Snowy the Fifth while on a story here in Pretoria, and just ended up staying. As cities go, it’s okay, if a little strange. The old Pretoria regime lost Bophuthatswana, and so the new one allowed their disposed children to build a Lost City in the eastern suburbs. But I could have made worse choices: returned to Brussels. Become a writer, like Richard – or Ryszard, if you insist. A concise word that: writer. Like a tick, small as a freckle. Sorry, my mind is bit like that drunken stream in the reserve. I suppose I could have done all that, gone back, endured under those cement-grey skies, and nurtured my regrets, made them into a kind of art. I could have written about General Tapioca’s memory of the time his grandfather showed him ice. Or secret loves of King M’Hatuvu of Congo. But does the world really care that Rodrigo Tortilla never died aboard the Ville de Lyon, that he went on to open a small art gallery, that his son now is a big cheese in Antwerp art circles with
clients lining up for a stake in new Congolese art? Perhaps. But if I’m honest, I have no seed left in me for words. My mind is an empty cinema between screenings and my scalp is a barren Karoo landscape. In summer the boy reporter has to wear a fedora. Sure, sometimes I pick up the odd assignment from Didier. A presidential obituary here, a little sidebar about a nine-metre statue there; just recently I wrote an editorial about opportunity and the electricity crisis. The eternal present tense of news always requires a sculptor. But I’m tired of grinding facts into flour like some robotic miller. Who cares that the Marquis di Gorgonzola was actually Roberto Rastapopoulos? Or that Peter Malungani-Malungani and Antonij Millar Snr., the men profiting from the R27-billion prepaid electricity hustle gripping Pretoria, own a white Maserati and single-engine Cirrus SR22? I’m tired of disentangling the facts from the raw material of life. The other day I was walking Snowy the Sixth at the Union Buildings. It was a Sunday, afternoon, the sky a liquid plenitude of blue. Not a Pierneef cloud in sight. People – grooms in wedding suits, brides in white gowns, uncles and aunts with rented smiles, grandchildren in matching yellow dresses – were crowding around that Disney statue of the former president waiting to be photographed. Life was unfolding, without the aid of a scorekeeper. Tomorrow was the next day away. On the lime-coloured kikuyu lawns, we – Snowy the Sixth and I – spotted our opportunity. I unhooked his leash and watched Snowy the Sixth run towards the hadedas. They took off with an indignant moan, as is their manner, circled overhead, and finally settled on that bronze horseman from another time. ‘Good dog,’ I said when Snowy the Sixth returned.