Jack Journal - Volume 2

For me, the fleeting snapshot-like quality of my paintings evokes a sense of something just having happened; a word just spoken, a stifled cry, a sudden silence. This sense of suspension of time, of waiting, of bated breath is further emphasized by the objects floating in space between the viewer and the canvas. There is a strong sense of cause and effect; of misunderstanding, of things lying just out of reach but tantalizingly close. In the same way that colours at dusk are more vivid when glimpsed out of the corner of your eye, the feelings of obscure familiarity evoked by the objects are seductively accessible. Instead of alienating the viewer, the subject matter serves to invite the viewer into some kind of complicity in the unfolding events.

Caryn Scrimgeour carynscrimgeour.co.za

Barbara gets banned from the Bookclub, 2019. - Oil on linen - 30cm by 80cm.

fromJohn

Keating in Dead Poets Society

by Tom Schulman

“We don’t read and write poetry because it’s cute. We read and write poetry because we are members of the human race. And the human race is filled with passion. And medicine, law, business, engineering, these are noble pursuits and necessary to sustain life. But poetry, beauty, romance, love, these are what we stay alive for.”

table of contents

contributors lessons from watching the reinvention of a city Bruce Jack

’n liedjie vannie rieldans Alison Westwood sake Anthony Rose

from trash to treasure Ashley Heather a labyrinth of legacies and musical signposts Josh Hawks gift of the givers Biénne Huisman foraging for mushrooms and other fungi on table mountain Ross Suter

the link between imagination and your wine glass Bruce Jack longing and belonging P. R. Anderson energy of trees 1 Cobus Joubert the national poetry prize Bruce Jack why joe dog makes me uncomfortable Bruce Jack there are none so blind as those who will not sea Aaniyah Omardien

an ode to mama esther and african womanhood Welcome Lishivha stars in the west Greg Mills

turning the tide Patrick Tagoe-Turkson

reverence for the future Frankie Pappas the magic of trees Don Pinnock inspiration and lasting legacies Jamie Goode saving a legacy Angus Sholto-Douglas the art of craft Ronnie Watt plaatje and the friendship of women Matthew Blackman version 1.0 Witold Rybczynski

Editor: Su Birch Design: Allendre Hine & Rohan Etsebeth

editor’s letter

Jack Journal is a magazine about the world of Bruce Jack Wines and the things that we, as a creative business collective and passionate crafters of that ancient staple, wine, are interested in. In a small way it is like the Red Bulletin magazine of the wine world, because it is about the micro-universe of wine and more generally about the things that touch wine.

However, it is different from other product-specific magazines in that it isn’t about trying to sell or even about brand recognition. Instead it is all about welcoming the consumer into the intriguing world of Bruce Jack Wines.

We believe this is important because none of us operates in a vacuum. Our world is tangible, fragile, responsive, challenging, collaborative, sensitive, inspirational, and has context – whether historical, sociopolitical or financial, etc., this context influences us and our work.

Hopefully it will provide insight into what makes us tick – explain why we do what we do, in the way we do it.

But that’s all a bit boring. Essentially, Jack Journal is engaging to read. This volume is quite self-reflective and inward-looking, which partly reflects the state of the world around us. Settle down with an uplifting glass of true wine and dive in. We loved putting this volume together for you.

Bruce

contributors

P. R. ANDERSON

is the author of three volumes of poetry, most recently In a Free State: a Music , described by J. M. Coetzee as destined to be a landmark in South African poetry. He lectures English at the University of Cape Town.

SU BIRCH

is a distinguished international marketing and generic promotions specialist. As CEO of Wines of South Africa, she received the Drinks Business Woman of the Year award. She runs her own marketing business called Thinking Seahorses and has embraced the challenge of producing the Jack Journal. She also volunteers as an English coach in a local township school.

MATTHEW BLACKMAN

is a writer and historian. A co-authored book on the history of corruption in South Africa will be coming out in early 2021. He lives and works in Cape Town.

ROHAN ETSEBETH

designs and illustrates wine labels under the company name of Archival Studio. By the time of this journal going to print he will still not have gotten around to putting his own website up and most certainly will still be looking for the unmute button on Zoom.

JAMIE GOODE

is a prolific, London-based wine writer and book author. He has a PhD in plant biology and is a wine writer who grasps many of the technical aspects of wine production, making him a firm favourite among winemakers. His latest book is The Goode Guide to Wine: a Manifesto of Sorts.

JOSH HAWKS

Josh’s early career with The Streaks and Zap-Dragons saw him share stages with Nelson Mandela, UB40, Crowded House and Duran Duran. Seventeen years with Freshlyground included collaborating with the likes of Stevie Wonder, Aretha Franklin and a global no.1 hit with Shakira. Recent projects include Zulu rock ’n’ roll band The Rockskandi Kings. He is currently studying for a Postgrad dip. through the Henley Business School.

ASHLEY HEATHER

is the founder of ashley heather jewellery, an independent jewellery studio crafting minimalist pieces in silver and gold recycled from e-waste. With a degree in fine arts, 10 years’ experience in jewellery design and a lifelong passion for sustainability, she developed her business as a way of melding these often quite disparate passions.

COBUS JOUBERT

is a farm-raised creative who spent his teenage holidays surfing at the famous Robberg Beach. He now lives in St James, South Africa, with his wife and three children. With his team at Wawa Wooden Surfboards, Cobus builds surfboards inspired by the intuited hydrodynamic genius of the ancient Hawaiian board builders.

WELCOME LISHIVHA

is a freelance writer whose work has appeared in the Mail & Guardian , Getaway Magazine, Reuters and the City Press where he served as the Arts and Lifestyle Co-Editor. Prior to working for the City Press, he was longlisted for the City Press Non-fiction award and shortlisted for the Gerald Kraak Anthology. He enjoys baking complicated pastries from scratch, trying out new eateries and reading Keats.

BIÉNNE HUISMAN

is an award-winning South African journalist with an MA in Creative Writing from Royal Holloway, University of London. She has worked for the BBC, the Sunday Times, Daily Maverick , Getaway Magazine , Open Skies, and more.

ANTON KANNEMEYER

is a satirical artist and co-founding editor of Bitterkomix, an anti-apartheid comic magazine in South Africa. He has exhibited extensively in South Africa, Europe and the USA and his work has been published in numerous publications and catalogues around the world and is held in many permanent art collections, including the Museum of Modern Art in New York.

FAINE LOUBSER

is a filmmaker, storyteller and environmentalist working with Sea Change Project, Wavescape and GoPro South Africa. She has spent several years committed to learning in nature, with a specific focus on the kelp forests along the Cape Peninsula.

GREG MILLS

is the author of numerous best-selling books and heads the Brenthurst Foundation. Previously National Director of the SA Institute of International Affairs, he has directed reform projects in African presidencies like Ghana, Lagos State, Mozambique and SE Nigeria, Kenya, Lesotho, Somaliland and South Africa. He has served four deployments to Afghanistan with the British Army as the adviser to the commander and has his national colours for motorsport. In 2019 he headed the first South African team to participate at Le Mans, driving a Bentley GT3.

FRANKIE PAPPAS

is an architecture firm making remarkable spaces and places with a very unusual philosophy.

ANTHONY ROSE

A founding member of The Wine Gang, Anthony contributes to Decanter Magazine, The World of Fine Wine, The Financial Times How to Spend It and the Oxford Companion to Wine. In 2007 he developed an interest in sake after visiting Japan as a judge at the Japan Wine Challenge. He is a judge at the Sake International Challenge in Tokyo, teaches a sake consumer course in London and is author of Sake and the Wines of Japan.

ANGUS SHOLTO-DOUGLAS

has spent the last 28 years working in the wild spaces of Africa. Starting in the Sabi Sand Game Reserve then moving to northern Botswana and eventually back to his roots in the Eastern Cape, he established Kwandwe Private Game Reserve (a model 55,000-acre wilderness reserve). He is a trustee of the Kwandwe Rhino Conservation Trust, serves on the board of the Private Rhino Owners’ Association and chairs the Ubunye Foundation, a Community Development organization.

AANIYAH OMARDIEN

Aaniyah’s work connects people and nature. While at World Wildlife Fund from 2001 to 2010, she managed the SA Marine programme. She is the founder and director of The Beach Co-op, a not-forprofit company that evolved from the work of a group of volunteers that started collecting marine debris at their local surf break, the rocky shore at Surfers Corner in Muizenberg, Cape Town.

DON PINNOCK

is an investigative journalist, photographer and travel writer who, realising he knew little about the natural world, set out to discover it. This took him to five continents – including Antarctica – and resulted in five books on natural history and hundreds of articles. He has degrees in criminology, political science and African history and is a former editor of Getaway travel magazine. The Last Elephants is his 18th book. He lives in Cape Town.

WITOLD RYBCZYNSKI

lives in Philadelphia, USA, and is the author of more than twenty books, including Home and How Architecture Works. His latest is Charleston Fancy : Little Houses and Big Dreams in the Holy City

ALLENDRE HINE

is a strategic creator and a lover of crafted design solutions, film, coffee and meaningful conversations. Allendre is graduate of the Red & Yellow School of Logic & Magic.

ROSS SUTER

was born in Cape Town and grew up on the slopes of Table Mountain where he has been hiking and rock climbing since the age of 12. He originally practised as an architect before changing career in 1996 to mountain guiding and training. His business focuses on mountain leadership, walking, hiking, rock climbing, botanical exploration and foraging.

PATRICK TAGOE-TURKSON

is a Ghanian-based multidisciplinary artist. Patrick is best known for his nature art and his works made using found flip-flop debris on the beach. He blends the historical Effutu Asafo flag-making art with his environmental activism. His artwork has been shown in exhibitions throughout the world including the Korean Nature Art Biennale and the Echigo Tsumari Art Triennale, Japan. His works are in permanent collections at the Royal Ontario Museum, Canada, and the Casoria Contemporary Art Museum in Italy.

ALISON WESTWOOD

has been travelling to and writing about Africa’s top destinations for more than 15 years. Her writing and photographs have appeared in various magazines and online publications, as well as a book or two. The Cape is her favourite place in Africa, at least partly because of the wine.

CARYN SCRIMGEOUR

is a graduate in Fine Art from the University of Stellenbosch. She is represented by the Everard Read Galleries in South Africa and London, and her masterful still-life paintings are found in many local and international collections. Her work is inspired by her travels around the world, and her curiosity about how we make meaning in our lives.

RONNIE WATT

is a ceramic arts historian with a specific interest in 20th- and 21st-century South African studio pottery and ceramic art. He started collecting studio pottery in the 1980s. His most recent academic research focused on a contextual history of South African ceramics.

ANDREW VAN DER MERWE

As a surfer, time spent on the beach led to a new art form which Andrew calls beach calligraphy. His way of working is unique in the world, and he has developed his own tools and techniques for the process. The letters are carved into the surface in a way that evokes the ancient way of carving in stone, yet it is all soon washed away by the waves. Occasionally he works on a large, monumental scale using an ordinary rake, but always, like most beauty, the beach work is ephemeral. He also designs wine labels.

JUDY WOODBORNE

is an internationally awarded printmaker and painter with her own printmaking studio, Intagliostudio, where she teaches classes, runs workshops and curates exhibitions. She has participated in many International Print Biennales and her work is represented in many International Public Collections and Museums. Her ‘Break the silence’ print portfolio is in permanent collections across the world.

SHERYL OZINSKY

has been involved in making things happen in Cape Town for a very long time. She headed up Cape Town Tourism for six years, helping to establish the City as among the world’s favourite tourism destinations. Sheryl, a marine biologist, was involved in starting the Two Oceans Aquarium and establishing Robben Island as a heritage site. Having founded the Oranjezicht City Farm, she then started the Farmers Market at the V&A Waterfront.

The Cape Town Waterfront

lessons from watching the reinvention of a city

Written by: Bruce Jack

There is a litany of welldocumented studies detailing how built environments affect all who live in, around and through them. Too often the lack of sympathetic, holistic planning results in a negative experience, with a catalogue of undesirable consequences. Poor design plays a big part in bad planning, as does spatial planning, unsympathetic use of scale, etc. … not to mention ego and nefarious agendas.

I am not just referring to the infamously bad examples like the urban housing project of Pruitt-Igoe in St Louis, Missouri, in the USA. First occupied in 1954, all 33 high-rise buildings proved such a social disaster that they were levelled by explosives two decades later.

As the son of an architect, I am not allowed to say this, but I believe, to a greater or lesser extent, that the vast majority of our built environments are failures. I can hear the gnashing of architects’ and city planners’ teeth just for committing such heresy to paper. I would also argue that positive legacies in this realm are the infrequent exception.

These little miracles of urban upliftment exist at the other end of the scale from Pruitt-Igoe. Instead of destroying hope, they bring happiness. The absolute pinnacle for me are the examples of developments that have saved a deteriorating built environment or crumbling city. Those are so much more difficult than starting with a noble idea like Cadbury Chocolate’s Bournville ‘Factory in a Garden’ vision of the 19th century, because the rot has already set in and success looks impossible.

When these mini miracles brighten urban lives, an oft-quoted common denominator is an individual champion with a bold vision and genius to burn. We think of pioneering

inner-city pedestrianisation initiatives like StrØget in Copenhagen, Denmark. The protagonist for this car-free inner-city experiment was Alfred Wassard, who received death threats for his trouble. When it first opened, the police were on hand to protect him against assassination attempts, and car drivers protested their displeasure in side streets by honking their horns. The architect, Jan Gehl, is now legendary for his visionary insight and planning of pedestrianised inner cities that swayed policy change towards pedestrian- and bicycle-friendly inner-city spaces in many cities around the world.

Architects and urban planners, etc., like to talk about ‘Liveable Cities’, by which they mean the handful of cities that aren’t horrible to live in. This means we mostly have to rely on miracles of rejuvenation to create ‘Liveable Cities’. Perhaps the most famous rejuvenation story is that of a Brazilian city, Coritiba, and an extraordinary man, Jaime Lerner, who happened not only to be a visionary, but both an architect and

the mayor of Coritiba. It is an inspirational story and my father knows it inside out. Many an evening around the dinner table has been spent analysing Coritiba’s reinvention and other successful rejuvenation projects like the Rouse Company’s Baltimore waterfront development in the USA.

The outside-looking-in mythology of these rare and remarkable success stories focuses on the champion catalyst with unstoppable charisma and audacious vision, because it is easier to explain success or failure through the stories of people. But this means we often miss the enigmatic seeds of success and happiness.

Sociopolitical, environmental and economic good timing, for example, are just as crucial as a visionary champion. And cooperative leadership, broad collaboration, committed teams, loyalty and hard work are essential too, but they seldom get the limelight they deserve – maybe because it is challenging to measure the degree of leverage these fluid, dynamic influences have

on an unpredictable outcome.

The reality is that sustainable revitalisation in the most immoveable and socio-impactful of environments relies on a mind-boggling, complex set of interrelated influences. To satisfactorily unpack this is almost impossible.

And then we have luck, whose role is hopelessly unquantifiable, and, in some cases, even culturally uncomfortable to accept –especially in the self-determined world built of minute and certain measurements.

But the lessons and the mysteries are there, waiting less for deciphering and more for acceptance. The mysteries are like the spirituality of place – those poorly understood interacting elements that unexpectedly combine to create social cohesion and happiness.

I grew up in the mountain-dominated port city of Cape Town at the southwestern tip of Africa. It is, like the rest of South Africa, a polarised place. Anchored by the brooding granite presence of Table Mountain, it feels suspended in a different reality from the rest of the world, held by

the tension of coexisting radical opposites – awesome beauty alongside revulsion. The peaceful and the violent, like the desperate and the decadent, materialise simultaneously and continuously. And then there is the stubborn legacy of social disunity and economic destruction wreaked by apartheid-era spatial planning.

Against this backdrop, our own miracle of inner-city rejuvenation took place, and I had a unique view of it unfolding. I was backstage as the Victoria and Alfred Waterfront was conceived, and I watched it transform Cape Town from the inside looking out. This unique insight was possible because the man who orchestrated it is my father, David Jack.

Recent figures show that Cape Town’s Waterfront is the most visited tourist attraction in Africa, with over 24 million visitors annually. While conceived primarily as a place for Cape Town’s locals, it has become a must-visit tourist destination. On most measurable levels – economic or social – the V&A is an unprecedented

globally significant success. The momentum it has created has rejuvenated the City Bowl and the Western Cape. It created thousands of indirect and direct jobs and provided a welcoming, culturally sensitive, relatively crime-free, clean, embracing space for all Capetonians.

But these miracles of the built environment don’t happen in a time bubble. Context is required to unearth the mysteries and the lessons. My father’s father, James ‘Stan’ Jack, was head of investments for Goldfields of South Africa, and so my father was born and attended boarding school in Johannesburg. Both sides of my family are almost exclusively of Scottish origin, with the Jacks having been involved in South African mining in some way or another since the mid-19th century. But instead of becoming a mining engineer, my father chose the University of Cape Town and architecture.

Here he excelled, met my mother on a blind date, and won a scholarship to study further at the Architectural Association in London, focusing on urban design in developing countries. He further excelled in London and won a Rockefeller Fellowship to the University of Los Angeles, USA, where he completed a master’s degree in urban planning. It was here that he became intrigued by waterfront and marina developments and visited as many as he could all around the USA and Canada to study them first-hand.

On completion of his degree, he was snapped up by the Californian architectural practice of Charles and Ray Eames, and so I should have been a Malibu grommet, not a Muizenberg one, because there was no intention to return to apartheid South Africa. Unfortunately, my grandfather-to-be, Stan, was diagnosed with cancer, and my parents reluctantly headed back to Africa, where I popped out some months later. Stan lived on for another decade and they stayed as a result.

On his return to Africa, David Jack was an unknown but landed a job at Anglo American Properties, then developing the groundbreaking Marina da Gama in Cape Town’s southern peninsula. Our first house was the old servants’ quarters of the Sandown-on-Sea Hotel on Surfers Corner, Muizenberg, a stone’s throw from the marina development.

Sheryl Ozinski worked with my father in different capacities on various key projects and has known him for 30 years. I asked her to provide me with some of her memories of the waterfront project, but she started with the marina development because it was here, she believes, that David Jack developed his unique way of working.

‘David Jack is not a follower. He didn’t simply change our environment for the better, he created important models for change. And he did that successfully, not just once or twice, but many times during his career.

‘It was during the development of the Marina da Gama project that David worked with many of Cape Town’s professional teams to provide a set of design parameters, while they built one of the city’s first iconic developments.

‘David understood that no single professional discipline can possess all the skills needed to address the complex issues facing South Africa’s towns and neighbourhoods. He knew that planning and design are multifaceted, and that these professionals needed to acquire extra competencies through collaboration. He envisioned a holistic development practice that included architects, town planners, engineers, geographers, urban designers, landscape architects, community leaders, biologists, environmentalists and historians, amongst others.’

This collaborative philosophy was something drilled into me at an early age. When he heard me criticising a rugby teammate at under-11 level, he took me aside after the game and said: ‘Everyone is trying their best out there. If they make a mistake, it isn’t on purpose. Criticising them won’t help, it will just make them more nervous and more likely to make mistakes in the future. Rather, encourage someone who has made a mistake and restore his confidence. In that way he is less likely to make the same mistake in the future and the whole team performs better.’ I kid you not. That’s a true story and even though I was 10 years old I remember it vividly. And that was exactly how he ran his multidisciplinary teams. His genius was not in putting these teams together, but in how he facilitated their interaction.

My father eventually became City Planner, a role he carried out for 14 years.

His team were responsible for overseeing all planning and also initiated many of the City’s own projects – including protecting and rejuvenating many heritage buildings earmarked for demolition and car parks. A favourite project was the pedestrianisation and greening of Church Street and St Georges Street (now St Georges Mall) in the Cape Town CBD. This project linked the old Company Gardens of the 17th century at the top of town all the way to the foreshore, in a similar way that the famous Ramblas in Barcelona works.

He helped facilitate the inspirational ‘Greening of the City’ initiative that saw over 1 million trees planted by the City Parks Board, and he made it his mission to bring life back into the CBD by redeveloping the stalls on the Grand Parade in front of the City Hall, etc. The projects were many – some small, like bringing the famous Cape flower sellers back into town. All were focused on revitalisation of the city around people. Unknown to most, he also worked tirelessly behind the scenes to keep the head offices of major companies in the city. His intervention helped stop many of the oil companies and, importantly, national retailer Woolworths from relocating to Johannesburg, for example.

Growing up, my sister and I would jump into his car on Sundays and drive around the peninsula with him for most of the day, inspecting contentious developments and progress-checking others. We spent more time on building sites than most kids, and it is little wonder that my sister studied architecture at university. It was on these car trips that he would regale us with stories about our city. He knows the origin of almost every building in Cape Town –who built it, why they built it, etc. – but he also knew contextual facts like why there is tension between National Government, Provincial Government and Local Government and how to align them, or why certain streets exist where they do, or that Hout Bay was first called Chapman’s Chance, or the history and practices of forestry management on Table Mountain, etc. I doubt anyone possesses as much detailed knowledge about the humaninfluenced environment of Cape Town.

It was in 1988 while working for the City that he was invited to become the CEO of the first ever public-private partnership –

the development of Cape Town’s Waterfront, known by all Capetonians as ‘The Docks’. Cut off from the city by a freeway, this run-down, seedy area was notorious for belligerent stevedores, prostitution, rats and crime. It was not only an insalubrious eyesore but cost the South African taxpayer over R2 million a year. In many quarters it was considered a hopeless situation. Not for my father – this is what he had been preparing for all his life and he jumped at the opportunity. He knew what would help save Cape Town from a design and urban planning perspective – she had to be reunited with her sea, through her people.

Sheryl recalls: ‘When the Victoria & Alfred Waterfront Company was formed and work started in 1989, most Capetonians said “it will never happen” and those few who were lobbying for the Waterfront were regarded as dreamers.’

As my father went around Cape Town

outlining his vision, he was met with cynicism and antagonism. Some restaurants in the neighbouring Sea Point felt threatened and a campaign called ‘Duck the Fox’ was started, which was typically myopic of the time, but still hurtful.

This attitude partly reflected the negative mindset – the apartheid nationalist government was in the dying throes of their tenure, but not going down without a fight. On 12 June 1986 – four days before the 10th anniversary of the Soweto Uprising – a draconian, country-wide State of Emergency had been declared. Detention without trial, curfews, torture, banning of political funerals, banning of certain indoor gatherings, and political murder, etc., ensued. News crews with television cameras were banned from filming in areas where there was political unrest. This meant both national and international coverage of police brutality and the

government’s attempts to contain unrest were largely unreported. The country was imploding, and tensions ran high. An estimated 26,000 people were detained between June 1986 and June 1987 – many of these died.

A young reporter for the largest local newspaper, Willem Steenkamp, recalls going to one of my father’s presentations and being impressed by the vision and excited by my father’s passion for his project.

When he filed his report, the editorial team mocked him for his naivety, cut the report down to a paragraph and apparently ran it near the sports section at the back of the edition.

But David Jack had kick-started his vision and he was determined. With the stoic support of Brian Kantor, an economics professor, who had been named Chairman of the V&A Waterfront, and the loyalty and connections of Arie Burggraaf, the most

David Jack showing Nelson Mandela around the Cape Town Waterfront, 1995.

senior harbour engineer at parastatal Portnet, my father knew it would work. His inner team believed in him and backed his audacious vision.

Sheryl explains: ‘The job was to rejuvenate the City’s historic harbour by restoring abandoned buildings, bringing together a mix of local retailers, restaurants, hotels, offices, residential and museums, all co-existing side by side.’

Of course, this meant simultaneously managing the economic development alongside the physical development, the successful execution of which required skills and inner resources not expected of most architects.

‘Unlike many other waterfronts in the world, David’s focus from the start was on attracting locals. For him, authenticity was everything – restoring historic buildings in the local vernacular style – whilst adapting them for new purposes and retaining an authentic link to the past. Most importantly, David wanted to ensure the continuation of the working harbour, which provides vitality and a rich maritime experience – from shipping traffic to the Synchrolift and Robinson Dry Dock, to fishing boats and tugs – this was to be a real peoples’ place, not a theme park. For me this aspect was the most interesting and David supported the work I did together with the Cape Town History Project in the development of story boards and a walking tour that presented alternative perspectives on the dockland and broader Cape Town history.

‘When I first met David, I was nervous, not knowing what to expect. But I needn’t have been. I encountered a modest man with great ideas and high ideals. It was obvious that David Jack was doing what he loved. He was passionate and curious and excited about the work at the Waterfront and I admired his sense of purpose and meaning. When I asked him if I could play a role in making his dream of the Two Oceans Aquarium a reality, he answered by quoting Nelson Mandela: “There is no passion to be found playing small –in settling for a life that is less than the one you are capable of living.”

‘David gave me a chance to do the work I loved. On 13 November 1995, the Two Oceans Aquarium was opened to the public – a feat that was only possible

thanks to David Jack and the thousands of hours committed by passionate professionals and volunteers.’

A distinguishing feature of how the development of the V&A Waterfront progressed was the way my father structured his multidisciplinary planning process. The team directly employed by the V&A Waterfront was always small and fleet-footed. It was his utilisation of external review boards, professional consultants and key outside individuals that allowed him to put together a dream team of the very best developers.

Sheryl again: ‘I remember the large boardroom in the Port Captain’s Building always being full of people in business suits carrying drawings and plans. Krysia, David’s hard-working secretary, would never let me peek inside, but I later learnt that these were David’s famous Design Review Meetings, where professionals worked collaboratively across many disciplines to bring the vision to life. Only by realising the benefits that closer working with people from other disciplines could bring was this ever possible. David has the uncanny ability to bring the last bit of inspiration, talent or ability out of each professional, and that is really what has made the Waterfront such a success.’

This was a difficult and potentially disastrous development model to adopt, because many big egos were involved. Most in those Design Review Meetings, for example, were leaders in their fields, owners of their own practices, with strong characters and strong opinions.

It sounds like a nightmare to most developers, which is why this model is seldom adopted and why, when it is, it often fails. The secret was the way in which my father managed these interactions. I was present in a few –left alone and ignored, at the other end of the room with my homework. I experienced it first-hand, but the stories are legendary – like a magician, he not only coaxed the best ever work from the best in the business, but he somehow managed to secure alignment and inspire an incredible sense of ownership and loyalty.

The Waterfront was also different from other waterfront developments around

A distinguishing feature of how the development of the V&A Waterfront progressed was the way my father structured his multidisciplinary planning process. The team directly employed by the V&A Waterfront was always small and fleet-footed.

Cape Town Two Oceans Aquarium

Californian Redwoods. Photography by Victoria Palacios via Upsplash

the world because it was conceived and planned around people, but not just an academic understanding of sociology or even psychology; rather this came about through how David Jack reads people. The direction of development was continuously tweaked as he carefully analysed what worked best through his unique lens. In a way, the early phases of development were an ongoing, real-time design experiment, the many outcomes of which were immediately felt by him, then analysed – all to ensure the best eventual outcome for all involved, especially for the Capetonians who would utilise the space.

Sheryl found this practice unusual, but fascinating: ‘The V&A took its shape as a result of David’s practice of carefully observing social behaviours and patterns and then adapting the project accordingly. He watched people walk, he watched them shop, and he watched them interact and socialise. He worried through challenges and constantly sought ways to make the Waterfront encourage rather than discourage social interaction.’

I remember the early years, walking around with my father and getting frustrated that it took so long to make it from one spot to another. In one instance he stopped and made me watch a hundred people cross an open space between two restaurants. Then he turned to me and said something like, ‘The reason most people cut out that corner and go the long way around is because the relationship between them, in this environment, and the scale of the building at the corner is wrong. We will plant a tree there.’

While the built environment is often what alienates us, it is the carefully designed and planned spaces in-between that can make us feel welcome once again. In David Jack’s mind the spaces are just as important as the buildings.

Sheryl: ‘I will never forget David walking around talking to tenants, customers, builders, security personnel, local and overseas visitors – all the while picking up any litter he encountered. If the Managing Director could pick up litter, then so could everyone else. It was a valuable lesson.

‘My own career took many turns, but I found myself at the V&AW again – this time working with the Robben Island Museum as the island was transformed from political

prison to World Heritage Site. When the Museum opened its doors in 1997, the first tour ferries departed from the original departure building at Jetty 1, with its unfriendly façade of red bricks, wrought iron doors and barbed wire fencing. This was the time that I got to know David as a compassionate person who wanted to turn our common suffering into hope for the future. Quite simply, he wanted to do good.

‘I am back at the V&AW, this time as a tenant, operating the Oranjezicht City Farm Market. I’m fortunate to see David from time to time, when he pops by. He never ages – he still has that twinkle of curiosity in his eye. He tells me he can still touch his toes, make a good cappuccino, peel a prickly pear, and at a push ride a horse and milk a cow – but prefers to drive his 1965 model Porsche.’ Numinosity is a beautiful word – it means the sense of blissful awe a place inspires in those who are fortunate to experience it. This could be a cathedrallike cave open to the crashing sea, an ancient forest of giant trees, or, in very rare instances, a building or city space. Those who have stood in front of the Acropolis in Athens, before the crowds arrive, will know what I mean.

We will never understand all the mysterious reasons why some urban or building design really works. It is usually easier to work out why it doesn’t work. But what we can attempt to do, if we care about our collective happiness, is to consciously scratch below the surface of this sort of success – where the spirituality of place makes us feel welcomed and happy. We can learn from them.

In the case of Cape Town’s V&A Waterfront, I have learnt lessons I try to utilise in my own business. I love learning from how people interact with my wines – why they react positively or why they sometimes don’t grasp the whole package. I continuously tweak my house style, my label design and my communication in an attempt to give consumers a sense of belonging. This makes me feel fulfilled and I believe it benefits the consumer. And business collaboration is the cornerstone of my business philosophy, as it was with my father.

It is not an easy path. I can see why no

one does business this way in the wine industry. Margins are so small and the pitfalls so prevalent that true collaboration takes a huge amount of trust and belief in my vision – a vision that to some is so long-term that it doesn’t always seem anchored in the commercial reality of this cut-throat industry.

Over and above this, watching my father struggle and eventually succeed in realising his dream for Cape Town taught me that if your vision is as egoless as possible, and if it is truly designed to spread joy, success against impossible odds is possible.

Most importantly, I learnt that it is not in the concreteness of the wine industry that we find beauty and joy – not in the scale of businesses, the turnover and profit, not even in the weight of the bottles, or the awards won at wine competitions.

Rather it is in the empty, mysterious spaces between all these measurable things – in the silence between sips, as flavours and aromas explode on your tongue, firing a thousand neurons deep in your brain, and in the initiatives outside of winemaking, like the social upliftment projects many of us are passionate about. And, I hope, in projects like this magazine, which, with any luck, is like that tree my father planted in the corner of that empty space between two restaurants – an out-of-the-box additional element that provides welcome and belonging.

Scan to find out more about the Cape Town Waterfront

’n liedjie vannie rieldans

(A Little Ditty about the Riel Dance)

Written by: Alison Westwood Photography: Courtesy of ATKV.

It’s midnight in the Great Karoo, The stars are out, the moon is new. It’s New Year’s 1952, Klein Johanna’s at the riel.

In a circle, on the dry sand, The crowd is clapping, hand on hand. A ramkie guitar leads the band, They’re ready for the riel.

Pieter van Rooien trots on first. Of all the dancers, he’s the worst –  Been working on a mighty thirst, But now it’s time to riel.

Next come Stoffel, Jaap, and Arrie –that man dances dangerously! They say he kicked cracks in concrete, Last time he danced the riel.

Bow-ties, waistcoats, ostrich feathers In their hats – so smart and clever. Watch how they vlerksleep together, When they dance the riel.

Three girls skip in, then another, Klein Johanna cheers her mother: Kappie, dress, and apron over, She’s dressed up for the riel.

The liedjie starts, this one is funny: It’s about a naughty tannie Who stole all the farmer’s money While he watched the riel.

Knees like rubber, lungs that aren’t pap, Toes dug in to throw the dust up, Vellies tough enough to vastrap –That’s what you need to riel.

Feet too nimble to make them out, All leap and kick and turn about: Then ‘Askoek!’ everybody shouts –  That’s how you dance the riel.

Johanna watches them all night. Next morning, somewhere out of sight, She tries to gooi her feet just right, And learns to dance the riel.

***

Johanna’s old now – seventy-seven. Verneukpan’s not exactly heaven, But she’s smiling, laughing even, When she talks about the riel.

‘I can skoffel, you must believe –I was champion at ATKV. Come to Kenhardt on New Year’s Eve, And then we’ll dance a riel.

‘My son Flippie’s got two left feet, But man, that boy can keep a beat. His blikviool sings something sweet, When he plays the riel.

‘I taught his daughter Elsa well, Since she was just a little girl.

Really, you should see her twirl, When she dances riel.

‘Now Elsa’s in a winning team –  They took gold in 2018. It’s the best thing you’ve ever seen When they dance the riel.

‘She said, “Ouma, I saw the sea, Thousands of people cheered for me. My face was even on TV, When I danced the riel.”

‘And those kids from Wupperthal way, Who flew out to the USA, Thirteen medals, they won – sien jy? For dancing in the riel.

‘They say it comes from long ago, The San, the Khoe-Khoe – well who knows? But samesyn will always grow, When we dance the riel.’

The wireless twangs an old refrain Of love and mischief, hope and pain. She jumps up, she feels young again –Old Johanna dances riel.

GLOSSARY

ASKOEK: (ash cake) or askoek-slaan (hitting ash cakes) is a characteristic dance move of the riel. Dancers strike their heels together, mimicking the sound made by removing excess ash from bread baked on coals.

ATKV: The Afrikaanse Taal- en Kultuurvereniging (Afrikaans Language and Culture Association) was historically an all-white affair, but when apartheid ended, it opened up to include all ethnic race groups who spoke Afrikaans. The establishment of their annual rieldans competition in 2006 was critical to the riel’s revival. Participants have grown from a handful of groups to hundreds of dancers from all over the Cape.

BLIKVIOOL: A tin-can violin.

KAPPIE: A bonnet in the style of the colonial era.

GREAT KAROO: A sparsely populated inland semi-desert stretching over more than 400,000 square kilometres.

GOOI: Literally, to throw.

KENHARDT: A small town in the arid Northern Cape at the heart of the region’s sheep farming community.

KLEIN: Little.

LIEDJIE: ‘Little songs’ are performed by a singer accompanying the band. Each liedjie tells a story about something in the community’s lived experience, which the dancers also try to depict in their performance.

OUMA: Grannie.

PAP: Flat, like a car tyre.

RAMKIE: A home-made stringed instrument, similar to a lute or guitar.

RIEL: The riel traces its roots back to indigenous Khoe-San dances, and is distinguished by fancy footwork, animal mimicry, and extravagant courtship displays. The name ‘riel’ is derived from the Scottish reel (an influence that arrived with Europeans) and is used for both the music and the dance. From the mid-1800s to the mid-1900s, the riel was performed at weekend and New Year’s parties by farm labourers in the rural Cape. During apartheid, it was disparaged for being associated with drunkenness, and almost died out. It is now regarded as a cultural link to the nation’s First People and a proud part of South African heritage.

SAMESYN:

A spirit of togetherness experienced at social gatherings, much valued in rural communities.

SIEN JY: You see?

SKOFFEL:

Literally translated, skoffel means ‘to hoe’, but is also used as a synonym for dance.

TANNIE:

Although it means ‘auntie’, any woman can be called tannie.

VASTRAP:

The fast stamping action performed by riel dancers.

VERNEUKPAN:

A 57km long and 11km wide salt pan in the remote Northern Cape. Verneuk is Afrikaans for trick, mislead or swindle.

VELLIES:

Short for velskoen (skin shoes), these tough leather walking shoes are thought to have been based on traditional Khoe-San footwear. The red shoes favoured by many rieldans teams are probably a hat-tip to Afrikaans folk music icon David Kramer, whose rooi vellies were famous.

VLERKSLEEP:

Literally translated, ‘wing sweep’. The moves for the courtship routines in riel are taken from the bird kingdom, where the male will spread a wing and sweep it along the ground while dancing around the female.

WUPPERTHAL:

This tiny village in the Cederberg mountains is home to a famous rieldans team, the Nuwe Graskoue Trappers. With no formal training, they won the ATKV competition and South African Championships of the Performing Arts, and went on to compete in the 2015 World Championships of the Performing Arts in Los Angeles. Their triumphant return with 13 gold, silver, and bronze medals was an inspiration to the new generation of riel dancers and quite literally put riel on the international stage.

Scan to find out more about the riel dancers

Photo: Sake dinner-Restaurant

‘A slow clock may never tell the correct time, but a stopped clock is right twice a day,’ says Masataka Shirakashi, the owner of Kenbishi Shuzo in Japan’s Hyogo Prefecture. Kenbishi was established in 1505, 13 years after Columbus discovered America, instead of Japan, as the explorer had originally intended. Historical drawings show 47 samurai drinking Kenbishi sake in 1701; they then set out to settle a score on behalf of their master before committing ritual suicide.

Consumed by Japanese writers, philosophers and politicians and drunk at coming-of-age and wedding ceremonies, Kenbishi’s sake has endured over centuries precisely because this ultra-traditional brewery has had no truck

with passing fads. ‘If two out of a hundred like it, that’s good enough for us,’ says Shirakashi. While it’s a statement that would have any modern-day drinks marketer throwing their hands up in despair, the fact is that the underlying message of ‘if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it’ has made Kenbishi one of Japan’s most enduring and distinctive sake breweries.

Endurance is a feature of Japan’s sake industry. More than 900 sake breweries, three-quarters of the 1,200-odd active sake producers in Japan today, are over a century old. One-third were established before the end of the lengthy Edo period (1603–1868). Drink the sake of Imanishi Shuzo in Nara, Japan’s ancient capital, and you are imbibing the traditions of a Japanese sake brewery with records dating back more than nine centuries. Sake brewing has survived, navigated and adapted its way through the challenges and hazards of the centuries to bring us a modern drink which would astonish its forebears as

much as the internet would have Johannes Gutenberg staring in bewilderment.

The families running today’s sake breweries are justifiably proud of ancestors who originally plied their trade in the likes of soy sauce, dried herring production or kimono sales. Traditionally, these families depended on professional master brewers, known as tōji, whose groups formed guilds throughout Japan. The tōji would pass down his skills to the next generation, and the family head would probably know only his surname. In an industry as traditional as sake, changes are almost imperceptible but today’s tōji is more likely to be a family member, and, whisper it softly, a woman perhaps.

The all-important job of rice milling was once carried out by priestesses (look away now, those of a delicate disposition) chewing the rice grain and spitting into a pot to begin the process of breaking down the enzymes. In the 8th-century Imperial Court in Nara, sake was made for the Emperor and his entourage.

sakeWritten by: Anthony Rose Photography: Anthony Rose

Photo: Removing the steamed rice by wooden shovel for cooling down, at Yonetsuru, Yamagata

Photo: Miho Imada, head brewer and owner, with Hattan-so rice, Imada Honten, Hiroshima

As the pestle and mortar superseded mouth-chewing, sake-making became the preserve of temples and shrines in medieval Japan, seeping gradually into all aspects of Japanese aesthetics: in the tea ceremony, flower arrangement, painting, lacquerwork, embroidery, porcelain, gardening and Noh theatre.

The basic techniques of sake brewing in use today were largely developed during the Edo period.This prosperous era saw continued expansion and improvement. Nada in the central Japanese prefecture of Hyogo became, and remains, the engine room of sake production. Efficient waterwheels replaced the pestle and mortar. In an ancient version of the Beaujolais Nouveau race, ships known as taru-kaisen raced each other to get their cargo of 2,000 barrels of sake to Tokyo’s (then Edo) thirsty population.

At the end of this lengthy isolationist period, Japan opened its doors to inquisitive foreigners lured by a country whose enigmatic charm had for so long obscured what the Western writer Lafcadio Hearn described as ‘a Fairyland … an era forgotten, a vanished age as ancient as Egypt or Nineveh.’ Visiting the country in 1878, bella Bird recorded the custom of drinking sake at a Shinto wedding ceremony: ‘The two girls who brought in the bride handed round a tray with three cups containing sake, which each person was expected to drain till he came to the god of luck at the bottom.’

Thanks to a talented group of pioneers, sake took a number of giant leaps forward after the turn of the century. In 1908, Riichi Satake invented a power-driven milling machine capable of milling the rice grain all the way down to its central starch core. Founded in 1904, the National Research Institute of Brewing made a significant contribution to improvements in quality, stability and scientific solutions to brewing techniques. In place of the laborious pole-ramming technique for getting the sake fermentation going, the more rapid, streamlined sokujo method was developed. Yamada Nishiki and Gohyakumangoku, the two rice strains that account for around two-thirds of today’s sake production, were developed in 1936 and 1957 respectively.

Rice shortages at the start of WW2 led to the government taking control of the sake industry in 1939 with the aim of producing maximum sake from minimum rice. Before

the war was over, breweries were forced to make sake with the wholesale addition of distilled alcohol. Thanks to the resulting ‘triple sake’ – two parts added alcohol to one part naturally produced alcohol – the quality and image of sake suffered badly, leading to a near-terminal decline in consumption and a stigma that has taken decades to eradicate.

Yet with typical Japanese resilience, sake has not only recovered from a spiral of decline but made rapid progress. The early 1970s saw a burgeoning of Jizake, local sake, leading to the ginjō boom of the 1980s in response to demand for a light, smooth, easy-to-drink sake. Old heads have rolled in favour of a younger, more open-minded generation with a formal sake education and experience of industries abroad such as wine. They are more supportive of local rice growers and more flexible in crafting new styles of sake adapted to a revival of interest from a younger generation of consumers.

In Akita, for instance,Yusuke Sato, the young head of the Aramasa brewery, is making waves with an almost wine-like sake commanding prices that other brewery owners can only dream of. Art of Sake, a start-up with four sake brands, is on a mission to revive small artisan sake breweries and put their trendy undiluted, unfiltered, unpasteurised sakes on the map. The young Japanese football star, Hidetoshi Nakata, is turning heads with his Japan Craft Sake Company, and Richie Hawtin, the acclaimed international techno DJ based in Berlin, has created a sake label, Enter Sake, with a focus on bringing young people into sake. Champagne producers too are getting in on the act. In a joint venture with Ryuichiro Masuda of Masuizumi, Richard Geoffroy, former chef de cave of Dom Pérignon, released his first ultra-premium sake this year, IWA5, made in the Toyama foothills of the Japan Alps. The ripple effect of new-wave premium sake is being felt in countries as diverse as Australia, the USA and the UK, where local craft sake breweries are springing up in response to demand. The brewer who perhaps best embodies the spirit of innovation is Philip Harper, Tamagawa’s head brewer in Kyoto Prefecture and Japan’s only British brewer. A welcome breath of fresh air, he has no time for the old shibboleths, favouring a simple set of enduring values with which few would argue: that what sake boils down to is flavour and fun.

SAKE BOX

Q: What is sake?

A: Sake is a fermented drink made from rice, kōji (moulded rice), yeast and water.

Q: What is kōji?

A: Kōji (more accurately kōji-kin) is a micro-organism, a mould, whose enzymes break down the starch in the rice and convert it to fermentable sugars. Kōji is the steamed rice with the kōji mould propagated on it.

Q: What is rice polishing?

A: Rice polishing, or milling, is the first step in the four-stage process of milling, washing, soaking and steaming needed to prepare the rice for fermentation.

Q: What is the polishing ratio?

A: The more the rice grain is polished, the higher the grade of sake. Premium grades of sake correspond to polishing ratios. Daiginjō, with at least 50% of the rice grain removed, is the highest grade of sake.

Q: Sake or saké?

A: Sake is English (pronounced sah-kay), saké is French.

Q: What is the alcohol content of sake?

A: On average 15–17% ABV.

Q: Should sake always be drunk from a traditional Japanese cup (ochoko) or is a wine glass acceptable?

A: Sake can be drunk from any vessel you like.

Q: Is it okay or naff to drink sake warm?

A: Despite a prejudice in some quarters against hot sake, it’s fine to drink sake warm, or even hot.

Q: Is sake better drunk with food, or on its own?

A: Sake is low in acidity and high in umami (savouriness), a versatile drink matching both Japanese and many Western foods.

Q: Should sake be drunk right away or cellared?

A: Most sake is best drunk young.

Q: Is sake good for your health?

A: Sake doesn’t contain sulphites or preservatives but, like any alcoholic drink, should be drunk in moderation.

Scan the QR code to buy the book, Sake and the Wines of Japan by Anthony Rose

Photography by Aler Kiv via Upsplash

from trash to treasure

ashley heather jewellery handcrafted in gold and silver recycled from e-waste

‘We believe that while some metal mining may always be necessary, ultimately our most important extraction operations should be happening in recycling centres and scrapyards rather than in sensitive ecological areas and ancestral lands.’

ashley heather jewellery is a jewellery studio that celebrates sustainability by crafting individually designed pieces utilising silver and gold reclaimed from circuit boards. Sustainable studio practices include everything from the manufacturing

process through to the packaging.

‘Our refining process begins with manually dismantling the waste electronic products. All the non-electrical components are sent their separate ways for recycling.

The circuit boards are run through a shredder before being fed into the furnace. All the metals are collected as a sludge. The precious metals are separated and purified before being melted a second time to ensure a pure, high-quality material. The recycled metals start their

new life in our Cape Town studio where, using traditional goldsmithery techniques, they are meticulously handcrafted into minimalist, easy-wearing jewellery.’

Scan to find out more about ashley heather designs

a labyrinth of legacies and musical signposts

Written by: Josh Hawks

John Lennon’s line ‘I read the news today, oh boy’ seems to have taken on rhetorical resonance. Like a theremin (that glissandosounding aerial of an instrument associated with eerie soundtracks), the digital news and social-media performative space is a high-frequency din as shrill as my tinnitus. I scan the latest from the Orange Vulgarian, the High Priest of Fake News, who, in 1,267 days, has (according to Fact Checker) made 20,055 false or misleading claims. I surmise that it might have always been this way, since the Ancient Assyrians; empires and their art of telling people what they need to know – the time-honoured balancing act – or giving them cake. The US corporate sector is eating it up. Billionaire wealth has gone up by nearly $600 billion since the beginning of the pandemic. Jeff Bezoz made $13 billion in one day. South Africa has its own voracious version of a feeding frenzy on show. The Revolution will consume every brick from the foundation like a biblical plague of locusts. Thinking about cake, I have a flashback to the 2007 pre-Polokwane Conference and I’m watching ANC heavyweights gulping from bottles of Moët behind the stage at the stadium in Athlone. I am with Freshlyground, and we are there to perform. I watch Mbeki cut a single slice from the ANC’s 94th birthday cake and walk down to the crowd for a symbolic feeding of the rapturous multitude. There has been a blast in Beirut; nearly 3,000 tonnes of ammonium nitrate left to solidify in a dilapidated warehouse seems like a metaphor for South Africa’s crisis of inequality. I look for something to stem my anxiety and give me colour, but I catch a story about white cricketers discussing whether black lives matter, and anti-vaxxers apoplectic about Gates and the Rothschilds. It’s suddenly 1928 in Berlin and Goebbels is overseeing the placement of movie cameras and microphones to enhance the image of the Führer, but I slip even further back to 1517, and another anti-Semite, Martin Luther, is about to nail his 95 theses up on the church door. Luther, like Goebbels, knew how to use new technology to absorb and advance a cause – in Luther’s case the Gutenberg printing press, enabling the first viral media campaign around Germany and beyond. Like the Catholic Church, then, it seems

we have no way to counter the information onslaught and are in a crisis of sense making. Then I see a very colourful Sho Madjozi on a BBC video insert, riffing on the legacy of Tsonga music, fashion adornments, and the age-old struggle against European determinations of what beauty and hair are supposed to be. She has annexed her traditions and performed such an original spin that she is now signed to one of the biggest labels in the business. I already feel as if I am in a labyrinth of past and conflicting legacies, but consider my European ancestors arriving in Africa describing their culture as civilisation and thus unchanging and final. Then I consider my own musical journey, rooted in Africa. The first time I lowered the needle onto spinning vinyl as a six-year-old in 1976, I heard a Mellotron and Strawberry Fields I didn’t know then that the Mellotron was the first sampler on record, nor that the reason for Lennon’s voice slowing at one minute in was because George Martin had slowed and spliced one of the takes in order to marry two. Neither did I know then that The Beatles were influenced by Little Richard, Chuck Berry and early rock ’n’ roll, a black art form, rooted in slaves from Africa, that needed a white face to go mainstream in Elvis Presley. Carole King’s Tapestry was another record in a threadbare collection, and years later I would have the fortunate experience of standing in the wings at Radio City Hall and watching Aretha Franklin up close singing (You Make Me Feel Like) A Natural Woman. Aretha –the culmination of the slave-era field holler, the call-and-answer song sung in the fields to compress time and pain; the so-called Negro Spiritual – the Queen of Soul. Another seminal musical moment two years later was my father giving me a cassette. On the one side was David Bowie singing Changes and Suffragette City but on the other was something called Exodus by a bloke Bob Marley and his band The Wailers. It was like nothing I had heard or felt before – the emphasis on the third beat of the bar and what sounded like a coke bottle being played on Jamming. My bible at age thirteen was Stephen Davis’ Reggae International and it was there that I discovered the trans-Atlantic slave trade. Africans, I learnt, were selected for their physical superiority, as they had some

immunity to malaria, and their labour produced massive profits and wealth for their owners. Those first twenty sent to America in 1619 aboard The White Lion from the Kongo were selected too for their iron-working, masonry, glass-making and farming skills. They arrived with their traditions and, through extraordinary resilience and innovation, went on over the generations to pioneer the banjo, the modern drum kit and an assortment of fiddles and string instruments, and lay the foundation for bluegrass, country, ragtime and jazz. The twelve-bar blues, the forerunner to rock ’n’ roll, was based on a Yoruba drum pattern. Rock ’n’ roll, the big hitter that spawned thousands of bands and an industry worth $50 billion today. Music has been my teacher and guide and has taken me into shacks in Nyanga East as a teenager, a boereorkes in De Aar, villages in Zimbabwe, performance stages across Africa, Europe and the USA; she is the language that transcends boundaries. As I look at Sho, I consider the immense contribution from Africa, in her blood lines, her song lines, her blood, and I can hear Bob singing ‘One good thing about music – when it hits you feel no pain’.

Gift of the Givers supplying boreholes to drought -stricken South African farmers.

Photo: Dr. Sooliman hands out food parcels 2020.

gift of the givers

Written by: Biénne Huisman Photography: Courtesy of Gift of the Givers

In South Africa’s deep, rural reaches, they are a familiar sight: large green trucks bearing the words ‘Gift of the Givers’. As these vehicles approach over rickety roads, dust in their wake, people rush to their doorways; children dance and adults blink away tears. The sight of these trucks elicits pure joy, for they come bearing essential gifts: animal fodder and tanks of  water, food parcels, blankets and sanitary pads.

Recently Gift of the Givers featured in the Netflix series Captive, which relayed the story of Afrikaans teacher Pierre Korkie and his wife Yolande, a hospital relief worker, who were abducted in Yemen in 2013.

Gift of the Givers managed to negotiate Yolande’s release, while sadly her husband was murdered.

Since 1992, Dr Imtiaz Sooliman’s Gift of the Givers has saved hundreds of thousands of people from disasters, droughts, floods and famine, in South Africa and around

the world. Today, using four mobile phones, Sooliman presides over 550 staff, including 140 in South Africa and 236 in Syria, where he runs a hospital in the  war-torn north.

By the end of August, Gift of the Givers had collected R3 million to help Lebanese people left homeless in the Beirut blast. Over the years, Sooliman’s teams have helped Sri Lankan victims of the 2004 tsunami, performed life-saving surgery in the aftermath of the 2010 Haiti earthquake, and assisted homeless Malawians in the floods of 2015.

Speaking to Jack Journal from his Pietermaritzburg home, Sooliman’s words are rapid. The founder of Africa’s largest humanitarian aid organisation is alert, with an air of slight bemusement. In between anecdotes of his globe-spanning operation, he likes to crack a joke.

‘So the older residents in the deep rural areas – my staff tell me they all know my name,’ says Sooliman. ‘It is a heavy weight on your shoulders, it’s a responsibility. I can’t let people down. I made a joke to my wife. In Islam, ladies wear coverings on their face, you know, a burka. So I told her: “I need to wear a burka, I need to

cover my face.” I mean, all these people recognise me: people I pass when I walk in the streets; the petrol attendant, the street sweep, complete strangers. In King William’s Town, we would be on a programme in a deep rural area; the moment our trucks come over the hill, they start shouting: “Amanzi, amanzi!” (water), and they start dancing because they know food parcels and water are coming.’

In South Africa, Sooliman’s trucks have assisted farmers, doctors, schools and orphanages. Most often, they help people living on the fringes of society, overlooked by politicians. Gift of the Givers have rehabilitated local bees and tortoises, and have launched a massive carp fishing project along the country’s south coast. They have fitted out numerous hospitals to better fight COVID-19.

‘The sad part is that the people who need help the most, who have the most difficulty, are so humble,’ says Sooliman. ‘When they contact me, well, it comes through the system – they are very polite. The first thing they’d tell you is: “Look, we are in great difficulty. But we know you can’t help everybody. If you could possibly come to us, we’d be so

Beirut explosion, Lebanon, 2020

Nepal earthquake relief, 2015

To date, the organisation has delivered 650 truckloads and 160 train carriages of fodder to drought-stricken areas around the country. They have drilled 400 boreholes in the past two years.

grateful.” They’re so patient, you know.’

Gift of the Givers first started drought relief in the North West in 2015, then expanded to other parts of the country.  ‘I must be honest with you,’ says Sooliman. ‘There was a lot of skepticism at first; for example when we went into Sutherland, the farmers were saying:  “Is he coming to convert us? Does he want our sheep, will he turn our churches into mosques?” Because they couldn’t understand that we were giving without wanting anything in return. After a few years, they finally realised that we’re doing it without expectation.’

To date, the organisation has delivered 650 truckloads and 160 train carriages of fodder to drought-stricken areas around the country. They have drilled 400 boreholes in the past two years.

Sooliman, 58, was born in Potchefstroom. He qualified as a medical doctor at the former University of Natal medical school in 1984, where he rubbed shoulders with formidable peers like Health Minister Dr Zweli Mkhize, his deputy, Dr Joe Phaahla, and Dr Vejay Ramlakan, the late president Nelson Mandela’s doctor, who himself passed away in August.

It was a meeting with a Sufi teacher in Istanbul on 6 August 1992 that laid the blueprint for Sooliman’s humanitarian organisation.

‘The moment I made eye contact with the spiritual teacher, I fell in love with

a man I didn’t even know,’ he recalls. ‘It was as if our souls spoke. He said to me in Turkish, and I don’t speak a word of Turkish: “My son, I’m not asking you, I’m instructing you to form an organisation. You will serve people of all races, of all religions, of all colours, of all classes, of all political affiliations and of any geographical location. You will serve them unconditionally, not expecting anything in return. Not even a thank you.”’

The Knysna fires of 2017 were a turning point for Gift of the Givers –this was when local media and corporates took notice.

‘Strangely enough,’ says Sooliman,  ‘I had a truck of water on its way to Cape Town, because of the drought there. The truck had reached Three Sisters, when I heard about the Knysna fires. I stopped the truck at 1am in Three Sisters. I said: “Turn around and go to Knysna.”  At 6am Gift of the Givers were the first providers of water in the area, as the local firefighters had run out.

‘From there we sent in a whole team; we took up a whole warehouse. In 24 hours, we had converted a car park into a logistics centre. We had teams on the ground. We had our own trucks, we had our own fire people. We had our own life-support paramedics, our own ambulances. We moved patients from Knysna to George and to Plettenberg Bay. We helped 20,000 families with food parcels. These were not only people caught in the fires, but also other poor people in the area who didn’t have food to start off with. When you’re doing food distribution, you don’t discriminate.

It was from here that local corporates understood our capability.’

One of the organisation’s ongoing projects is fishing in Groenvlei Lake in the southern Cape. The freshwater fish  are being used to fill dinner plates.

‘We were told that there’s this invasive fish, carp, in this lake,’ says Sooliman.

‘Our contact spoke to the environmental people, the municipality people, all the different people associated with the fish.  I said: “Did you test the quality of the fish?” So they sent a sample to be tested locally; then they sent it to Pretoria for specialised testing. It came out a hundred

percent successful.

‘The fish was brilliant, no problems. There is so much of the stuff, we have taken out 180 tons already. I mean you can feed the whole southern Cape. So we’re taking the fish to the local feeding centres. Alternatively, we wrap them up and give them to people to take home, to cook.’

As more and more South Africans  turn to Sooliman and Gift of the Givers for help, the organisation’s pioneer gives all credit to God. ‘The spiritual teacher told me everything would be done through me, not by me,’ says Sooliman.  He said: “You will know. You will just know what to do.” And it is true. We’re always in the right place, at the right time. I like to tell a joke. I say: “God Almighty, you do all this stuff through me, and you give me all the credit?”’

He adds that in 28 years, the organisation has never formally asked for funding. ‘The teacher told me: “You will never look for money and people from all over the world will come to you.” And they have.’

Scan to support Gift of the Givers or visit www.giftofthegivers.org

Photo: Ross Suter

foraging for mushrooms and other fungi on table mountain

There is something instinctively appealing and very fulfilling about foraging for food. It is like going on a treasure hunt, and the thrill of finding edible organisms is like finding the treasure! Success requires experience, observational skills, an affinity for the seasons and weather patterns, the will, the work ethic and the ability to sink deep into nature to the point of attaining a heightened awareness and level of intuition.

Written by: Ross Suter Photography: Ross Suter

The net result is incredibly therapeutic and revitalising, because this deep immersion in nature is all about being in the present. It is an antidote to the stressful urban lives many of us live. The process of foraging also reconnects us with knowledge about our natural environment that has mostly been lost in modern-day society.

Foraging has been an essential part of humans’ survival for hundreds of thousands of years. Historical records reveal that the harvesting of mushrooms and other types of fungi for both food and medicinal purposes has been practised for at least 6,000 years in China. In Roman times, the porcini mushroom was sought after for its fine flavour. In South America, the Mayans consumed certain mushrooms for their psychoactive properties as part of religious/ spiritual ceremonies.

In South Africa, people of British

and European origins have foraged for mushrooms for a few hundred years, but the San, the Nama, the Khoikhoi, the Bantu and others had been doing this for millennia.

In the Cape Town environs, and elsewhere in South Africa, many fungi were introduced with the soil of sapling trees and grasses that were brought here from Britain, Europe, North America and elsewhere in the world, mostly by the British in the 19th century. These trees were introduced either for their aesthetic and shade-offering appeal, or as part of creating plantations of pine and eucalyptus trees for timber. Efforts to grow these trees from seed proved difficult because the soil here didn’t have the mycelium (thread-like ‘root’ systems of fungi) that these particular trees needed (creating symbiotic relationships) to help them get nutrients from the soil. The

solution was to import saplings instead. The soil they arrived with contained a wide range of fungi mycelium and spore which were then introduced to the soils here, thereby allowing these exotic trees to grow properly.

Capetonians are blessed to have Table Mountain rising up high above the city, accessible from all sides to those who choose to walk or run in the hills or climb its cliffs. The mountain is part of a World Heritage Site, a status declared by UNESCO for the Western Cape, which hosts the Cape Floristic Region – the most diverse of the world’s six floristic regions. About 70% of the plants growing in this region are endemic. The mountain has roughly 1,500 different flowering plants (more than the entire United Kingdom) that are mostly part of the Fynbos vegetation group, but also include plants from the Renosterveld

Photo: Ross Sutter

Chicken of the Woods (Laetiporus sulphureus) grows on oak trees in midsummer in the Western Cape.

Photo: Ross Suter

vegetation type. Sadly, 98% of this latter vegetation group has been lost, mostly due to the agricultural practices associated with the growing of wheat, making it the most threatened vegetation type in the world.

Part of the mountain’s history includes the establishment by the British, in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, of pine plantations and stands of eucalyptus trees for commercial timber, plus the planting of oaks, chestnut, poplar and other exotic trees on the lower slopes. As a result, a range of exotic mushrooms have been growing in the Cape Town area for at least 150 years. Some are edible and delicious, some not, and some have toxins that, if consumed, are hallucinatory, poisonous or deadly. The toxins in some mushrooms are among the most potent found on earth, so it is very important for foragers to know exactly what they are picking for the pot and which ones to avoid.

Foraging for mushrooms not only involves exercise, fresh air, quiet and meditative time, but edible wild mushrooms add great flavour to meals, and they also have a range of nutrients beneficial to general health. Other fungi are used for their medicinal properties, such as antibacterial, antiviral, antioxidant, anti-inflammatory, and even as a remedy for high cholesterol and for certain types of cancer. Of further appeal is the fact that the harvesting of fungi/ wild mushrooms is completely sustainable, and has no negative impact on the natural environment.

If you are interested in mushroom foraging on Table Mountain, get a good reference book such as Gary B Goldman and Marieka Gryzenhout’s Field Guide to Mushrooms and Other Fungi of South Africa (Struik Nature, 2019) and link up with an experienced forager to give you guidance for at least your first few outings.

Happy hunting!

Scan to find out more or visit www.highadventure.co.za

the link between imagination and your wine glass

Being a winemaker, designing a wine label and remaining sane is surprisingly difficult. This is why there are so many average labels around and why so few designers make this a niche speciality.

Written by: Bruce Jack Art: Lady Margaret Tredgold

Wine-producing countries often have a kind of label look – France is dominated by the Bordeaux and Burgundy look, and these are entrenched by so many wannabe wines from elsewhere (including the south of France) copying said look. They are staid, conservative and predictable. That works for them. Italy also has a specific look and feel, as does Germany – all have developed over many years and in a specific direction. I love the Spanish idiom that has emerged in the last 20 years – Spanish producers generally have excellent taste when it comes to wine label design. The bold colours and balanced negative space of that sun-baked, flavourful, generous country seeps into the language of their wine label design.

Of the New World countries, South Africa is developing a confident, cuttingedge label visual language. This has some thing to do with a growing confidence in the wine producers, but probably has

more to do with a handful of exceptionally talented designers who have established a minimum standard of excellence in South Africa over the last 30 years – Anthony Lane, Brian Plimsol and Rohan Etsebeth spring to mind, but there are others.

When labels are produced that fall short of this standard, they stand out terribly, like amateur floundering. As a result, it is rare to see badly designed labels from South Africa – a commonplace occurrence in the rest of the world. Just one long walk past the thousands of stands at Prowein (the world’s biggest wine show) will prove my point.

‘Never judge a book by its cover’ and ‘You can’t taste the label’ are both aphorisms I live by, but I am a wine nerd, so I guess that comes with the territory. The reality is that you can’t survive at the sharp end of the wine business with badly designed labels. And anyway, I like welldesigned things – it indicates that the

whole project has been properly conceived. It is unusual to find a crap wine in a beautiful design. It is commonplace to find ordinary wine in an ordinary package. I only ever wanted to make one wine on my estate. I have had a name for this wine since I was a youngster – Moveable Feast. The name is borrowed from the author Ernest Hemingway’s snapshot autobiography set in Europe when he was a young, recently married, emerging writer. Kingdoms of critique have been built around Hemingway – as though his personality, failings, idiosyncrasies, sexuality, etc. manifest like a rare metal worth extracting. None have detracted from, or added to, his writing for me.

At 20 years of age a university lecturer called Stephen Watson opened a small, hitherto unnoticed trapdoor in my mind and introduced me to Hemingway who was asleep next to a river. A long hike into the mountain, good fishing and a lunch of

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cheese and jamón were behind him. He lay on his back with his hands under his head. Alongside him in the cool shade of the tree the trout glistened on his canvas bag. In the slow-running shallows of the river, an unlabelled bottle of true wine had been wedged between two almost round, white stones. The river widens here, leaving fine, brown sand banked up in the bend. The sun was coming in low through the willow and small yellow birds were weaving their homes in the branches that hung over the cold, clear water.

I am obsessed with crafting that wine in Hemingway’s half-drunk bottle wedged between those stones in a shining mountain river.

My wife, Pen, envisioned a feast procession. We do feasts here. Family and friends were invited to a photographic session by the Cape Town photographer Daniela Zondagh. I brought a decanter and glasses. Catherine Searle (who runs the Bruce Jack Wines office) brought her little daughter, Bailey. Mike Hoole, a brilliant guitarist, brought his guitar … etc. With the subjects caught in profile, the calligrapher and land artist, Andrew van der Merwe, joined Pen to pull it all together.

The profiles were inspired by the silhouette artworks I grew up with, which were given to my mother by the artist Lady Margaret Tredgold.

Born Margaret Baines in 1910 in the far outpost of Lady Gray (about as selfreliant as it gets), she grew up in the country village of Aliwal North, where she remembered the diamond transport stagecoach, protected by armed outriders, passing in a cloud of dust at sunset.

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Scan to find out more or visit https://www.palmstrings.co.za/

A celebrated African artist, she loved creating intricate silhouette artworks, a technique she used to illustrate the many children’s books of traditional African fables she wrote. Her research proved that Aesop’s Fables had their origins in Africa.

watching an artwork explore its own possibilities – like a rivulet dancing to the alluring tune of gravity. It developed a life beyond the control of the design duo. The hidden meanings and messages in the design are part of the intrigue, and, along with the balance and beauty, draw people in like a treasure map.

to find out more about Winemag Label Design Awards

I met Andrew van der Merwe on Muizenberg beach one autumn evening while heading out for a surf – he was cutting a happy birthday message into the sand for an enthralled child. It struck me that he was some sort of rare genius and, my board under my arm, I asked him if he wanted to help design a wine label.

Witnessing the label design progress through its many iterations was like

Moveable Feast is the antitheses of a practical business proposition. I don’t care if anyone likes the label. Weirdly, I can’t even bring myself to care if anyone likes the wine. I don’t even care if anyone buys it. It is simply an obsession with that wine cooling in that river. It is an obsession with a certain truth – a perfect moment, which I know exists in dreams. It is about trying to craft a perfect wine from vineyards I have planted around my home and in these mountains. It is an improbable goal –which, by definition, all obsessions are.

Like life, disappointment is an essential ingredient in making it real. And if I am disappointed by Moveable Feast it means I am still sane. As for the label, I fear I love it too much.

Witnessing the label design progress through its many iterations was like watching an artwork explore its own possibilities –like a rivulet dancing to the alluring tune of gravity.

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Etching by Pippa Skotnes, made for artist’s book, Cape Town Days with poems by Stephen Watson, published by Clarkes Bookshop 1989.

longing and belonging

Written by: P. R. Anderson.

Stephen Watson’s is a poetry of longing. It’s a word that he comes back to in his essays. Whether for people or places, and sometimes especially for places as a correlative of a people or a person, all his poetry seems to be about deriving a language of yearning.

To long for something is a more complex thing than to desire it. It implies some vision of former fulfilment or the satiation of a current lack of fulfilment. We all know of the lover in love with being in love, the less requited the better. That comes close to a state of longing, in raising the condition to something of an affect, or a metaphysical condition, but Watson was always more than the haplessly bereft. His poems make the places they long for. In many ways, posterity will come to recognise that Cape Town, for instance, is partly now Watson’s invention of the city, and that it is a city forever imbued

with a character of longing.

I think Watson realised early on that poetry is a kind of speech inherently longing. It is a type of language always reaching beyond the flat declarative language we mostly use, and so that reaching is always ready to become a kind of longing. But, more importantly, I think Watson realised that the old Romantic transcendence to be sought from nature was never going to survive the horrors and moral bankruptcy of South African society. In an epigraph to his book devoted to Cape Town, In This City, he quoted his beloved Camus:

Yes, there is beauty and there are the humiliated. Whatever the difficulties of the undertaking, I should like never to be unfaithful either to the second or the first.

In plain terms, South Africa, and what Watson called its ‘melancholy’ – its attritional lowest common denominators of social engineering, its sordid poverty, its enmities, its isolation – was never going to permit of any refuge in its exquisite beauties. To write poems encompassing those beauties one had

to stare long and hard at the social humiliation also. Caught between the two, as a fidelity to both, was to be longing – for an unfettered vision of the transcendent, and for a resolution to the centuries of colonial impoverishment, of every kind. That longing, which Watson brought across in characteristically long-lined poems, with a rolling, piled-up, accumulating syntax, became a kind of belonging too. And in this all his poetry marks an act of inhabiting. Watson’s poetry, as a cohesive and integrated body of work, as a voice, structures the act of being South African – and perhaps not only a white, middle-class, academic South African – in ways which seem to demand of us both vigil and vigilance.

Those characteristically long-lined, accumulating poems will now forever condition our sense of Cape Town, the Cederberg – Watson’s home landscapes – but also the condition of longing that they place at the heart of being South African. Here is a typical example, in which the reaching and reaching of the lines and imagery become at one with the landscape and its inhabitant:

Drawings by han≠kass’o of porcupines and of their spoor at the entrance to a porcupine hole,1878. From the Digital Bleek and Lloyd Archive.

Later, towards evening, the city far across the flats, pale from four days’ rain, ghostly in a tightening cold, shines briefly and goes under. They see the mountain, already distant in its rain-texture, withdraw into a mist; its hills gleam bluntly, for one last moment mussel-black before the cloud-base in its north-west massing battens down and all along the low skyline, for the fourth night in a row, a big wind, freshening still, flares like a big sea running.

‘Exposure’, In This City

Few of us won’t recognise the truth of this kind of music, from our experience of big skies, road trips, the elegiac quality of South African landscapes blighted by poverty and dislocation. Watson’s poems do not, of course, long for things simply as they are, but for the access they give to how things might be – or have been. For some, the greatest of his work was in his translations from the /Xam folklore and testimony in the Bleek and Lloyd archives. In these poems Watson cast a shadow under which all his successors have worked. His ear, attuned to longing, was perfect for the task of recuperating a culture yearning for itself at the point of its extinction, and his intelligence was perfect for realising that that condition of colonial extinction was characteristic of all South African culture and gave it, for better and for worse, its particular existential claims upon the interest of our humanity. Apart from the sheer scholarship of the exercise, immersing himself in the historical depths of the /Xam genocide, Watson brought to life a strange music and managed to make it resonate with both the terrible sadness of the occasion and the wonder of another cosmology, just barely recuperated from the miracle of the Bleek and Lloyd transcriptions and translations. Here is a stanza of an account of a commando brought against the fugitive /Xam:

We would know it by our blood, my father used to say, our blood starting to mist, our blood making this smoke,

that out there in the mists, very early in the morning, our camp still lost in sleep, a white commando loomed.

‘Our Blood Makes Smoke’, Return of the Moon

We find the historical moment recounted through the cosmological vision of a people obliterated by that history. Watson was at pains to credit Bleek and Lloyd, and above all their three informants (then convicts on the Breakwater at Cape Town), but the poem is an extraordinary act of recuperation and evocation. Its success in English is no accident, but high poetry, because poetry of all genres of writing comes closest to the impossible task of translation itself: it is the proper mode for it. Watson’s ear was perfect for this task because it was conditioned to longing, to keeping faith with beauty and the humiliated, and there is a pronounced correspondence between his own voice and the voice he carried over from the /Xam. It was not an appropriation, but a happenstance of great fortune. Watson himself was steeped in the ancestral mountain landscapes of these fugitives, and always had a sense of moving in their footsteps. How immediately he enters upon their vision of the so-proximate universe:

Father taught me about the stars. He used to say that whenever I was sitting by a burrow, I should watch the stars, the places where they fell. I should, above all, watch them keenly, for the places where stars fall, he often taught, really are the places where porcupines can be caught.

‘Catching a Porcupine’, Return of the Moon

That Watson knew it was a politically tricky business to access and translate these records is amply witnessed in his fine introduction to Return of the Moon. He risked much in articulating the voices of factory workers and exiles, ‘others’ of the enduring colonial circumstance, and in many ways the long-lined narrations were his way of moving cautiously, periphrastically, about the acute sensitivities he approached. His essays – for he was a superb essayist – in the two volumes he published are testament to his scholarly and poetic instinct for the art of the anguished and longing in-between, the compromised and yearning subject, whether he is writing about Camus or Leonard Cohen (in late essays), or, witheringly, of the crass impoverishment of South African culture and letters (in his earlier ones). He espoused the cause of poetry above any cause among its subjects, and he did so because he found in poetry the occasion of a language that could better come at the truths of that paradox of Camus than any other. It is now almost a decade since Watson died, and the poetry has lain fallow under the skies of many people’s personal grief, but it shows well at this unwanted remove, and its timeless urgency – the urgency of longing – is with us still and will stay so.

Scan to find out more about the Digital Lloyd and Bleek Collection

Scan to purchase In A Free State, poetry by P.R. Anderson

Photo: Julian Love

energy of trees 1

Wawa Wooden Surfboards was established in 2010 with start-up partners Andrew Strode (Ballito surfer and artist with expertise in indigenous plants) and David Hidi (Eastern Cape born and trained sander/glasser/polisher).

With a team of respected carpenters and board builders, we craft surfboards, bodysurf handguns, skateboards, bodyboards and SUPs for the world. Our goal is to give you an unforgettable ride towards a sustainable future. The happy by-product of this vision is functional art, made to last generations.

My fascination with the ocean goes back to holidays spent at our family shack on Robberg Beach in the Southern Cape of South Africa. On the dunes overlooking The Wreck, we had no electricity or running water, just a long drop and plenty of warm water peaks to choose from.

The Wawa philosophy has its roots in

those heavenly surf holidays. With only a single proper bodysurf handgun among myself, my three brothers, sister and dad, flip-flops often changed from footwear to wave toy. The Wawa philosophy remains true to this ethos of creatively using what is at hand, rather than to ask what is wanted. It harks back to the resourcefulness of simpler times, when broken things were fixed, and available materials were the chosen ones.

South Africa has a lot of great woods to use for surfboard construction. Both indigenous and recently introduced species that have to be cleared in gardens and on farms are transformed into something lasting, pleasurable and practical. We can witness, through our craft, not only an immediately positive outcome for these trees, but a beautiful legacy. The woods we use must have certain inherent properties for performance surf gear, so

we mostly use paulownia, swamp cyprus, pencil cedar, agave and erythrina.

The natural materials we use ensure that we leave a very light footprint on Mother Earth. Not only can these materials match the lightness of synthetic foam blanks and epoxy resin, but they have a completely different energy. They feel alive under your feet on the face of a wave in a way that synthetic materials can never do. The Karoo agave competes with balsa wood in weight and can be glued into flat sheets from which the basic blank is cut and shaped. A stringer and agave ribs and some recycled foam and cork are added to give the board its structure and form. Crucially for any surfer, wood has a natural memory of shape, giving each board amazing, sensual flex properties without sacrificing balancing rigidity for performance. This is design beyond biomimicry – it is craft through nature.

Written by: Cobus Joubert Photography: Julian Love, Sacha Specker, Andries Joubert

Photo: Andries Joubert

Like fine wine, each board is a total sensory experience. The first thing you notice is that each board has its own unique, enticing smell. Then there’s the sound as the rail slices a glassy wall.  You hear the water clearly, as the unique, hand-sculptured lines of your board peel away each salty, energised droplet. A synthetic board’s resonance interferes with this sound, so it’s drowned out. The sound of a wooden board is like a solo soprano silencing the auditorium at the start of the show. Every surf session on any type of board is exhilarating, no matter how sloppy the surf, or how cold the wind, but to experience the energetic feedback and unique character of a wooden surfboard is like slipping into another dimension. The essence of evolution and the key to survival – in nature and in business –is adaptation. While surf shops fold, and shapers are forced to moonlight, Wawa are totally committed to our process that respects our roots, the sanctity of nature and the innate energy of lovingly worked wood. It appears that trees are far more adapted to a balanced, sustainable ecosystem than humans are. Why not learn from that?

Scan to find out more or visit www.wawawave.com

The Wawa philosophy remains true to this ethos of creatively using what is at hand, rather than to ask what is wanted. It harks back to the resourcefulness of simpler times, when broken things were fixed, and available materials were the chosen ones.

Photo: Sacha Specker

Well over 100,000 years ago our tiny band of surviving human ancestors lived along the coastline of South Africa. The oldest evidence of cognitive thought has been unearthed in this place and dated to this time. This provides us with an irrefutable, exciting milestone in our early human development. It is here that we find the oldest evidence of when we started thinking like modern humans. Our cognitive ability differentiates us from other animals. It has allowed us to dominate our environment and is partly why we are in this environmental mess.

The earliest signs of cognitive development are indicated by the recording of internal ideas outside of our ancestors’ brains –such as drawing patterns on cave walls, scratching geometric designs into shells and bits of ochre, etc.

the national poetry prize

Written by: Bruce Jack

Art developed simultaneously alongside language and took the form of body adornment, including jewellery production – remanets of both mixed paint and shell jewellery have been discovered dating from this period. As language developed, so our ability to collaborate, communicate our plans and share our visions for advancement improved.

And poetry … well, poetry is the essence of language, the essence of our cognitive difference.

Poetry is the key that unlocks our inner language, which in turn is how we will unravel for ourselves (and through sharing, with others) the challenges we face. The arts in general help us uncover the problems, and poetry in particular helps us explore the solutions. This is why poetry is more crucial than ever.

It is therefore fitting that we celebrate South African poetry in the very place our language first developed. We do not want to detract from the poetry competitions already in place; rather we want to add to the focus on poetry. I have teamed up with New Contrast Magazine to create the National Poetry Prize. Although we are currently sponsoring the financial rewards, this is a legacy project for South African poetry – hence the name of the prize doesn’t mention a person, a benefactor or a corporate sponsor.

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THE JUDGES

MEG VANDERMERWE

is an Associate Professor in Creative Writing and English Literature at the University of the Western Cape. Her novel, Zebra Crossing (2013), was selected by the Cape Times as one of the ten best South African books published in 2013, and chosen by The Guardian newspaper (UK) as one of the Top 10 books about migrants. Her new novel, The Woman of the Stone Sea/Die Vrou van die Klippesee, which is set in a West Coast fishing village and features an IsiXhosa water maiden (umamlambo) and a local crayfish fisherman, was published by Umuzi in 2019.

UHURU PORTIA PHALAFALA (PHD, UCT)

is a lecturer in the English department at Stellenbosch University. She is an archivist of black cultural production and a collector of jazz records. Her research interests are material cultures, black archives, antiapartheid and anti-colonial movements, Cold War-era cultural circuitries, and black internationalism. She is currently completing her book project on black radical traditions from the south.

SAALEHA IDREES BAMJEE

is a writer and photographer based in Johannesburg. She has an MA in Creative Writing from Rhodes University and is the winner of the 2014 Writivism Short Story Prize. Her debut poetry collection, Zikr (2018), won the 2020 Ingrid Jonker Poetry Prize.

To enter the National Poetry prize, please visit www.newcontrast.net for submissions, rules and awards.The winning poems will be published in New Contrast Magazine and in Jack Journal.

New Contrast Magazine invited the judges for the 2020 National Poetry Prize and will coordinate the submissions and the judging thereof.

Self-Portrait: Democracy – 2018,  Hand coloured Silkscreen, 21 x 21cm

why joe dog makes me uncomfortable

Anton Kannemeyer (Joe Dog) is a controversial satirical artist and co-founding editor (with Conrad Botes) of Bitterkomix, the radical anti-apartheid comic magazine in South Africa. The first Bitterkomix was published in 1992. An early publication of theirs, Gif: Afrikaner Sekskomix, was banned in December 1994, an act which they believe was executed by old structures in the new government.

Written by: Bruce Jack Artwork by: Anton Kannemeyer

As they did in the past, many of his current works create an unflattering portrait of those in power in South Africa. While investigating race and the everpresent abuse of power, he also holds up a hostile mirror to the failure of good liberal intentions. The controversy that follows Anton sometimes obscures the whole story – many of his uncontroversial works are world class, including his landscapes and self-portraits.

I met Anton and his collaborator, Conrad, through my wife, who was studying a jewellery design degree at Stellenbosch University. I am pretty sure Anton doesn’t remember me and our paths haven’t

crossed again, but I have stayed close to his work.

Anton might not have stuck out at UCT the way he did at Stellenbosch. It was as if he was intensely sensitive to the fragility of Stellenbosch campus life and by implication apartheid South Africa. I got the feeling his unease bordered on anguish, and he has indicated as much since then. He was unapologetic in his critique of the apartheid machinery, police thuggery, the rugby culture and paternalism, etc.

I distinctly remember my first experience of one of his short comic book vignettes – it made me feel physically ill. It had such raw, dangerous power. I was simultaneously repulsed and intrigued. There were images you could never unsee. It was like looking at a bad dream. I recall showing it to a friend and saying: ‘This guy is f….ing nuts… I can’t believe it isn’t banned.’

Maxwell Heller, writing in The Brooklyn

Rail (2011/12/13), says: ‘Kannemeyer’s works are subversive critiques of racism and political correctness. His portraits are clever indictments of the hypocritical whites he depicts, who wear masks of tolerance while privately maintaining delusions of superiority. But Kannemeyer’s caricatures do not just point fingers at others. Many of the white characters in his work bear a striking resemblance to the artist himself. His paintings, drawings and prints are not simply assessments of ambient racial tension, but self-portraits exploring his own place in the equation. For this reason, it does little good to declare Kannemeyer part of the problem when it comes to race relations – after all, his work begins with that assumption, and ponders what to do from there.’

Anton’s work has been criticized in recent months, especially where he used a black stereotype. It is easy to see why they

Zizek – 2015, Black ink, and acrylic on paper, 29.7 x 21cm

E is for the Enemy of Democracy – 2013, lithograph, 75 x 56cm

Pine Trees, De Waal Drive – 2015, lithograph, 58 x 47cm

make people uncomfortable; they make me uncomfortable too. But that’s what he has often been about – making us feel as uncomfortable as he feels. For this reason, they are important in today’s sociopolitical implosion. They force us to examine our own biases. They make us investigate deeper.

There is a growing realisation that to thrive as a species we need to cultivate more trust. One of the ways trust is undermined is when the uncomfortable conversations stop. Next, we stop reflecting on our situation. And when we aren’t reflecting or questioning, we default to dogma, which is everything Anton’s controversial art rebels against.

The internet and social media provide more of us with more access to information than ever, but in the overwhelming profusion of that access, we have had to sacrifice context. Soundbites are the background music to the modern world. And most information, even on centralist mainstream media, is increasingly presented in this way. Without context, conversations become more difficult.

A recent Joe Dog graphic novel, Pappa in Afrika, was based on Tintin in the Congo by Hergé (1931). His stated aim was to investigate racism today through a popular and familiar visual idiom. The book, from

the cover onwards, is clearly a parody.

He says, ‘And how could it be a parody if I did not use the (black) stereotypes from Hergé’s book? This is unfortunately one of the ironies of satire: you perpetuate that which you attack. A satire on Hitler or Trump perpetuates those people as well. It is a complicitous critique that necessarily reproduces the very values it simultaneously attacks and displaces. There seems to be a common misunderstanding nowadays that when something is offensive in the arts it is criminal. But obscenity, just like pun, parody, inversion and allegory, all form part of the satirist’s armoury. And remember that the black stereotype is offensive to both black and white people, not just to black people. For a white person, especially a “liberal”, it’s a very untimely reminder of an atrocious legacy.’

He has exhibited his work extensively in South Africa, Europe and the USA. To date he has had 15 solo exhibitions and participated in 45 international group exhibitions. He is represented by galleries in New York, Paris, Vienna and South Africa. And here it is fascinating to note that The Artists’ Press, an online, cutting-edge South African art facilitator and retailer, prefaced his artworks on their site by saying: ‘Some of the images for the prints have been removed due to The Artists’ Press being increasingly uncomfortable with the caricatured depictions of Black people in the prints.’

Despite the controversy that has surrounded Anton, his work has been published in numerous publications and catalogues around the world, and is held in many permanent art collections, including the Museum of Modern Art in New York. His book, Pappa in Afrika, won the best international graphic novel award at the Amadora BD Festival in Portugal in 2015 – clearly the judges understood the context.

While we all struggle to swim against the riptide of contextless information and misinformation, we need fearless commentators like Anton to make us think. Dogma in all its nefarious forms must be challenged every second – discomfort awakens reflection and self-analysis. Reflection restores balance and builds confident resilience.

Scan to follow Anton Kannemeyer on Instagram or find him at kannemeyer.anton.

There is a growing realisation that to thrive as a species we need to cultivate more trust. One of the ways trust is undermined is when the uncomfortable conversations stop.

Faine Loubser

there are none so blind as those who will not sea

“It is a curious situation that the sea, from which life first arose, should now be threatened by the activities of one form of that life.But the sea, though changed in a sinister way, will continue to exist; the threat is rather to life itself.”

Rachel Carson, The Sea Around Us

Written by: Aaniyah Omardien Photography: Faine Loubser

We cannot survive without healthy oceans. Besides being spaces of natural beauty and inspiration, oceans generate half of the oxygen we need to keep breathing, supply a sixth of the animal protein we eat, absorb damaging carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, and hold more than 90 per cent of all water on Earth. Our oceans are home to a staggering diversity of life that has intrinsic value and an inalienable right to continued existence. This life (and by extension our lives) is under threat from the careless way that we produce, consume and waste.

The ocean is in my blood, from a long lineage of ancestors brought to the Cape from Malaysia/Indonesia as slaves in the late 1600s. I grew up in Cape Town where the oceans meet, and was fortunate enough to have parents who taught me to swim, to harvest periwinkles along the rocky shore, to make delicious meals from the bounty of the sea, and to share my appreciation for these life-giving bodies of water with others. The establishment of The Beach Co-op as a voluntary organisation in 2015 and its formalisation into a non-profit company in 2017 was a natural extension of my and others’ relationship with the ocean.

Our work focuses on (re)building the critical and rewarding relationship between people and the oceans. This relationship is needed to safeguard the oceans as well as our continued survival. We immerse those who travel with us through beach cleanups, art and story programmes, and annual events. These shared experiences change behaviour by reigniting what we once all instinctively knew – that the web of life is interconnected and interdependent far beyond even our current scientific understanding.

The immersive and embodied practice of using our Dirty Dozen Cleanup™ methodology shifts individual – and corporate – patterns of destructive behaviour. We have witnessed how these experiences foster a deep sense of ecological citizenship in a very short space of time. They have proven to quickly build lasting relationships between coastal communities and oceans, especially with our particular focus on the youth.

The most fundamental law is to recognise that we share the planet with other beings, and that it is our duty to care for our common home. - Vandana Shiva

We are running out of time. As our oceans degrade, so will our current and future quality of life, and it will be impossible to reset or regenerate some marine systems – some species will have disappeared forever. Our production, consumption and waste patterns are driving climate change and degrading the biodiversity that is critical for our survival. The time to reconnect with oceans – and with life – is now, to ensure that our legacy enables our children and their children to enjoy Earth’s oceans and all that they offer.

The only way to build hope is through the Earth. - Vandana Shiva

To support the Beach Co-op, Snapscan or visit www.thebeachcoop.org

The most fundamental law is to recognise that we share the planet with other beings, and that it is our duty to care for our common home

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Photography: Clint Strydom

an ode to mama esther and african womanhood

‘Abo Gogo gade ba gwala na bo Mma gade ba gwala’ – Esther observed her grandmother and mother write patterns, the same way I observed my own grandmother make beads. The difference is that neither my grandmother nor I have been embraced by the world’s most renowned museums, rubbed shoulders with John Legend over a Belvedere campaign, or had a Rolls-Royce Phantom – like The Mahlangu Phantom – named after us.

Written by: Welcome Lishivha Photography: Clint Strydom and BMW

When her grandmother and mother took a break in the shade, little Esther would find a spot and try her hand in the scorching sun, only on the walls at the back. When they resumed, she ran away, afraid she had made a mess. Instead they marvelled: ‘You’ve got the gift,’ they said.

On a visit home this year, I asked my grandma on her stoep, for the first time, where and why she had learnt to make all those beautiful and colorful artefacts that I have also learnt to make from watching her. Her sister-in-law taught her to make pottery, brooms, beads and mats – because, as a woman, she needed to learn to fend for

herself and for her children. When my grandma eventually left my grandfather, she relied on the creative work of her hands that she sold in markets, introduced to her by other women who were independent and wanted the same for her.

In Black Womanhood: Images, Icons, and Ideologies of the African Body (2008), Ifi Amadiume, the author of Male Daughters, Female Husbands (1987), writes that ‘the critical gaze of NeoChristian crusaders’ obliterated the role and contributions of women in African societies as sacred by creating a system that excluded women from making art, and established a culture that produced art for and by men, even when it concerned women.

A tourist from France, who noticed Esther’s patterns on her house, went looking for her. He was told she had left home for

a residence at Botshabelo Museum and Historical Village, where she used to write patterns on the wall. Upon finding her, he invited her to come and paint at The Magicians of The World festival in 1989. She painted a replica of her house in front of hundreds.

Esther Mahlangu is the first woman and African artist to join the likes of Andy Warhol and Frank Stella to paint the BMW art car.

From working with clothing labels to brands like Vaseline, Tastic and Belvedere, Dr Esther Mahlangu has brought traditional Ndebele geometric art to contemporary modern mediums like canvas, sculpture, ceramics, cars and even airplanes –demonstrating the timelessness and adaptability of her artistry.

Although the ancient art form used limestone whitewash with natural

Photography: Clint Strydom

pigments like brown, black and ochre from the earth, store-bought paints have a wider variety of colour and are convenient to travel with. But Mama Esther still uses a chicken feather to paint her lines. And from these feather-painted lines she has helped re-establish African art by African women on the world stage.

When she started painting at the age of 10, women who could paint were revered the way we revere people who are educated today, which was affirmed by the University of Johannesburg honouring her mastery with an honorary doctorate in April 2018, and later a similar honour from the Durban University of Technology –just two among her many other global and local accolades.

Hers is a triumphant story of the celebration of heritage and the remagination of African art in contemporary society. It is a story about Ndebele women who have always been revered for painting complex geometric patterns in their homes. But Mama Esther is more – by being true to herself and her traditions, she has become a contemporary feminist icon and the antithesis of colonialism. Celebrating Ndebele heritage in this way reminds us who we are.

My celebration of Mama Esther is a celebration of the creative power of black womanhood. In her abstract, bold work we find hidden secrets about the beauty and boldness of our heritage. We, too, learn to adapt ourselves and our traditions with the rigour and honesty that she has pioneered with her confident, precise lines. And, like her, may we wear our heritage like a breastplate of honour into every room we enter.

to find out more on Dr Esther Mahlangu

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stars in the west: sneaking some space for nostalgia in big-buck sport

About 252,500 spectators attended the 2019 24 Hours of Le Mans. Television coverage reached over 800 million worldwide, making it one of the top five sporting events in the world. Sixty-one cars participated in the main event, operating on seasonal budgets as great as €100 million. But there is room, still, for a little nostalgia in such big-buck, high-technology motor sport, writes Greg Mills, particularly in an event with an unlikely South African connection.

Nine thousand kilometres away from Le Mans, in South Africa’s Northern Cape province, in the city of Kimberley, is the Star of the West bar. Opened originally in a zinc shack as Diamond Lil’s Tavern, it catered for a flood of fortune seekers in the diamond rush of the early 1870s.

The treasure hunters had been attracted

by the find of an 83-carat diamond, later to become famous as the Star of South Africa, which caused Sir Richard Southey, the Colonial Secretary at the Cape, to declare: ‘This is the rock on which the future success of South Africa will be built.’

After the pub was fitted out with a bar counter salvaged from the wreck of the ship, the Star of the West, which had foundered on the wild West Coast, the name was changed accordingly. Downstairs, people drank in the hot and dry town; upstairs, Diamond Lil and her ladies entertained her clients.

Kimberley had mushroomed, with several hundred thousand fortune seekers quickly crowding into its sprawling shacks, tents, houses and compounds. Diggers working 3,600 30ft by 30ft individual claims clustered in and around what became Kimberley’s Big Hole. A process of consolidation of the smaller concessions inevitably followed the increasing chaos of deeper mining, including cave-ins and flooding, compounding problems of supply and price volatility.

Two figures, Barney Barnato and Cecil John Rhodes, born a year apart, and frequent patrons of ‘The Star’, were central in this process and in so doing directly shaped the history of southern Africa and, in a far-flung arena, indirectly that of international motor sport.

Barney Barnato, born Barnet Isaacs in London’s East End in 1851, was a prize fighter and music-hall turn before he and his brother Harry joined his cousin David Harris in the Cape in 1873, four years into the ‘diamond rush’. Barney had taken three months to walk to Kimberley, unable to afford the coach fare. Despite this slow start, within a decade, the Barnato Diamond Mining Company was competing with Rhodes over the amalgamation of the myriad diggings – a tussle between Rhodes’ De Beers and Barnato’s Kimberley mines. Barnato had realised early on the importance of controlling supply to keep prices stable. But to achieve that, you needed control. Although Barnato believed that he had outwitted his rival through Rhodes’

Written by: Greg Mills Photography by: Greg Mills

enforced sale of the French Company (which owned around half of the Kimberley Mine), in so doing his rival gained a foothold in his major investment. A costly price war followed, but the rivalry ended when Rhodes bought out Barnato for £5.4 million in March 1888, an amount equivalent now to more than £2 billion. Out of this emerged De Beers Consolidated Mines – and in the process diamond mining and marketing were transformed from an idealistic rush, centring on the wild and woolly activities of frontiersmen (and a few women), to a stable industry centring on bankers, financiers and romantic consumers. A copy of this cheque sits today in De Beers’ Kimberley boardroom.

When asked once whether he had a preference between gold and diamonds, Harry Oppenheimer, himself born in Kimberley, and later, like his father Sir Ernest, elected as an MP for the city, replied: ‘Diamonds every time. I think people buy diamonds out of vanity and they buy gold because they’re too stupid to think of any other monetary system which will work – and I think vanity is probably a more attractive motive than stupidity.’

To such reasoning not only the development of Kimberley, but South Africa’s industrial progress, an icon of British engineering and, in a footnote of history, the Le Mans 24 Hour race owes.

Barney Barnato died in 1897 in mysterious circumstances amid claims of suicide and blackmail and an alleged coup plot in the Transvaal Republic, officially lost overboard near the island of Madeira while on a passage home to England. His money went mostly to his two-year-old son, Joel Woolf Barnato.

Educated at Charterhouse and Trinity College, Cambridge, Woolf, as he was known, served as an officer in the Royal Field Artillery in the First World War. He was an acknowledged sportsman, playing first-class cricket as a wicketkeeper for Surrey County Cricket Club from 1928 to 1930. But his driving abilities are often overlooked in favour of his great wealth and role as Bentley’s financial backer in the 1920s and early 1930s. ‘The best driver we ever had,’ said WO Bentley of the largerthan-life Woolf, a man who won three out

of three attempts at Le Mans between 1928 and 1930.

Le Mans, today, comprises two races. The main event is, of course, the 24 Hour race, the 87th edition of which was held in 2019. The curtain-raiser, comprising two one-hour races, is known as the Road to Le Mans series, for slightly lesser performance cars, giving them a chance to gain a foothold into the series with the aim, one day, that they might challenge to gain an entry into one of the coveted 61 24 Hour garages.

In late April 2019, while I was holidaying in Kenya with my family, our small racing team, known optimistically as Team Africa Le Mans, was delighted (if not a little surprised) to receive confirmation of a long-shot entry into the Road to Le Mans. It was an almost impossible goal, given the challenges of finding, hiring, buying, or borrowing an eligible car and given that we were not entered into the full season of racing in Europe, a previously unconditional requirement.

Regardless, in the words of Margaret Thatcher to George HW Bush over the Gulf War, it was not the time to ‘go wobbly’. It was the chance of a lifetime, whatever the challenges that lay ahead and the tut-tutting ‘advice’ of the inevitable naysayers.

In part such attempts are driven by nostalgia. My grandfather, Billy Mills, competed in pre-war Grands Prix among other notable record-breaking events. I had raced since I was 14, winning the SA karting championship and being well placed in international events, being selected to race in the SA and UK teams before getting serious with my studies. Thereafter I dabbled in various historic formulae, until 2010. A flight back from a deployment with the military in Afghanistan was diverted to Birmingham on account of an incident at RAF Brize Norton. As I drove back to London, listening to the outcome of the UK general election in the small hours of the morning, I deviated to visit Pilbeam Racing in Bourne, once the home of BRM, and the Le Mans ambition was hatched. Initially we built our own car, based on Pilbeam’s design, but were refused an entry into Le Mans in 2014, which we cheekily had again attempted to do without committing

to the requirement of a full season of World Endurance Racing.

In part, one attempts such goals because they are so difficult, the Everests of their genre. The challenge is there, and it’s precisely because people say it cannot be done that one is tempted to do it. Or as Amelia Earhart put it: ‘Never interrupt someone doing something you said couldn’t be done’.

Such goals are what define us, perfect for qualities of dogged determination – or perhaps more exactly, my partner reminds, more than a small dollop of stubbornness.

It would have been easier, of course, to simply buy a drive-in car, and tick the experience off on the bucket list of life. But that was never my intention. For one, I wanted to build a mostly African-based team around the experience, which would then be able to pass this knowledge on to others. And I also wanted to use the media opportunity to raise the profile for a cause close to my heart.

Back to 2019.

Having managed to secure a car through Bentley motor sport in the UK, and a South African connection in the person of team director Brian Gush, we still had a mountain to climb in pulling the whole effort together. We lacked the logistical backing, equipment and funding of a professional team, not least since we would be travelling from South Africa. But regardless, there were good building blocks.

We had a great team of volunteers, mostly from South Africa and Kenya. We had a superb professional co-driver in Jan Lammers, who famously won the 24 Hour race in 1988 for Jaguar and has probably raced more laps around the track than anyone still competing.

As the dust settles, and tyre tracks fade, there are three overwhelming memories of the week.

The first is the sheer volume and complexity of the logistics involved. In some respects, Le Mans was little different to most big races, save a little more difficult because we literally came with hand luggage only. Regardless, a checklist was drawn up and ticked off, the former naturally easier than the latter.

Car. Preparation. Spare Wheels. Tyres. Air bottles. Air lance jack. Wheel guns and sockets. Stickers. Spare suspension, lights,

Woolf Barnato, 3rd from left, victorious at Le Mans, 1930

and electronic bits. Tools. Transport. Tickets. Timings. Team Kit. Accommodation. Oils and other engine fluids. Fuel. Catering. Radio and repeater with a range far enough for the 13km circuit. Fireproof clothing for the pit crew. And so on … ticking off, checking, and adding more items in nearly equal measure.

But logistics and checklists were complicated by new and confounding levels of bureaucracy. Satisfying all the requirements to enter such a highbrow event are quite different to anything I have encountered in my 45 years of motor sport involvement. For example, because Le Mans is sanctioned by the international motor sport body, the Fédération Internationale de l’Automobile, there is a mandatory driver grading system on application (and payment). International licences for drivers and entrants have similarly to be applied and paid for. Two special transponders have to be purchased, and a data logger to monitor the engine’s performance rented, and both installed. Drivers also have to undergo a drug awareness course and stringent medical exams, and require a special carbon helmet. Indeed, all clothing for pit crew and drivers alike has to meet the highest FIA standards.

The local Le Mans organiser, the ACO, or Automobile Club de l’Ouest, was special. The accreditation system for the team was complex and confusing, the volume of correspondence and requirements almost overwhelming.

On arrival at Le Mans the Sunday before the race weekend, I was ‘greeted’ by the organisers with a list of further requirements, including finding a quad bike and trailer for our pit purposes, and a paddock tent which had to be erected along carefully measured and spray painted lines on the road. Additional car stickers had to be made up to satisfy the organisers. Those were biggish hurdles for, at that stage, a one-man show in a foreign town (until the rest of the team arrived late on the Tuesday). But they were hopped over largely by a combination of Google translate and good manners. A bigger stumbling block concerned the scrutineering exam of the car, which was failed, the technical errors remedied only after a long night, resulting in successful resubmission the next day – but only after

several more items were added to an already formidable list. All of this had to be dealt with in pretty much incessant rain. There were many people with clipboards and ACO jackets always about, and not all of them friendly.

The second impression is that from the driver’s seat of a Le Mans virgin. It was, I confess, the most intimidating challenge I have attempted, professional or sporting. And there have been a few of those from Afghanistan to Zimbabwe – and more than a couple in between.

Some car niggles meant we were not able to test at Silverstone the previous week, which proved to shape our Le Mans experience somewhat. Once the car passed scrutineering, the first practice on the Wednesday evening lasted just half a lap after a driveshaft problem, which would have been manifest at the earlier test. My fear of learning a magnificent but complex and highly demanding circuit with 38 corners over 13.6 kilometres in the rain was to be temporarily avoided until another rain-washed session early on the Thursday. It was insufficient time behind the wheel to put it mildly. We raced shortly afterwards on the Thursday, Jan starting. While he had 3,500 laps behind him on the circuit, I had by that stage just four. The striking feature of the track is not just its length, and the speed of the long Mulsanne straight where the twin-turbo Bentley was flat-out for long stretches, but its continuously undulating nature, making many of the corners completely blind, taking some commitment (and a few gulps) at 300kph.

In the circumstances, my goal was only to stay out of trouble and keep up a steady pace. As a result, and entirely my fault, we finished closer to the tail than the tip of the 50-car field. I finished the week with just 14 laps under my belt, just enough to remind myself what corner was coming up next but not enough to nearly get them right.

The third impression centres on what we tried to achieve as a team, as is hinted above. It was focused at using the platform to make motor sport more than simply a focus on cars, and technology, to issues bigger than the sport. Hence the branding of the car in the STOP! Poaching initiative. Judging from the number of interviews

conducted, not only did we raise a lot of interest as the first African team at Le Mans, but so did the anti-poaching campaign, and the pangolin image featured in highlighting the plight of the highly threatened mammal. ‘What is a pangolin?’ was the question most asked of us by crowds during the weekend. Subsequent catastrophic events illustrate that perhaps we were just a little bit ahead of the field in this regard.

We were also honoured to play a small part in Bentley’s 100th anniversary, the car ultimately proving reliable in the marque’s rich tradition.

As we took the shuttle to the pits, I was chatting to a young Swedish driver who said: ‘This is the ultimate, right? Everyone wants to drive at Le Mans. I am,’ he said, ‘honoured just to be a part of it.’ Or as one of our all-volunteer team members, a retired general, put it: ‘Just getting there and finishing is a massive achievement.  There is a reason that you and Jan are the 29th and 30th Bentley drivers ever at Le Mans – this stuff is seriously challenging!’

But the last word should be left to Jan Lammers, who has raced in 24 24 Hour events with the biggest of the big professional teams, and finished in every one of the top ten positions in the process. ‘Thanks to your initiative and campaign we are able to spread the word of the poaching insanity, and these precious, vulnerable pangolins have gotten a touch of the attention they deserve. To qualify as your friend is the required skill for this team and I am sure that all of us are very proud of being part of this fantastic group. I’m ready for the next one when you are!’

I feel the same, of course, despite – or perhaps, because of – the challenges thrown our way.

Scan to find out more or visit www.teamafricalemans.com

From L to R Jan Lammers and Greg Mills

turning the tide

Written by: Patrick Tagoe-Turkson Artwork and Photography: Patrick Tagoe-Turkson

I live in a coastal community in southern Ghana and the flip-flop debris I use for my art is collected from beaches around my home. Some pieces are donated by friends who know what I do with plastic waste. I also collect waste plastics as part of my weekly Nature Art activities at the beaches. This initiative gets the youth, young artists and students in my community and other regions in Ghana involved in this environmental movement. The plastic waste epidemic is so fastgrowing that it feels as if it is engulfing us

on the west coast of Africa. And it comes from across the sea, from places that can, without noticing it, afford to lose so many flip-flops and throw so much away. The only solution to contain the tsunami of waste is to make as many people as possible in my community part of the solution.

Every day, once I get the plastic waste back to my studio, it is sorted, disinfected, washed and colour coded. Then starts the cutting, gluing and stitching of the material, depending on the concept or idea I have. The fast-changing topography of our

beaches, the colours, histories and memories left on the material by the original users of the flip-flops, and the narratives surrounding the whole collection and artistic transformation process, from flip-flop debris to art, serves as inspiration for my work.

Scan to find out more or visit www.patricktagoeturkson

Kwaa Mu Nhyiren (Wild flowers), Found Upcycled Flip-flops on Suede, 248cm x 139cm, 2018

REVERENCE FOR THE FUTURE

removing the ego for a pure pursuit

written

by: Rohan Etsebeth and Frankie Pappas

One of Wallpaper magazine’s top 20 emerging architecture practices to watch

who is Frankie Pappas?

Frankie Pappas is an architecture firm studio ... TBC (indefinitely) F1rstly, there is no Frankie.

The House of the Big Arch, Waterberg Mountains, South Africa ‘Hi, can I please speak to Frankie for an interview?’ ‘Huh?’

...Most importantly, make sure that not a single tree has to be demolished during the process.

Established in 2019 by a group of like-minded architects and designers in Johannesburg, Frankie Pappas is a ‘collection of brilliant young minds that do away with personal egotisms in order to better find remarkable solutions to fascinating problems,’ explain the founders – who prefer to remain anonymous. Following the mantra ‘wonderfully similar, beautifully different’, the collective has completed various residential projects, including the sculptural brick volumes of House of the Big Arch in Waterberg. - excerpt from Wallpaper magazine

...While still allowing for wild animals to move, uninhibited, across the site.

ECOLOGICALLY RESPONSIBLE

Maverick, experimental and ecologically responsible, Frankie Pappas is self-styled not as a conventional architectural practice but a freeform group, ‘fictional persona’ and ‘collective pseudonym’ that encourages coders, engineers, mathematicians, artists and managers to work with draughtsmen. Its mission? ‘Pave the way with yellow bricks and break out the pixie dust’ to make remarkable spaces and places that ‘people write songs about’. - excerpt from Wallpaper magazine

INSPIRATION

Nicolas Bourbaki is the collective pseudonym of a group of mathematicians, predominantly French alumni of the École normale supérieure. Bourbaki was founded in response to the effects of the First World War, which caused the death of a generation of French mathematicians; as a result, young university instructors were forced to use dated texts. Founded in 1934–1935, the Bourbaki group originally intended to prepare a new textbook in analysis. Over time the project became much more ambitious, growing into a large series of textbooks published under the Bourbaki name, meant to treat modern pure mathematics. Still active, the collective’s most recent publication appeared in 2016 source - Wikipedia

ANONYMITY FOR A GREATER GOAL

Anonymous (group)

Anonymous is a decentralized international activist/hacktivist collective/movement that is widely known for its various cyberattacks against several governments, government institutions and government agencies, corporations, and the Church of Scientology.

well-known examples

Banksy

WikiLeaks

WikiLeaks is an international non-pro t organisation that publishes news leaks and classi ed media provided by anonymous sources.

A

REGENERATIVE FARMING

focuses on topsoil regeneration, increasing biodiversity, improving the water cycle, enhancing ecosystem services, supporting biosequestration, increasing resilience to climate change, and strengthening the health and vitality of farm soil. Practices include recycling as much farm waste as possible and adding composted material from sources outside the farm. - source - Wikipedia

Examples: Farmer Angus - Spier. Bertie Coetzee - Lowerland. Dan Barber - Blue Hill Farm.

‘farming as custodians for future generations’

who is Nicolas Bourbaki?

who is Frankie Pappas?

Frankie Pappas + theArtMakers Gallery of the Insta Essence

One of Frankie’s first artworks. This piece is generated through some custom code we wrote. The code finds and downloads the top 100k images on Instagram which use the tag #blue. The code then averages out all of these images into a single artwork. This image is part of a series of artworks. Each piece is generated from a specific and unique hashtag.

Frankie Pappas does:

Photo: Don Pinnock

the magic of trees

In the extraordinary book, The Overstory, about trees by Richard Powers, a woman leans against a pine listening for its ‘words before words’ and hears it say: ‘Sun and water are questions endlessly worth answering.’ A wiser tree would add ‘roots and relationships’.

Written by: Don Pinnock Photography: Don Pinnock

Photo: Don Pinnock

If you’ve ever felt the need to whisper in a forest, your intuition not to disturb the trees has a basis in science. The great, leafy creatures around you are in constant, detailed conversation.

You needn’t worry about disturbing them, though. They don’t speak through the air like you do, but through their toes. Spoiler warning: after reading this you’ll never feel the same in a forest.

Beneath every woodland floor is a massive communications network of near-infinite pathways that connect trees and through which they communicate. This biological system allows the forest to behave like a single organism with arboreal intelligence.

For British Colombia forest ecologist Suzanne Simard, this information required nearly 30 years of complex investigation, testing and asking good questions. But when she hit the jackpot, she knew she’d found something big.

‘It was another world where trees act, not as competitors but as co-operators. They communicate, feed and care for each other.

‘It turns out they converse through sharing carbon but also in the language of nitrogen, phosphorus, allelochemicals, hormones, water and defence signals –essentially vital information.’

This takes place through a fibre-opticlike mycorrhizal mat which connects into the root systems of every plant. We see its reproductive organs: mushrooms. Without it, most trees could not survive.

A single mat – made of genetically identical cellular clones – could underpin the entire Amazonian or Central African rainforest and is essentially immortal.

Where the fungal web interacts with the root cells, there’s a trade of carbon for nutrients. It’s so dense that there can be hundreds of kilometres of filament under a single footstep.

And here’s the really interesting part. Mother trees – the big ones we’re inclined to look up at and go ‘wow’ – support others of their own kind and even other species, but recognise and favour their own children.

They feed their kin with bigger mycorrhizal networks, sending them more carbon and nutrients below ground. They even reduce their own root competition

to make elbow room for their kids.

When mother trees are injured or dying, they direct messages of wisdom to the next generation of seedlings, dispersing their declining nutrients into the young trees gathered around them.

So there you have it: trees talk, forests think and you can be sure they know you’re there.

But wait! That’s not the end of the story. Trees cooperate with much more than other trees. Here’s a tale about an ant, elephants and a tree that whistles.

The tree is a Vachellia drepanolobium, commonly known as a whistling thorn for reasons which will become clear in a moment. It’s native to East Africa, grows to around six metres tall and has the usual pairs of mean-looking thorns on its branches.

Thorns don’t deter elephants. They can turn a woodland into grass savanna in a remarkably short time and have the ecological delicacy of bulldozers. But they avoid the whistling thorns like poison chalices.

The reason is that these trees have

bulbous spheres at the base of their thorns and dispense sugary nectar from the ends of their leaves. The result is food and housing for several species of stinging ant with Latin names far longer than themselves.

Some of these species bore holes in the spheres, chuck out the contents and settle in. When the wind blows across the entrances, the spheres whistle like flutes.

If an unwary animal attempts to browse off a whistling thorn, the ants attack with singular ferocity.

There’s an inverse proportion between an elephant’s size and strength and the sensitivity of the inside of its trunk. Once bitten, as they say, twice shy. The same browsing sensitivity goes for giraffes and other herbivores.

To test whether the ants were truly deterring elephants, University of Florida biologist Todd Palmer and University of Wyoming ecologist Jacob Goheen fed some young orphaned Kenyan elephants branches from whistling thorn trees, as well as from another acacias. When there were no ants on the branches, the elephants were just as likely to eat  Vachellia drepanolobium as they were their usual tree food. But when the branches held ants, the elephants avoided them.

The mutualistic relationship, however, is more complex than just housing ants. If the Vachellia drepanolobium could be said to have a preference, it would be for the Crematogaster nigriceps ant. And if the nigriceps could be said to have a plan, it would (and does) allow occasional herbivore browsing. This is because a bit of plucking stimulates leaf growth, which in turn increases the supply of nectar.

However, if one of the other acacia ant species such as C. sjostedti takes over a tree, its preference is not for the bulbs but holes drilled by stem-boring long-horned beetles and – in ways not yet understood – it attracts them. They eventually weaken a tree and can kill it.

To prevent this, if a tree leans out too far in the direction of another, the nigriceps prune the twigs so that there’s no contact, avoiding a possible invasion. Too much variation in the balance between tree, ant and elephant would cause hardship for all three.

There’s no need to remind you that,

Mother trees – the big ones we’re inclined to look up at and go ‘wow’ – support others of their own kind and even other species, but recognise and favour their own children. They feed their kin with bigger mycorrhizal networks, sending them more carbon and nutrients below ground. They even reduce their own root competition to make elbow room for their kids.

Photo: Don Pinnock

Photo: Don Pinnock Photo: Don Pinnock

while an elephant’s brain is larger than ours, a tree doesn’t have one and an ant’s is smaller than the point of a pin. We’re talking about something other than intelligence here, and a synecdoche of a creation story far more astounding than those handed down to us from conventional religions.

Every second of every minute of every hour of every day, year, decade, millennium, million and even billions of years, the relationship between every insect, animal, bird, fish, plant, mountain, continent, planet, star and galaxy is in an exquisite ongoing dance of this and every moment of time. Creation is a never-ending story so big, so small, so destructive and constructive, so beautiful and profound that, like the blind men trying to describe an elephant by touching parts of it, we can hardly see it at all.

And the hardest of all is to understand the outrageously vast time it takes for an ant, a tree and an elephant to learn to dance together in mutual harmony on the African savanna.

So it’s worth remembering that beneath every step you take beyond your home or pavement, there’s possibly hundreds of kilometres of living filament under your shoe connected to everything else. And so, come to that, are you.

Every second of every minute of every hour of every day, year, decade, millennium, million and even billions of years, the relationship between every insect, animal, bird, fish, plant, mountain, continent, planet, star and galaxy is in an exquisite ongoing dance of this and every moment of time.

Wine delivery in Serpa Pinto, Vila Nova de Gaia, Niepoort, circa 1920

inspiration and lasting legacies

Written by: Jamie Goode Photography: supplied by the wineries

It’s a sobering thought. I’m 52 years old, and if I were to plant a vineyard tomorrow, I’d likely not live to see it produce its finest grapes: I’d be doing it for the next generation.

When you plant a vineyard you are doing it for your kids, or for the rich American who bought it off you, or for the bank who repossessed it from you. The massive capital costs of establishing a vineyard and a winery are unlikely to be paid off quickly, even if all the wines are sold at a good price. This is a long-term game, and for most who decide to play, it’s about creating a legacy. In this piece, I’m going to write about five wineries that have each created a lasting legacy, achieved a measure of fame, and acted as an inspiration for others. It’s a personal list, and I’ll try to explain why I have chosen each one.

Eyrie, Willamette Valley, Oregon Eyrie is probably my favourite Oregon winery, making beautiful, precise wines of balance and interest. And Jason Lett,

the second-generation owner, is one of the nicest and most thoughtful winegrowers I know. I’ve chosen Eyrie, because Jason’s father David was a pioneer who helped establish an important new wine region: the Willamette Valley. Back in 1965, Lett moved to Oregon from California. He’d caught the wine bug, studied viticulture and oenology at Davis, and wanted to plant Pinot Noir. But Lett didn’t think anywhere in California was cool enough, so he travelled north.

Lett was heavily influenced by the work of Victor Pulliat, the French ampelographer of the late 19th century. Lett was convinced that Pulliat’s Period 1 grapes were best suited to western Oregon. So he chose Pinot Noir, Pinot Gris, Pinot Meunier, Muscat Ottonel, Pinot Blanc and Chardonnay as his favoured varieties. Lett arrived in Oregon with 3,000 cuttings in a horse trailer towed behind his VW. He planted them in a temporary nursery in Corvallis; crucially, this included the first Pinot Noir and Chardonnay to be planted in Oregon. He was just 25 years old. The first Pinot Noir went into the ground on 22 February 1965.

To earn a living, he worked as a textbook

salesperson, which gave him a chance to drive around the state, prospecting for vineyards. In the summer, he went to a sales conference in Chicago, and there he met Diana, who was working for the same company. Clearly the attraction was strong, because six weeks later he married her, and she moved up to Oregon with him. The wedding present he gave her was a set of rain gear with a flannel lining.

Lett stumbled on an interesting volcanic anomaly, the Dundee Hills, and here he bought an old prune orchard and began planting a 13-acre vineyard. This was the Eyrie Vineyard, and the first vintage was 1970. It was the 1975 Pinot Noir that caught the attention of the world in 1979, when it did really well in a blind tasting with other Pinot Noirs in Paris. This brought Oregon into the spotlight. Considering the fame of Oregon Pinot Noir today, it’s amazing to consider the bravery of this 25-year-old pioneer, with no money, who had the vision to do something crazy, and it paid off.

Klein Constantia

Back in the 18th and 19th centuries, the sweet wines of Constantia were some of

the most sought after in the world. But then came the phylloxera epidemic that shook the whole wine world – it was first detected in South Africa in 1886. With the upheaval that replanting all the vineyards caused, the sweet wine of Constantia was temporarily lost to the world.

Klein Constantia deserve their place in my list because of their work to recover this legacy. In 1986 – 100 years after phylloxera was first found in the Cape – the new Vin de Constance was made. It’s based on the original wines that were made here. When the Jooste family bought the property in 1980, they were approached by a Stellenbosch University viticulturist, the late Professor Chris Orffer, who encouraged them to try to recreate the historical sweet wine. They agreed, Orffer helped them, and through the skill of the winemaker at the time, Ross Gower, they succeeded.

The historical Constantia wine was made from late-harvested grapes, and it was likely made from the Muscat variety. The problem was that there was no longer any Muscat in Constantia, so they had to plant some. The vines went into the ground in 1982, and the first new-era Constantia was the 1986 vintage, released in 1990.

There are different ways of making sweet wines. The most common style in the Cape is probably noble late harvest, made from botrytised grapes. But the old Constantia was a late-harvest wine, made by picking the grapes when they are rich in sugar. These wines can sometimes be a little simple, so the winemaking team at Klein Constantia have a special protocol for making a complex late-harvest wine. First, 10% of the grapes are picked early, to make a base wine at 12.5–13% alcohol with good acidity. Then they go and pick any already-raisined grapes. The remaining grapes are left to accumulate sugar, and leaf removal exposes the fruit to the sun, which helps more of them to raisin. Then, the big pick takes place in three passages through the vineyard. Altogether, around 10% of the crop will be raisins. The key stage is extracting the flavour and sugar from these shrivelled berries, and to do this some of the first-made base wine is added to the raisined berries, which then slowly release their flavour. Then the skins are pressed quite hard, because tannins from the skins, normally a key part of red wine flavour

rather than white, are important to the style, adding freshness to counter the sweetness. The wine then spends about four years in the barrel until it is clear and ready to bottle. The result is a very complex, very sweet wine with astonishing ageing potential.

Since the Vin de Constance, other Constantia estates have also released their own versions. They are all excellent, but I have a special love for Klein Constantia’s, with its distinctive bottle shape and its ability to age beautifully. I recently tried the 2017: the current winemaker, Matthew Day, has nailed it with this wine. On my last visit, I was lucky to try the 1885 vintage, one of the last made in the old era. It was a special moment.

Millton

The choice of Millton, a biodynamic winery based in the Gisborne region of New Zealand, might surprise you, because this is not one of the country’s major wine regions. But it’s included here because of the way that James and Annie Millton have pioneered biodynamic farming. They were ahead of their time, and have had a strong influence on other organic and biodynamic winegrowers in New Zealand.

James started the Millton Vineyard in 1984, when he was 28. His wife Annie’s father had developed vineyards on his Opou estate in Gisborne, and so when James and Annie decided they wanted to establish their own winery, this was the obvious place to start. It’s fascinating that they’ve managed to make such interesting wines from a region that no one thinks much of. ‘Gisborne, with its clay soils, is acknowledged as making wines with full, fat fruit,’ says James, ‘but I’m looking for minerality.’ When he started, the New Zealand wine industry was a very different place to how it is today. The international success of Marlborough Sauvignon Blanc was still a few years off, and organic and biodynamic farming were pretty much unheard of.

The estate now consists of four different vineyards in the Gisborne region, which James describes as consistently inconsistent. The Millton Vineyards include Opou, Te Arai and Riverpoint. The jewel in the crown is the spectacular Naboth’s Vineyard, a steep hillside vineyard first producing

in 1993. This site has been developed to include five different parcels, which together make up the Clos de Ste. Anne estate. Altogether there are now 15 hectares here, which takes the total Millton holdings to about 30 hectares.

The Millton farming is meticulous, and the wines have a lovely energy and brightness to them. They have also developed in style. Since James and Annie’s son Sam started working with him, a new addition to the range has been the Libiamo skin-contact natural wines. New Zealand is lucky to have Millton.

Niepoort

Niepoort was a small Port house when the current generation, Dirk Niepoort, began working in his family firm. After a spell away studying, working in a wine shop and making wine, Dirk returned to the family firm in 1987, and was determined to do something different. With fruit from two newly purchased quintas – Napoles (in 1987) and Carril (in 1988) – he decided to try making table wine.

His first foray into winemaking, Robustus 1990, was an experiment made with grapes from Quinta do Carril, an old vineyard planted in 1925. Niepoort’s first wine met with a poor reception from his father, who thought so badly of it that he sold the majority of it off while Dirk was in Australia in 1991. Of the initial five pipes, just one was left, which made a production of 630 bottles and 45 magnums. Before Dirk’s return, Niepoort owned no vineyards: their skill was in buying young Port wines from farmers in the Douro Valley, and then blending and maturing them in their warehouses in Vila Nova de Gaia, over the river from Porto. Niepoort deserves his place in this list because he has taken this family company and made it into one of the leading quality producers of both Ports and table wines in Portugal, and because of the enormous influence he has had on other winegrowers in Portugal. He has changed the way Portuguese wines are perceived internationally.

In 1991 he launched Redoma, and over the subsequent years these Douro table wines achieved a lot of success. Other wines were added to the range: Batuta, Charme, Redoma Branco, Tiara, Vertente, a new version of Robustus, Coche and

The opening of the Millton Vineyard 1984

Catena’s Tikal winery

Turris. And then began a series of collaborations with other winegrowers, both in Portugal and further afield. More recently, Niepoort have bought new quintas in the Dão and Bairrada regions of Portugal, and Dirk has begun a series of collaborative wines called NatCool, which are all affordable, naturally made wines in litre bottles. The Niepoort house style is precision, purity, freshness and ageability.

Catena, Mendoza, Argentina

Laura Catena seems to have endless energy. As well as working as a medic in a San Francisco hospital, she runs the family winery established by her father Nicolás.

In 1982, Nicolás and his wife Elena took their young family to live in California for a year, while Nicolás spent time as a visiting scholar at the University of California, Berkeley. He visited Robert Mondavi and was inspired: if this is what can be done in California, why can’t Argentina also produce wines to match the best in the world? He began making

high-end Chardonnay and Cabernet Sauvignon at the beginning of the 1990s, and set out to convince the world of the merit of Argentine wine. Success with these wines led him to begin making world-class Malbec, widely planted in Argentina, but little known by consumers abroad. Just 934 hectares of Malbec remain in the Bordeaux area, where it originated, but there are 26,845 hectares of Malbec in Argentina. Cantena’s Malbecs from the 1990s brought the world’s attention to this variety. These days, everyone knows about Malbec from Argentina.

Laura Catena has also demonstrated a commitment to scientific research, founding the Catena Institute, where researchers work in association with the winery on a range of topical projects. Because of this, the Adrianna vineyard in the appellation of Gualtallary is one of the world’s most studied. Catena began planting this in 1992, and were pioneers of what has become the most prized vineyard area in the country. At an altitude

of 1,450 metres, the ultraviolet light levels are very high here, and there’s a remarkable diversity of soils. Initially Catena planted three varieties: Chardonnay, Pinot Noir and Merlot. Later on, Malbec and Cabernet Sauvignon were added, and the vineyard is now 120 hectares. It’s an extraordinary place.

Catena is one of those rare wineries that is able to make good affordable wines alongside top fine wines, and Laura Catena has the drive to get these wines in front of the right people. With their commitment to research, their commercial shrewdness, and an excellent winemaking and viticultural team, they are an important winery for Argentina.

Scan the QR code to visit the website www.wineanorak.com

saving a legacy

The ring-ting-ting of the twostroke 1950s DKW gathered urgency as the four rhino picked up speed in what I can only think must have been a playful charge. I was eight years old and watched in wonder out of the back window as these prehistoric beasts galloped after my mother’s gun-blue DKW. The rhino had been moved to the Thomas Baines Nature Reserve from KwaZulu-Natal as part of Operation Rhino – a species-saving initiative, driven by the late Dr Ian Player, to move white rhino out of Hluhluwe Game Reserve. The awesome image of those rhino running after us has never left me. Was it the noise of the twostroke engine, the colour and shape of the DKW, or were they just having a bit of fun at our expense?

I saw my first black rhino in the Addo Elephant National Park in 1986 – the rare East African subspecies. The magnificent animal came to drink at the Main Camp waterhole amid much excitement from staff and tourists. Interestingly, I did not see another black rhino until 1999 despite spending the intervening years in some of the most notable wildlife areas in Africa.

South Africa saved the white rhino from extinction. The methods would be controversial today, but the people who carried out this incredible success worked for only one thing – the species’ survival. There were no social media to judge them when they experimented, occasionally with bad results. They had an objective and they carried it out. Their success was our nation’s conservation pride. In 35 years we built our white rhino numbers from around 400 to a reputed 19,000 by 2008. Then trouble hit and, in the next ten years, South Africa lost 8,000 white rhino to poaching. The population of black rhino in Southern Africa fell from 100,000 in the 1960s to just 5,000 by 2018. In August of 2020 the white rhino numbers are in

decline, and the black rhino population is growing from a low base. The question now is who will once again save the rhino in South Africa, a country that is the custodian of over 75% of Africa’s rhino? It can only be the private sector, which reportedly owns over 50% of South Africa’s rhino population. (My personal view is that this figure is closer to 60%.)

In the African 21st century, resources to protect a species like this are limited, coupled with the possible, even probable, corruption that donor funds may attract within the government structures. The private rhino populations are presently owned by private game reserves and ranches. The latest technology, armed response, specialised canine units, boots on the ground, aerial support – the list goes on – costs big money.

The COVID-19 pandemic hit the pause button on rhino poaching as South Africa closed its provincial boundaries. Criminals could not move around as easily, as law enforcement monitored peoples’ movement. Tourism was also closed down. In most cases, wildlife-based tourism contributes directly to the cost of rhino

Written by: Angus Sholto-Douglas Photography: Kwandwe Private Game Reserve

conservation. No tourism meant no funds, which equates to no incentive for the landowner. There are no tax breaks for conserving rhino, no contribution to cost, and variable government intent to stop rhino poaching.

We expect poaching levels to increase as lockdowns are eased. The demand has not gone away. What is of greater concern is that resources that flow to anti-poaching teams, rhino monitoring and intelligence gathering have been reduced and may never be reinstated. Rhino are now more at risk than ever before by this combined reduction in financial resources.

‘What can I do to help?’ is a question I often hear. The answer: travel to Africa, preferably to a game reserve that has rhino, witness this prehistoric beast and then tell people about their plight. If donating money is what you would like to do, please choose carefully and contact us if you require direction.

We are unashamedly passionate and hopelessly emotional about the protection of these creatures. If we fail the rhino, we will lose so much more than a species, so much more than a majestic presence in our celebrated biodiversity, so much more than a living link with our shared prehistoric past … we will lose the opportunity of making lasting memories for our children, maybe even of galloping rhino playfully charging their mom’s vehicle. The world will be a much poorer place.

To support the Rhino scan the QR code or visit www.kwandwerhinotrust.org.za

If we fail the rhino, we will lose so much more than a species, so much more than a majestic presence in our celebrated biodiversity

Hyme Rabinowitz with his wife, Jenny and son, Nik.

the art of craft

- hyme rabinowitz, master potter

When I moved from South Africa to Canada five years ago, I had to be sparing with what I brought with me. Before anything else, I packed those things that would link me with what I was leaving behind. My collection of South African ceramic objects and pottery wares would do just that.

Take this bottle-shaped pottery vase, a work by Hyme Rabinowitz, that sits on my desk. It has a simple decoration of grass stalks waving against a pale blue background. It speaks powerfully of the veld and sky of the Western Cape. It speaks of the mastery of Rabinowitz’s studio pottery.

The twenty-first century has seen international recognition for South African ceramics artists, notably for those whose works present a new vision of Africa, challenging convention and stereotypes. The new generation of ceramicists builds on the heritage of traditional African pottery, but their studio practices use the technology and processes introduced in the mid-twentieth century by studio potters. Rabinowitz (1920–2009), Esias Bosch (1923–2010) and Bryan Haden (1930–2016) are hailed as the pioneers of South African studio pottery.

To tell of Rabinowitz’s accomplishments as a potter, and to emphasise his relevance in the story of South African pottery, I need to step back in time.

Re-imagining Africa through ceramics is not new. It was first seen in the works produced by the English studio potter Michael Cardew, who between the 1940s and 1960s spent time in Ghana and Nigeria, where he taught and produced pottery. Cardew’s own roots in studio pottery can be traced to his early apprenticeship with Bernard Leach, who is hailed as the father of the ‘Anglo-Oriental’ tradition of studio pottery.

The ‘Anglo-Oriental’ tradition describes a way of making, rather than what is actually made. It developed around the idea of producing the ‘ethical pot’, and brought together what the American art historian Ellen P. Conant calls a mix of ‘philosophical, religious and aesthetic elements that saw beauty in utilitarian objects made by and for common people.’ This approach to pottery found wide appeal in England, North America, Australasia and, via the three pioneers, South Africa, too.

Because of their association with the English pottery practice of the time, and

because they made things people could use, Bosch, Rabinowitz and Haden would become known as ‘Anglo-Orientalists’. It is a misleading label, though, which does not give them their due credit as individualistic artist-craftsmen.

All three had contact with Cardew, but it was Hyme who would emerge as the South African studio potter who most closely followed Cardew’s ethos of producing functional wares, in an individual style, without any sacrifice of the principle of good form.

Those ideas became so much a part of Rabinowitz’s own style that when he was selected to participate in a group exhibition of 13 of Cardew’s associates, at the Beardsmore Gallery in London, in 1993, he was hailed as the studio potter who ‘carried the [Cardew] tradition back to southern Africa’.

This recognition was matched by many other awards. The University of Pretoria, for example, awarded him with a silver medal for Singular Merit and Rare Achievement in 1990. In the same year he

Written by: Ronnie Watt Photography by: Pottery photographs by Ronnie Watts

was recognised as a Master Potter by the Association of Potters of Southern Africa. The only other South African honoured with such an accolade was Bosch. And in 1992 the University of Cape Town bestowed on him an honorary master’s degree in fine art.

But none of this recognition can be fully grasped unless you know how Hyme responded to a changing world.

After World War II, there was a change in consumer culture throughout much of the world. People started choosing lifestyles that reflected their own personalities. When it came to ceramic wares, this change manifested in a dismissal of mundane, industry-produced wares in favour of more distinctive craftware. By mid-century South Africa, this translated into a consumer preference for pottery that was being produced by more than 40 small pottery enterprises, each producing distinctive wares in limited ranges. The unique pottery wares were produced by individual potters, but on an extremely small scale.

It was into that void that the pioneers stepped. Bosch gained his knowledge and experience in England, and on his return in 1952 set up his first backyard studio in Durban. Haden’s training in pottery in England overlapped with that of Bosch, and his first studio was set up in Hay Paddock in Pietermaritzburg. Hyme, however, had his first exposure to pottery in South Africa when he attended evening classes in pottery at the Frank Joubert Art Centre in Rondebosch, Cape Town, in 1953. Soon after, he set up his own small studio space in Long Street, where he worked on a kick-wheel.

Hyme was born and raised in Port Nolloth, Namaqualand. His father was a smous (peddler) of donkeys and mules. He first came to Cape Town to attend school in 1932, and would live there for most of his adult life.

A career in pottery was a far cry from that of accountant, for which he qualified after serving as an artilleryman in the Second World War. But, as he wrote in an unpublished memoir, pottery was an opportunity that he had been waiting for and he would give it a go because ‘maybe something will come of it.’

But first, leaving accountancy behind,

Hyme set off in 1956 on a journey of discovery, in which he would travel comprehensively in Europe and Africa.

The first stop was England, where he visited studio potters in Cornwall. One of them was Kenneth Quick, at his Tregenna Hill pottery studio in St Ives, where he eventually took up a position as studio assistant for six months.

In that role he was required to mix clay in a bucket and deliver the pots, packed in a haversack, to customers by bus. During this period, Hyme also met Cardew, who was preparing to return to Nigeria. Hyme met Cardew again the following year in Kano, Nigeria, where Cardew was setting up a training centre.

On his return to South Africa, Hyme found studio space in Higgovale, Cape Town, where he built a wood-fired kiln. It marked his formal entry as a professional studio potter in South Africa. But he did not consider his knowledge of pottery complete. South Africa presented distinct challenges in the production of pottery. The raw materials and studio processes differed from what he’d come to know in England. The one person who could guide him along was Bosch, who by then had established his permanent studio in White River, in what is today Mpumalanga Province.

For six months in 1961/1962, Hyme worked as assistant to Bosch and then returned to Cape Town to set up his own permanent studio at Eagle’s Nest on Constantia Hill. This is where he would live and work for the next 40 years.

Hyme visited England again in 1966, financing his trip with an award he received from the Cape Tercentenary Foundation that promoted the development of South African arts. On that trip, he again sought out Cardew. Cardew agreed to take Hyme on for a few months as assistant at the famous

Wenford Bridge pottery. As Hyme wrote much later in his life, Cardew did not really teach, but demanded of his students to observe, practise and ‘listen to his sophisticated opinions’.

Cardew had no patience for ceramics that sought to serve only as art. He never abandoned the ethos of producing things that people could use, in which the form of the wares was more important than their style. This ethos resonated with Hyme, and he would always stay true to the thinking of his mentor.

Working from his remote and rather rudimentary studio, Hyme nudged his style along through trial and error and endless correspondence with his peers. He and Bosch would even exchange works to compare the results of various glazes on different clay bodies. Hyme never ceased to experiment with glazes, and those, alongside his meticulously thrown forms, were to become the hallmark of his craft.

In her article titled ‘A Passion for Pots’, written in 2000, the ceramicist and writer Ann Marais said of Hyme’s work: ‘There is no artifice, no “cleverness” in his strong, simple forms. Form, surface and decoration are integrated in harmonious balance. There are no trivial appendages to distract the eye or block the hand in holding. All elements serve the goal of “usefulness”’.

His range of utilitarian wares did not offer anything novel. That was not his intention. He threw lidded jars, vases, platters, teapots and tea bowls, casserole dishes, round cheese plates, bottles and tiles. His wares were sturdy to the point of being robust, but never chunky, with rounded bellies and strong but graceful handles and lugs. On the surfaces, the hands of the potter could be read – the marks deliberately or unintentionally left when the clay was shaped on the wheel. Everything he made tells a story of intimacy between maker and material.

For decoration, he would either use the brush or execute them in sgraffito, which is the process of scratching through layers of glaze to create contrasting images. The decorations were executed in simple and even sparse linework and revealed his love for nature: flowers in outline, swaying grasses, leaves and birds.

And the glazes! By sight and touch they were generous, whether Hyme used

Everything he made tells a story of intimacy between maker and material.

a single glaze or layered them to create even further depth: feldspathic, celadon, shino, khaki and the deepest and richest of tenmoku. The kiln added the finishing touches, often with the mischief of causing the glaze to crawl or craze or pinhole or coagulate at the lower edges like dripped mutton fat. For other potters, such surface effects would spell a kiln disaster. In Hyme’s case, the whims of the kiln simply served to enhance the organic look and feel of his wares.

Though he didn’t have formal apprentices, his influence worked in other ways. It was his way of life and his way of working that served as inspiration for the next generations of studio potters. And they would come to know Hyme’s famously down-to-earth

personality, which clung to the belief that the work was more important than the ego. Hyme generously shared not only his pottery knowledge but also his thoughts on beauty and usefulness. In the last years of his life, he wrote: ‘It is good to enjoy one’s food in a container that gives pleasure and aesthetic joy at the same time.’ It was as simple as that.

The thriving and dynamic ceramics fraternity in South Africa in the twentyfirst century has grown from humble beginnings. In 1972, a small community of potters established the Association of Potters of Southern Africa (APSA). By the end of the century, it grew to boast a membership of some 1,000. Hyme and his fellow pioneering figures, Bosch and

Haden, laid the foundation for this – not in defining how South African pottery should look, but in setting the example of the studio potter as a combination of persona, practice and ethos.

Hyme’s beloved Eagle’s Nest studio was partially destroyed in 2000 in a raging veld fire, but he continued working. His death in 2009 closed a career that spanned some five decades. The respect for Hyme as studio potter and the memories of his humility, which he maintained even as praise was lavished on him, have yet to fade. And in any case, Hyme lives on through his works that grace our homes and enrich our lives. He would not have asked for anything more.

memories of hyme

Written by Esias Bosch

I met Hyme in a way that corresponds with the kind of person he was. I can still picture it as if it were yesterday: Val, the children and I had just had lunch and we were chatting around the lunch table. It was in 1961. Suddenly a guy walks in, with a rucksack, shorts, velskoene. His name is Hyme Rabinowitz, he says. He is an accountant, but every morning he woke up with a rash before going to work and, when a psychologist diagnosed that he hated his job, he quit and turned to pottery. So he took the train to Nelspruit, hitchhiked to White River and found our home and workshop on Die Randjie. Could he please

dig down here for some time? He comes as a student and will do anything it takes to learn more about ceramics. What happened then is testimony to the fact that Hyme was a truly lovable human being. Val, who under normal circumstances would have hesitated to take in a complete stranger (considering her workload with three young children and everything else she had on her plate at the time), agreed without a murmur! She instantly recognised his integrity. Hyme blended in to life on Die Randjie in no time. The children still remember anecdotes – of how he would fetch them from school in the old kombi, suntanned, shirtless and barefoot. Although they were extremely fond of him, it did cause quite a stir among their friends, especially when he arrived with nothing on apart from a sarong! And when he fetched them from Sunday school dressed like that, you can be sure that the church elders – who had already tried without success to get me into church – would have a thing or two to think about. Don’t forget that in those days in our conservative little town of White River a bare-chested white man dressed in a Masai sarong was a very unusual sight and raised many an eyebrow – particularly when he went shopping with Val, who was always immaculately dressed! He loved his shopping experiences with Val. He would push the trolley for her and they would always be in deep discussion about something or other. There was such a strong, mutual bond between them. He also loved helping her in the kitchen. ‘Let the wandering Jew do the dishes,’ he would always say, and they would laugh together. Hyme loved the rocks on which Die Randjie is built – and he often lay down on the warm rocks like a lizard in the sun, or hiked in the valley, searching for rock art in the other koppies surrounding ours.

When I think back on those days, I realise how much slower the pace was. Hyme and I would sit through many a night – those still hours when even the insects sleep – while the old wood-fired kiln was going. Oil lamps on the grass, looking at the stars, on those warm Lowveld nights. Or we would all sit for hours on weekends – after one of Val’s lovely meals – and talk. Of course, Hyme and I could never get enough of talking about ceramics. He was a wonderful

potter with a true passion for the craft. He was crazy about ceramics! He had such a natural instinct for the wheel. His pots were so organic, so honest. I will never forget the moment when I first realised his love for pottery – when I saw him hold a pot, as if it were a precious rarity, stroking it with reverence. At that time I was doing stoneware, and Hyme continued working in stoneware for the rest of his life. Our relationship was not one of student and teacher. He taught me about the value of a simple approach to ceramics. His pots reflected his nature. Nothing slick about them. Hyme was probably the most natural human being I have ever met. No airs and graces. He connected to people with a natural warmth, and people felt so drawn to him. I was always particularly struck by the way he gave time and encouragement to young potters, with the humility and kindness that made him a remarkable artist. Val and I always used to say that he had an authentically Zen attitude to life, without even knowing it. Spontaneous, compassionate, humorous and natural, and he never spoke about possessions. He was a good, intelligent man. A real human being. And then, of course, Jenny came into his life, and we were soon introduced to the beautiful young woman who would become his wife. We were happy that he had found someone to settle with, someone whom we liked immediately, a woman of substance with whom we connected in so many ways.

Hyme and I always kept contact. Often, Val and I would visit Hyme and Jenny at Eagle’s Nest or they would come to the Lowveld. When Val died, the contact went on – two old men sharing their ailments and talking about pots. When Jenny phoned me to tell me that he had died earlier that day, I could hardly speak. I just needed to sit down. It was a terribly strong emotion. I walked into the house and picked up his pot, which had been standing on a chest in the corridor for as long as I remember. An iron-glazed bowl, that famous iron glaze of Hyme that he loved. I held it in my hand for a long time and felt a strange link with my old friend, as if a message was passing between us, as if the powerful link we always had was still there.

Hyme was probably the most natural human being I have ever met. No airs and graces. He connected to people with a natural warmth, and people felt so drawn to him.

“I grew up with Hyme Rabinowitz –not the man himself, but his work. My mother revered his work to the extent that at almost every evening meal one of his pieces was on the table – being used, being loved. ‘Form follows function’ was a family mantra and Hyme’s pieces proved that this could be done beautifully. Of the dozens of pieces my parents accumulated over the years –buying something from him almost every year, I think – only a small percentage do not show some wear and tear. I believe Hyme would find that quite okay. I only met Hyme as a small kid on one of my parents’ visits to Eagle’s Nest, but have since got to know his son, Nik, one of South Africa’s most charismatic and intelligent comic performers and a fellow Muizenberg backline local. It’s nice to have that connection, which to me feels as if it has lasted my whole life.”

- Bruce Jack

plaatje and the friendship of women

Written by: Matthew Blackman

For an African who grew up in the late 1800s on a remote German-run mission station on the far-flung borders of the Cape Colony, Solomon Tshekisho Plaatje would lead a truly remarkable life. The fact that a black South African, educated to the level of a 12-year-old, would meet Lloyd George, the British Prime Minister, befriend Minister of Railways, Henry Burton, and be gifted educational films by Henry Ford seems unlikely. Adding to this that he was supported by and lived with members of the suffragette movement in Britain, Plaatje’s life seems to run contrary to everything we think we know about history. But Sol Plaatje – the politician, editor, novelist, and one of the founders of the African National Congress (ANC) – did all of these things.

Plaatje was a brilliant linguist and was fluent in a startling number of languages including English, Dutch and German. In fact, as a 17-year-old he was tasked by the Westphals – German Wesleyan missionaries – to teach their children how to read. And his rise from tutor to postman, to civil servant, to newspaper editor, to politician is a truly remarkable story. But it is in many ways also a story of the women who were part of Plaatje’s life.

As a young boy of eight, in the dusty mission station of Pniel near Kimberley, he is recorded as having walked up to Marie Westphal, wife of the head of the mission, and saying: ‘I want to be able to talk English and Dutch and German as you do.’ It was a request Marie did not turn down. And when she began to teach the young Solomon, she discovered his natural talents for languages and his remarkable memory – gifts said to have been inherited from his mother. The Westphals took to the young Plaatje, who by all accounts had free reign of their house. Marie would teach him to play piano and read him Shakespeare until he could read it himself – in later life Plaatje translated Shakespeare

into his own language of Setswana.

In 1894 at the age of 18, Plaatje, thanks to Marie’s tuition, would leave the mission to take up a job as a messenger at the Kimberley Post Office. The post office had become a famous place of employment for black missionary-educated men. Diamond mining had made Kimberley one of the richest cities in the world, and as such it attracted many educated African men and women. Among this community Plaatje would meet Isaiah Bud M’bele.

M’bele had already become well known in the Cape Colony for being the first African to pass the Cape Civil Service examination. The two men were naturally drawn to each another, having similar interests in music and a love of literature. But there was one marked difference between them – their tribal origins: M’bele was Xhosa (or Mfengu), Plaatje was Tswana (or Morolong). And when Plaatje fell deeply in love with M’bele’s sister, Elizabeth, there were problems.

As Plaatje would write, it was like something from Romeo and Juliet: ‘My people resented the idea of my marrying a girl who spoke a language, which, like the

Hottentot language, had clicks in it; while her people likewise abominated the idea of giving their daughter in marriage to a fellow who spoke a language so imperfect as to be without any.’

But the headstrong Sol and Elizabeth defied their elders and pursued a courtship that happily, as he put it, did not end up in ‘a double tragedy in a cemetery’. The marriage in fact became an important moment for much of the African community in Kimberley. As Brian Willan, Plaatje’s biographer, says, ‘it gave romantic expression to many of their collective hopes and aspirations’ with regard to the notion of tribal unity.

In fact this became the ethos of the African National Congress, which Plaatje would help found in 1912. It was a philosophy that in many ways made the ANC unique within the context of anti-colonial movements in Africa. And it was an ethic that would be handed down to Nelson Mandela, who often stated that the ANC was a ‘broad church’, retaining under its umbrella all tribes, all races and all non-racial ideologies.

According to Plaatje, Elizabeth was much better educated than he was. She had in fact worked as a teacher alongside her brother, and Plaatje seems to have been drawn to Elizabeth’s intellect. Although little of their relationship has survived in letters, the picture of Elizabeth that is developed in Plaatje’s other correspondence is that of a strong, independent woman determined to educate their six children, which she did quite often alone. Plaatje spent many years in the UK and North America garnering support against the growing racial legislation in South Africa. As the racial laws were enacted in South Africa, it would be Elizabeth who would see the real effects on the lives of their children. The humiliating ‘Colour Bar’ legislation and the inequities of the Natives Land Act (1913) would limit their well-educated children even more than racist laws had limited their father – who had been at least allowed to join the Cape Civil Service when he worked as a court interpreter. As Plaatje would write to Georgiana Solomon in the UK, ‘few men could boast a spouse so faithful under such trying conditions.’

Plaatje’s novel, Mhudi, the first ever written in English by a black African, seems to depict something of his wife. The story is of a young, strong-willed and intelligent woman who ‘sees quite through the deeds of men’. Ra-Thaga, her husband, conversely sees, rather naively, only the good in people, in particular the Boers. And throughout the novel one gets the sense that much of Mhudi’s personality comes from one lived off the page.

Plaatje was in fact often drawn to strong, independent women. And they, in turn, seem to have liked his humble intelligent charm. After the Natives Land Act (1913), Plaatje and the other leaders of the newly formed ANC (initially called the South African Native National Congress) would go to the UK to protest the Act’s injustices. South Africa was by then a self-governing dominion in the Empire, whose head of state was still the British King. Plaatje would document the Act’s devastating effects in his famous work Native Life in South Africa, about the legislation that would leave him ‘a pariah in the land of his birth’. But the ANC’s deputation was largely ignored by British politicians. Plaatje was, however, determined to stay and make the British public aware of the institutionalised racism developing in South Africa.

The task at first seemed hopeless, until he met Georgiana Solomon (the widow of Saul Solomon, the famous Cape Liberal politician) and Harriette and Sophie Colenso (the daughter and daughter-in-law of the famous South African bishop). On meeting Plaatje and listening to him speak at public meetings, these three women became eager to help him. Georgiana Solomon had, after all, first-hand knowledge of protest and was part of the suffragette movement. In 1912, at the age of 68, she had in fact smashed several windows of the House of Lords and as a result was sentenced to one month in Holloway prison.

Georgiana Solomon and the Colensos would end up befriending Plaatje for the rest of his life, finding money for him to continue his work and connecting him with people in Britain who were sympathetic to the cause of racial equality. And he in turn would dedicate books to them. Native Life in South Africa, which

is perhaps one of the defining political works of South African history, was dedicated to Henriette Colenso. A translation of Setswana proverbs was dedicated to Solomon.

However, his other published book, Mhudi, would be dedicated to the woman who held Plaatje’s deepest affection – his daughter Olive. Named after the novelist Olive Schreiner, whom Plaatje had known personally in Kimberley. Olive’s precocious and vibrant character was something he was drawn to. It seems that she was the only one in the family who could interrupt him at his work in his small study at home. In 1907 he published a poem entitled ‘Olive and I’ about a day out in the countryside with her, picking flowers and spotting buck. Her death was something with which he would never reconcile himself.

Olive’s health was badly damaged from a bout of the Spanish flu in 1918. Plaatje had in fact personally taken her up to Aliwal North after a doctor had recommended that her condition might be alleviated by the hot springs. However, when Plaatje got there, Olive was barred from entry because of her race. It was a moment that had a deep emotional effect on him and one that spurred him to continue his political work.

Olive sadly fell ill once again while training to be a nurse in Natal. On her way home to Kimberley, her condition worsened on the station platform in Bloemfontein. There she was refused entry into a ‘whites only’ waiting room and was not allowed to sit on the seats on the platform. Soon after this she succumbed to heart failure. Plaatje, who was on a lecture tour of the USA at the time, was devastated by the news. The dedication in Mhudi reads: ‘To the Memory of our Beloved Olive, one of the many youthful victims of a settled system, and in pleasant recollection of the life work, accomplished at the age of 13 during the influenza epidemic, this book is affectionately dedicated.’

Elizabeth Plaatje

We have become used to the idea that there is nothing that can’t be improved. Any device or tool or appliance can be made more efficient, more convenient, more user-friendly. More something. Nothing is ever finished; if there is a Version 1.0 there must be a Version 2.0 around the corner. What a rapidly changing world, we tell ourselves. But it’s surprising to consider how many things in our world haven’t changed at all.

Take hand tools, for example. Whenever you hammer a nail, you’re repeating a task that is two thousand years old. We don’t wear togas or recline to eat, but we hammer nails just like the ancient Romans who, having devised forged-iron nails, needed something that would both drive them in and pull them out – the result was the claw

version 1.0

Written by: Witold Rybczynski Illustration: Rohan Estsebeth

hammer. The Roman hammer had one drawback: the wooden handle tended to loosen at the head when pulling recalcitrant nails, a weakness that was solved in 1840 by a Connecticut blacksmith who extended the iron head into the handle, producing the so-called adze-eye hammer. That design has survived unchanged ever since.

Every household has an odds-and-ends drawer, and if there is a tool in the drawer it is likely to be a screwdriver. You always need a screwdriver for something, even if it’s only for opening a can of paint.Turnscrews, as they were originally called, originated in the late fifteenth century among European gunsmiths who used wood screws to attach the mechanism to the wooden stock. Arquebusiers, or gunners, carried a small all-purpose tool – a progenitor of the Swiss Army knife – that included a screwdriver blade. Early screws were handmade, but with mass-production the screw became the ubiquitous fastener of the Industrial Age. Like so many tools, screwdrivers have been mechanised – every handyman owns a cordless drill. But the traditional

screwdriver is simply too useful to become obsolete. The tool sold on Amazon today is basically the same as an eighteenthcentury turnscrew, although I prefer the old pear-shaped wooden handle to knurled plastic.

‘Cute as a button’ is a puzzling expression until we remember that ‘cute’ was originally a shortening of ‘acute’, which meant shrewd or clever. The ingenious buttonand-buttonhole combination is very clever indeed; the button slips sideways into a slot, then it magically turns flat and holds fast – to unbutton, simply reverse the process. Velcro is a Swiss invention of the 1950s, and the zipper has been around for more than a hundred years, but both are johnny-come-latelies compared to the ordinary button. The ancient Egyptians, Greeks and Romans didn’t have buttons; togas and cloaks were wrapped, tunics fastened with a belt. Of course, in warm climates clothing didn’t need to be snug. Perhaps that’s why the button originated in drafty northern Europe. When?

Sometime in the thirteenth century. Easy to make, cheap, and reliable, no wonder the button continues in use, unchanged after eight hundred years.

We often think of the Middle Ages as a romantic period of chivalry and minstrels, but it was actually a time of radical technological change. Medieval inventions include the mechanical clock and the printing press, as well as the button and the screwdriver. And eyeglasses, which were the first application of the new science of optics that also produced the telescope and the microscope. The first reference to glasses is in a 1306 sermon by a Florentine Dominican friar who mentions that eyeglasses were developed twenty years earlier and that he had met the inventor, although he neglects to include the name. Medieval eyeglasses, which seem to have originated in Pisa, were strictly for the farsighted, and were commonly used by monks and scholars for reading and writing; the elderly Petrarch had a pair. His eyeglasses were supported by pinching the bridge of the nose, a type that survived a long time – the nearsighted Theodore Roosevelt wore them, so did FDR, whose pince-nez were as much a trademark as his jaunty cigarette holder. The more familiar model with temples passing over the ears is hardly modern, however; it appears in a portrait of a Spanish cardinal painted by El Greco around 1600. The cleric’s lenses are perfectly round and resemble the glasses favored by many architects today. Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose.

We continue to use medieval tools like the screwdriver and eyeglasses because of how well they do the job – they don’t need improving. Neither did what is arguably the most common device of our Digital Age. Not the LCD screen, although in one form or another screens are everywhere –in airports and bars, in planes and cars, on banking machines and in homes. I’m referring to a common feature of laptops, iPads, and smartphones, the so-called QWERTY keyboard. The keyboard enables text messaging and social media, but it is not a product of the Digital Age – it has been around for almost a hundred and fifty years. The keyboard appeared in 1878 as part of the first commercially successful typewriter, the E. Remington & Sons No. 2. Mark Twain was an early adopter.

Typewriters went through many changes, becoming smaller and lighter, but their keyboards changed little. There were small variations – German-speaking countries and Central Europe interchanged the Y and the Z (hence QWERTZ), and national keyboards added accents and language-specific characters. (Chinese and Japanese typewriter keyboards are another story.) The most successful attempt to develop an alternative was the Dvorak keyboard, patented in 1936, which was actually offered as an option on the IBM Selectric typewriter. Although many personal computers and some smartphones offer a Dvorak option, it is the familiar QWERTY layout that has prevailed. The reason seems to be a combination of utility and inertia: the keyboard works well enough, and it is what people are used to. Sometimes the familiar is all you need.

This morning I made myself a cup of coffee – a drink that arrived in the West from Turkey in the seventeenth century. I tightened up the temples of my reading glasses with an old jeweller’s screwdriver that used to belong to my father, fired up the laptop, and got down to work. A thoroughly modern scene? Well, sort of.

We continue to use medieval tools like the screwdriver and eyeglasses because of how well they do the job – they don’t need improving.