Jack Journal - Volume 4

Cover artist: Joshua Miles.

Cover art: Full Moon Agave. A reduction woodcut.

Joshua Miles was born in Ceres in the Western Cape in 1967. He studied fine art at the Michaelis School of Fine Art at the University of Cape Town where he received the Michaelis Prize for best student in his final year.

Joshua is one of those rare artists who has managed to make a living solely from his art. He spent many years painting oils on canvas but his passion has always been with reduction block printmaking.

Joshua’s influences in printmaking started at a young age watching his aunt Elsa Miles, artist and art historian, doing woodcuts and later studying under Cecil Scotness at UCT. He is inspired by the play of light on the landscape which leads him to explore his local areas. He is always hunting qualities of light that evoke emotion. This is often the softer light that brings out the in-between tones and greys most would miss. This love of capturing the play of light is also found in reflections on water or objects. He is also inspired by the impressionist style of loose mark making and the Japanese tradition of printmaking.

After finishing at UCT, Joshua moved to Hermanus where he met his Scottish wife, Angela. They have been married more than 20 years and over the years they have lived and worked between South Africa and Scotland. They work together in the business of selling Joshua’s art and have a home with a studio in both countries.

Joshua is a prolific worker and has exhibited extensively in groups and solo exhibitions and as a result he has work in private homes and collections, not only in his two home countries, but also internationally in America, Australia, France, Italy and Germany.

www.joshuamiles.art

Joshua Miles

There is a pleasure in the pathless woods, There is a rapture on the lonely shore, There is society where none intrudes, By the deep Sea, and music in its roar: I love not Man the less, but Nature more.

George Byron

Joshua Miles. Quando. Reduction woodcut 265 x 205mm.

table of contents

contributors protecting the pumas Felipe Howard the democracy of print: legacy of sa linocut art Melvyn Minnaar

wine industry adventures chapter one rule no: 1 Bruce Jack breaking down barriers in east harlem Jim Clarke

reading the detectives John Higgins grootbos Geoffrey Dean the crypto-feather Chris Marais robert grendon – a forgotten voice in africa Matthew Blackman legacy of trees custom guitars Biénne Huisman

the national poetry prize background, update and 2021 winners the bling’s the thing Anthony Rose in defence of worms Don Pinnock art deco Tanya Farber

red-tailed tropicbird Vernon Head

sea dogs Bobby Jordan humility and the x factor Bruce Jack the billion oyster project Jim Clarke hops on city rooftops Lucy Corne

a young poet no longer Philip Myburgh mothers of invention Alison Westwood the ancient lure of bonfires lives on Jeremy Daniel caribbean paradise Caspar Greef

fiction: the lesson MS Mlandu west coast stoke Justin Fox

nft’s and wine: now and next Simon Pavitt

Editor: Su Birch Design: Allendre Hine

Address letters to the editor: editor@jackjournal.com

Bruce Jack Wines Limited. Registered address: c/o Seles Group, 2a Charing Cross Road, London, England, WC2H 0HF

Jack Journal’s Big Bang

When I decided to leave the corporate wine world where I helped make some juggernaut-sized international brands, I knew what I wanted to do with Bruce Jack Wines – focus on the vineyards and the winecraft. However, there was a problem. Since selling our first winery, Flagstone, in 2008, the world of consumer communication, with which I had had nothing to do for over a decade, had moved on radically. I suddenly had to catch up with how consumers accessed information and interacted with wine producers.

I threw myself into online marketing, social media and the quagmire of ‘influencers’. I did a few online courses that promised to explain how Google search words, website optimisation and Facebook ads worked …

It was awful and depressing. I became suspicious of platforms like Twitter, etc., because by design they amplify negative tonality of the written word – and that most crucial of understanding tools, context, is ubiquitously sacrificed for immediacy, reactiveness, FOMO and clutter.

I discovered to my horror that I was lost in a dense, dark jungle of overwhelming noise, my only guide a capricious gadget called a smartphone designed by organisations

as helpful as they are clearly nefarious.

I am not the only person never to have met an algorithm I trust, be that what pops up on a social media feed or how a large supermarket supply-chain manager is notified by her screen to place another order.

We have witnessed the collapse of global shipping logistics, partly because of the flawed artificial intelligence embedded in international shipping systems. Self-drive cars – originally based on clever code, false-messiah AI and greedy tech investment – have failed to deliver on their promise, the bright buttons at engineering labs now rather quietly reverting to yesterday’s camera technology. And don’t those selfservice book-in machines at airports look forlorn while travelers’ lost baggage piles up like clogging rubbish in a ghetto?

We are told it will all be okay and that the computers will come back to save us from ourselves. I don’t believe this. We all know AI isn’t going to save us from climate change. Which is why, as a winemaker, someone inextricably tied into the warming seasons, and embedded in an ancient craft, I must always champion context and collaboration –the cornerstones that will save us.

Jack Journal has had a very long gestation period. It all began in 1987 when a group

of friends and I started an unsanctioned magazine at school called Gray Matter. Illicitly printed on a clunky Xerox machine and stapled together, it caused a mild sensation by lampooning our equivalent of helicopter moms … an irate mother wrote a vitriolic letter to the principal demanding an apology from me, the editor. It was one of the most rewarding moments – I suddenly realised that a well-timed word had as much impact as a well-timed rugby tackle in the ribs. I framed the letter of complaint. What a triumph! Thirty years later, Gray Matter was still being produced by the students.

As an undergraduate, during apartheid, while studying Politics and English, the heady journey continued with a magazine called Ascent produced and published by the Humanities Student Council. I revelled in the deadline-enforced all-nighters, and as co-editor came in for a lambasting from both political extremes at UCT (University of Cape Town) – the agitating young revolutionaries and the conservative right. It was a surreal ride, with an ironic twist – a decade later I learnt that one of those agitating revolutionaries so critical of Ascent was a spy for the apartheid police.

It wasn’t all opinion pieces. We also produced a magazine dedicated purely

to creative writing, called 3rd Ear, and I was thrilled to have poetry published in South Africa’s oldest literary magazine, New Contrast.

After a Masters degree in Literature and a failed attempt at publishing the ‘Great South African novel’, I started working full time in the wine industry, followed shortly by a postgraduate Oenology and Viticulture degree at The University of Adelaide. Thankfully, wine bottles have back labels, and wine businesses have newsletters to write.Various publications also asked me to contribute, so when I didn’t have my head in a tank, or wasn’t vainly trying to sell my wine, I was able to write a bit.

Highlights included a regular column for The South African newspaper in the UK, an insightful gig at Personal Finance magazine

when Bruce Cameron was editor, and a few prefaces for WOSA (Wines of South Africa) publications while Su Birch was CEO (Su is now the editor-in-chief of Jack Journal). I may also be the only full-time winemaker to have written the forward for Platter’s Wine Guide.

As I slowly worked out what was positive in this new, often artificial, world of marketing and communication, and, more importantly, what was not, I came to a conclusion: I had to believe in the intelligent, inquisitive and considered wine drinkers out there.

I knew you couldn’t all have been transformed by snake oil AI into mindless crowd-rating app slaves. No matter what age or nationality, I believe in my heart you are still interested in the rich, diverse context of wine and the joy of discovery. And the only way I know how to reach you, to share this journey with you, is to produce a beautiful and embracing magazine. Thank you for joining me.

Bruce

contributors

SU BIRCH

Su Birch is a distinguished international marketer. 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 is enjoying the challenge of producing the Jack Journal. She also volunteers as an English coach in a local township school.

MATTHEW BLACKMAN

Matthew Blackman is a writer and historian. He has co-authored two books with Nick Dall on the history of South Africa. The most recent, Spoilt Ballot s, is a history of South African elections which came out this year. He lives and works in Cape Town.

JIM CLARKE

Jim Clarke has been writing about wine, sake, and related subjects for almost 20 years. In 2020, Jim received the International Louis Roederer Wine Writers’ Award for Feature Writing, and in August of that year Wine Business Monthly named him a Wine Industry Leader of the Year. Jim is the author of The Wines of South Africa , published by Infinite Ideas. He is also the US Marketing Manager for Wines of South Africa (WOSA).

LUCY CORNE

Lucy Corne is a beer writer and the editor of On Tap, South Africa’s only beer magazine. She is Africa’s first certified cicerone – akin to a beer sommelier –and the founder of South African National Beer Day. Lucy is a big fan of pilsner and IPA but also has a deep fascination with traditional African beers.

JEREMY DANIEL

Jeremy Daniel is an author and a scriptwriter for film and television. He is the author of a series of YA nonfiction books for Jonathan Ball Publishing: the Road to Glory biographies of South African sporting heroes. His adult biography Siya Kolisi: Against All Odds (Jonathan Ball Publishing) is a number one bestseller. He also writes business content on the convergence of cloud, mobile, big data and social media for international brands and online publications.

GEOFFREY DEAN

Geoffrey Dean is a wine and travel writer for various publications, as well as being a cricket correspondent for The Times of London, for whom he has covered more than 100 test matches. He judges for the International Wine Challenge and the Michelangelo International Wine & Spirits Awards. A lover of aged rum from his many cricketing trips to the Caribbean, and of single malt Scotch whiskies, he also writes on both spirits.

TANYA FARBER

Tanya Farber is an award-winning journalist and author of bestseller Blood On Her Hands: South Africa’s Most Notorious Female Killers. She has won three international human rights journalism awards, has a Masters degree in journalism from Wits University, and is passionate about science, art and social justice. She lives in Cape Town with her husband, two daughters and four dogs.

JUSTIN FOX

Justin Fox is a travel writer, photographer and former editor of Getaway magazine. He is the author of more than 20 books, including The Marginal Safari, Whoever Fears the Sea , The Impossible Five and Beat Routes. His latest World War II novel, The Cape Raider (Penguin, 2021), is available in bookshops and on amazon.com. Its sequel, Wolf Hunt, is due out soon.

CASPAR GREEFF

Caspar Greeff has been a journalist for longer than he cares to remember (not that he has much memory left after all those beers). For the last 30 months he has been a digital nomad in Latin America, working (he is currently a subeditor for Daily Maverick) and travelling in Belize, Guatemala, Nicaragua, Costa Rica, Ecuador, the Galapagos, Peru and Panama. He is the author of the psychedelic journal The Ayahuasca Diaries

VERNON R.L. HEAD

Vernon R.L. Head is a birdwatcher. He is also a South African poet with an MA in Creative Writing (UCT), a bestselling novelist, and an internationally acclaimed architect. His first book – a non-fiction narrative, The Search for the Rarest Bird in the World –was long-listed for the 2015 Sunday Times Alan Paton Literature Prize. His first novel, A Tree for the Birds, was long-listed for the Sunday Times Barry Ronge Fiction Prize and short-listed for the National Institute of Humanities & Social Sciences 2020 Fiction Prize. And his poetry has been long-listed for the Sol Plaatje European Union Poetry Prize in 2014, 2017, and again in 2019. He writes for a number of international literary magazines.

JOHN HIGGINS

John Higgins was formerly Arderne Chair of Literature at UCT and is currently a Senior Research Scholar at its Centre for Higher Education Development. His most recent academic writings include ‘Getting Academic Freedom into Focus’ and ‘Montage’, and he is also the co-author (with the artist Hanien Conradie) of 40 nights/40 days from the lockdown , a book comprising 40 hand-painted postcards and texts put together in the first two months of lockdown. Every month he convenes an online meeting, through UCT’s Centre for ExtraMural Studies, of The Detectives’ Club and The Poets’ Club, with each month focusing on a particular author and text.

ALLENDRE HINE

Allendre Hine is a strategic creator and a lover of crafted design solutions, film, coffee and meaningful conversations. Ali is a graduate of the Red & Yellow School of Logic & Magic. She is the designer on Jack Journal

FELIPE HOWARD

A keen kayaker, mountain biker and SUP surfer, Felipe Howard owns his own travel company and created the award-winning Patagonia Camp, a 20-yurt hotel located on the outskirts of Torres del Paine, which received the Avonni Innovation Award in 2009. He has helped establish and contributes to the Chile Outdoors guide. He loves travelling with his family whenever he can, showing the world to his children.

BIÉNNE HUISMAN

Award-winning journalist Biénne Huisman is happiest finding the world’s special bits, and writing about them. She holds an MA in Creative Writing from Royal Holloway, University of London, and has contributed to BBC World Arts, the Sunday Times, Daily Maverick , and more.

BOBBY JORDAN

Bobby Jordan is a Cape Town-based journalist with an interest in most things, not only seals. He is employed by the Sunday Times newspaper, and was once warned not to keep writing about fish. As a writer, he is happily working his way up the food chain.

CHRIS MARAIS

Award-winning journalist and indie publisher Chris Marais has worked in the South African media landscape for decades as a newspaper reporter, feature writer and magazine editor. In the past 15 years, Chris and his partner Julienne du Toit have focused exclusively on telling the story of the Karoo. They have published six books and written more than 300 magazine features, exposing the vast and varied narrative of South Africa’s dry heartland to readers all over the world. Operating from the river town of Cradock, they own and manage the premier website of the region: www.karoospace.co.za

MELVYN MINNAAR

Melvyn Minnaar has been writing about art, wine and related existential issues for various local and international publications for many years. The creativity that underpins these subjects is an enduring personal passion. He has served on a number of cultural bodies and institutions. With a history of cultural involvement, opinions about art and wine, and an appreciation for talent, he was honoured by Veritas in 2018.

M. SOGA MLANDU

M. Soga Mlandu was born in the district of Mount Frere and lives in Mthatha in the Eastern Cape. M. Soga Mlandu has published many isiXhosa school books as well as English books of essays, short stories and poems. Soga edited South Africa is Part of Africa written by Kenyan author, Anthony Kambi Masha. In 2013, he was the Mellon writer-in-residence at Rhodes University and is the recipient of four South African writers’ awards.

PHILIP MYBURGH

Philip is part of the Myburgh clan who have lived on Joostenberg Farm for generations. Two years ago he published his debut collection, Fifty-two | Twee-en-vyftig and is now working on his next collection of English, Afrikaans and isiXhosa poems, which will go by the name A young poet no longer. When not scribbling in his notebook, he works as an advocate in Cape Town.

SIMON PAVITT

Simon Pavitt is the founder of the boutique consulting firm Capstones Co, which manages extraordinary passion projects, and has almost 25 years of experience in fast-paced, dynamic business environments under his belt, including as the Chief Marketing Officer of a Formula One team. Simon is the Chief Operating Officer of the London Technology Club, an exclusive network of over 90 private investors, VCs, family offices, and institutional partners such as UBS, Barclays, and LGT. He is publishing his first book, Capstones: The blueprint for meaningful passion projects, later this year.

DR DON PINNOCK

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.

ANTHONY ROSE

Wine correspondent of The Independent from 1986 to 2016, Anthony contributes to Decanter magazine, The World of Fine Wine , The Real Review and The Oxford Companion to Wine, and is the panel chair for Southern Italy at the Decanter World Wine Awards. His most recent books are Sake and the Wines of Japan (Infinite Ideas, 2018) and Fizz! Champagne and Sparkling Wines of the World (Infinite Ideas, 2021), the latter of which was nominated this year for Drink Book of the Year by the Guild of Food Writers.

ALISON WESTWOOD

Alison 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.

Torres del Paine in Patagonia.

Raya and her cub.

protecting the pumas

Written by: Felipe Howard Translated by: Su Birch Photography by: Felipe Howard

At Cerro Guido, situated in the pristine landscapes of Torres del Paine in Patagonia, a conservation project to protect the puma and explore ways for wildlife, the gauchos, and ranching culture to co-exist is attracting a lot of attention. High-end tourism is a powerful tool in sustainable conservation, and recently I had the chance to visit Estancia Cerro Guido and experience this first-hand.

On day one, Pía Vergara, Director of Cerro Guido Conservation, greets us with a smile: ‘We have a surprise for you.’ She had just contacted her team of trackers, who had left earlier from Casa Puma. It is 8am and the Paine massif is sharp in the clear winter light.

After a short drive, the vehicles stop and we all meet the trackers: Mirko Utrovicic, Alfredo Rivera and Gino Pereira. They are also accompanied by Nicolás Lagos, scientific

advisor to the project. Only 100 metres away is a puma, imposingly reclining with her cub on a rock. We are handed powerful binoculars to follow their movements. Pía excitedly tells us that it is Raya, one of her favorite pumas, with her three-month-old cub, whose birth was recorded on 27 May 2021.

While we watch how the cub plays around her mother, Raya looks carefully towards the pampas. One of the trackers who has also been looking in the same direction quietly points out another puma crossing the bushes surreptitiously but very determinedly. It is a male. He advances and crosses about 50 metres from us, ignoring us completely. The scene plays out very fast. The male reaches Raya and the cub, trying to attack the little one. We hear loud roars, we see the bushes move; Raya manages to drive the male away, and begins following him without pausing. We would never see the cub again. Raya would follow the male towards the summit and we would become spectators of their movements from a distance.

During the day we move towards the upper part of the area, while the trackers split up to position themselves in different locations so as to never lose sight of the two pumas. Alfredo stays down, while Mirko and Nico go up to another sector. This is how we are able to see the pumas from the ledge, watching them under a cliff about 40 metres away. Raya follows the invading puma all day. We feel privileged, so lucky to be watching the scene. Pía is very worried about Raya’s cub. She explains to us that the males want to impose their offspring into a territory, so they try to attack and eliminate offspring that are not theirs and then try to mate with the female and thus leave their own offspring. In fact, Raya had two cubs this year and one of them was never seen again – the harsh laws of nature.

The Cerro Guido conservation project started from scratch in January 2019 as a way to protect the pumas and to manage a coexistence with the gaucho and cattleraising culture that is so typical and deeply rooted in the Magallanes Region – two

Palomo and sheep with the Torres del Paine behind them.

Torres del Paine in Patagonia at sunset.

Travelling to Cerro Guido is not just going to see pumas, as Pía Vergara told us – it is seeing wildlife, it is living in and knowing the work of an estancia, it is meeting the gauchos, it is participating in this experiment to achieve coexistence between fauna, wildlife and the livestock world.

worlds that have always been in conflict. The approach is multi-pronged: introducing methodologies to protect the livestock, introducing conservation tourism, and scientifically measuring the impacts of their efforts. The project did not expect such good results in the short term given the history with the pumas, but with 30 camera traps installed, they have come a long way.

Says Vergara: ‘This is more than coming to see pumas – we are in a kind of laboratory, testing tools that can protect livestock and make coexistence a reality. We want to obtain real, scientific data from these methods and then make them available to neighbouring farms and the entire region, to protect not only the puma but all the fauna. This is a project that requires a lot of collaboration.’ Vergara is also a nature photographer and passionate about this region. ‘The conservation originates with the puma because of its importance, symbolism and meaning and the need to conserve these animals. The idea is to make the Cerro Guido conservation project sustainable through tourism, which is why we want to show our activities.’

We don’t only see pumas: in searching for them, we often came across majestic condors, snow-covered rheas, flamingos in the lagoons, as well as foxes and a type of rare llama called the guanaco in the pampas. All far away from the tourist crowds that you can sometimes find in Torres del Paine. ‘Look, Felipe, to the east, next to a square stone with lichens, under the crack – there is another puma.’ I take the binoculars and I see the stones covered with lichens; they are all square to me, everything looks the same and I have a hard time finding the puma, which camouflages itself very effectively. The eye of the trackers and Pía is impressive; part of the tourist experience is feeling that emotion of patiently observing until you find a puma. Look at the sky, the movement of birds, look for signs.

For five days we lived the experience in the field. We stayed at the Estancia Cerro Guido hotel, the base for all these excursions and part of the conservation project. It’s an old house, renovated, very warm, cozy and with the decor of the period and a privileged view of the Paine: a true ranch that currently operates as such. The hearty breakfasts were the start of our explorations.

Their personalised snacks kept us going during the day. We observed the Paine from another perspective, from the Sierra del Toro, from the condoreras cliffs – home of the condors, landscapes with lights that change day by day, sunrises and sunsets with the towers as a backdrop, or the immense Sierra Baguales, yet another treasure.

We participated in several routines of the scientific experiments that aim to change some of the methodologies in the management of cattle pastures. We saw the Foxlights, LED solar-powered lights that, at night, project random multicoloured patterns into the valley, imitating the movements of torches held by humans. We visited the different locations where camera traps have been installed, following the footsteps of nature and the intuition of the trackers. We accompanied our guide, Alfredo, in his work looking for these cameras, and we saw his emotion when, on checking the memory cards on his phone, he found when a puma had passed by, with the exact date and time of its movements. It had passed by two days earlier. Alfredo’s smile and joy when he saw the puma on the phone infected us all.

We also loved his connection with Palomo, one of the dogs of the Great Pyrenees species that has lived with the sheep since he was a puppy. The flock has accepted Palomo and he will defend the sheep from attacks by the puma. Palomo played gently among the animals with Torres del Paine behind him; a postcard.

Travelling to Cerro Guido is not just going to see pumas, as Pía Vergara told us – it is seeing wildlife, it is living in and knowing the work of an estancia, it is meeting the gauchos, it is participating in this experiment to achieve coexistence between fauna, wildlife and the livestock world.

For more on the conservation of the puma.

Written by: Melvyn Minnaar

The word ‘print’, both as a verb and noun, has a strong association with process and procedure. It also suggests access, multiples and format. Metaphorically, it conjures up notions of communication, spreading stories, moving messages – reaching many. Indeed, the limit of that reach is only determined by how many are printed and where they land up.

From newspapers to books, to posters to brochures, the physical print marks the very essence of an open society, in conversation and debate with itself. Democracy at work.

Print can be many things, but in the world of art it occupies a niche. One step away from the most simple of artistic visual gestures – the drawing – it empowers the artist to reach more, extending the audience.

Western art usually credits the Nuremberg artist Albrecht Durer (1471–1528) as the first print master.

Both as creator and theorist, his work and influence defined the process during the Renaissance. He worked with wood and metal – the first producing woodcut prints, the second engravings or intaglio prints.

Multiple copies were made, in the first instance, by cutting out into a wooden board the part of the illustration not to be seen. The remaining surface would be inked and printed onto paper. This is known as relief printing. In the second manner, also called etching, the opposite is done: with intaglio (‘incised’), the grooves cut into a metal plate with a burin are filled with ink, the surface wiped clean, and the print produced from those inked grooves.

The handsome, clever Durer, connected to many of the well-known contemporaries of the time, including Raphael and Bellini, revolutionised printing as a sophisticated medium for artists. He unlocked the power of the process. Ownership of the artwork – in other media, like a painting, singular and elitist – opened up with more than one of the same possible. The stories to tell, the visual messages to be seen were less limited and not exclusive.

This is the democracy of art that echoes all the way to the valleys and townships of South Africa, coinciding with the awakening about 60 years ago of a particular black political-artistic awareness and invention.

The simplicity of the process and the print is the trick. Inexpensive in terms of media (wood – free; linoleum – handy), relatively easy in terms of hands-on manipulation, the potential was obvious to unlock.

It starts as simply as teaching preschool children to cut and print patterns with potatoes and ink. It can end up as some of the most sophisticated multicoloured, multilayered imagery in a combination of methods in the process that is called relief printing. Somewhere between these is what many have called South Africa’s own art tool, the one that we have polished to exquisite power: the linocut print. This method has suited us better than any other. For many reasons. For many purposes. For it literally and figuratively brought art and expression to the people – and their freedom.

The story of South Africa’s linocut print tradition has numerous roots and branches. It is anchored in the deep, rolling country side where it produced art as a parallel to subsistent rural life and branched out into the townships as vibrant manifestation of political clout.

In the early 1960s, Peder Gowenius, a Swedish art teacher, together with his artist wife, Ulla, established what was to become famous as the Rorke’s Drift Arts and Craft Centre at a church mission in KwaZulu-Natal.

It was an era when black South African artists had no mainstream presence, even though the famous Polly Street Art Centre in Johannesburg, where artists like Cecil Skotnes tried to bridge the gap, had exposed many people of colour to the creative industry.

Beyond its skill teachings of weaving and pottery – ‘creative usefulness’ according to Gowenius’ socialist motto – the Rorke’s Drift centre developed naturally into the field of printmaking. Linoleum was cheap and available.

Azaria Mbatha is the first of numerous names that established and continued the linocut printing trails from here. Among many protégés are artists such as John Muafangejo, Kay Hassan, Sam Nhlengetwa, Thami Jali, Kubeka, Cyprian Shilakoe, Gordon and Eric Mbatha, Thami Mnyele and Sandele Zulu. Later, Gowenius wrote:

‘Some men tried painting but it was a futile exercise … in desperation I tried one last thing, linocut printmaking. Azaria Mbatha’s delight when we rubbed the print with the back of the spoon and peeled off the first proof was the turning point. There is a surprise moment in the graphic printing process, something magical happens …’

The artist and activist Lionel Davis, a Capetonian who was imprisoned on Robben Island in the 1960s, played a key role in the establishment of the collection of prints now carefully housed at the University of the Western Cape’s Centre for Humanities Research. This remarkable collection comprises mostly linocut prints made by many known and unknown artists during the great days of Cape Town’s Community Arts Project (CAP). Davis

was one of the original inspiring teachers when CAP started in 1977 (its work ceased in 2008).

CAP was known for the political punch of the art produced by teachers, students and hangers-on in the run-up to Mandela’s release in 1990. It was here that the humble linocut print bloomed as South Africa’s art medium with clout: a vibrant visual tool for social transformation.

The method and manner of the simple print had carried its political potential over centuries. Here, uniquely South African, it was a vital tool in the urgent political message demanding change. It was used for posters, handouts and ad hoc flyers, making the most of the instant power of both its bold imagery and quick method of production.

The artist, esteemed printmaker and academic John Roome says linocut prints lend themselves to resistance and protest art because they are cheap to make and easily reproduced: ‘The medium is so basic and relatively affordable that artists who do not have access to expensive or fancy equipment can make great prints. That’s why South African artists turned to this process to get their message across during the struggle years.’

Roome is passionate about the medium: ‘Despite the prevalence of digital printing these days, I think the handmade and “raw” quality of lino still has tremendous appeal. It is such a gutsy medium. The graphic strength and directness of the medium makes it really appealing and powerful.

‘Personally I love lino and woodcut printing because the cutting process is kind of meditative, and the end results are more often than not slightly unpredictable but just about always very rewarding.’

In South Africa, the cultural reward is an illustration of creative democracy.

To find out more about the wine, There are Still Mysteries.

To find out more about the art works.

To see more of Joshua Miles’ art.

There Are Still Mysteries. Pen Jack. This linocut is the inspiration for Bruce’s wine label ‘There Are Still Mysteries’ Pinot Noir.

Azaria Mbatha: 1941-2018. Untitled. Linocut on paper. 63 by 93cm. Strauss & Co.

John Muafangejo: 1943-1987. Zululand: Natal Where Art School Is. Linocut. 78 by 97cm, Strauss & Co.

John Muafangejo: 1943-1987. Elephant is Killing a Lion in Funny Way in 1975. Linocut on paper. 45 by 34cm. Strauss & Co.

Artist unknown. Linocut. From the Community Arts Project Collection.

Crossroads. Sydney Hollow. Linocut. From the Community Arts Project Collection.

Cecil Skotnes 1926-2009. British Traders Settle. Woodcut on paper. 50 by 33cm. Strauss & Co.

Cecil Skotnes 1926-2009. Kwabulawayo Kraal. Woodcut on paper. 102 by 78cm. Strauss & Co.

x 55

30 Jack

John Roome. Aloe: Three Tree Hill, hand-coloured linocut print on Fabriano paper. Dimensions 37

cm, dated 2021. Edition of 10.

Joshua Miles

When John Roome talks about ‘a gutsy medium’ and its ‘graphic strength’, he may well be describing the outstanding print art of Joshua Miles.

The 55-year-old artist has defined his visual work with one of the trickiest of methods: reduction printing. Often described as ‘suicide printing’, this is a multicolour relief process in which the surface of the medium – a single block of wood or linoleum – is systematically cut away as layer after layer is printed in one required colour, each separate, working step by step towards the completed whole in full colour.

It is a challenge – which can also be seen as an aesthetic scuffle with the medium –that suits the artistic temperament of Miles. Once a student at the UCT Michaelis School of Art, where he studied with Cecil Skotnes, he won the celebrated Michaelis Prize in his final year.

Like the spoon-rubbing that once launched the magic and career of Azaria Mbatha way back at Rorke’s Drift, Joshua Miles, too, started his colourful career in that inventive manner. Today he is a master of the press. Hailing from a family where creativity was admired and inspired, his appealing imagery celebrates the landscape and the real.

The 55-year-old artist has defined his visual work with one of the trickiest of methods: reduction printing, often described as ‘suicide printing.’

Joshua Miles. Kayamandi word wakker Reduction linocut 935 x 290mm.

Joshua Miles. Getting Ready. Reduction woodcut 700 x 350mm.

A few months after my winemaking studies at the University of Adelaide, two things occurred that I remember with such hyperreal clarity that it feels as though they happened a few seconds ago. Like many, I remember exactly where I was when I heard that the Princess of Wales had died. I was piloting a Ford F150 pick-up truck along the beautiful Route 116 in Sonoma County, listening to KRSH Radio. It was a clear day with no wind and I was winding along the Russian River.

I had landed a dream Sonoma vintage job at Flowers Vineyard and Winery on Camp Meeting Ridge overlooking the Pacific. I arrived a month before the grapes, and my first job was to wire the office lights from the electrical board through two storeys of conduit, the whole place smelling of recently set cement – the smell of a freshly built dream.

About a month into harvest I woke before sunrise to find the chief winemaker, Greg La Follette, fast asleep on the big Persian carpet beneath the boardroom table. He had driven a load of Pinot Noir grapes through the night from a mystical vineyard on the far side of San Francisco. Greg had only hired me thinking I was Australian, and up until that point hadn’t done a great job of hiding his mild disappointment.

I cooked us some scrambled eggs and woke him with a coffee.

As the ridge caught the first rays of light and the ranch ruffled itself awake, he suddenly asked: ‘Do you really, more than anything, want to be a winemaker?’

I answered unequivocally: ‘Yes, sir.’

‘Well, then, Bruce,’ he said, ‘you are inviting chaos and destruction into your life.’ He smiled a sad sort of smile through sleep-squeezed eyes.

A shaft of sunlight caught the suspended dust between us. I had no answer to that foretelling of doom.

‘As a winemaker your life will be screwed up …’ he continued, taking a long sip of coffee. I heard the chillers in the barrel room kick in. ‘… but there is one rule that might

save you.’ He seemed to be addressing his younger self. ‘The only thing that gives meaning to your crazy existence is how you craft wine. In the end that might be the only thing you can ever truly hold onto with certainty.’

With that, he stood and rubbed his eyes. The Mexican picking team were assembling outside with viticulture manager, Greg Bjornstad.

He pulled on his RM Williams and walked towards the door, then turned as I was clearing the plates and cups away.

‘Vint With Honour. That’s Rule no. 1, Bruce! Whatever happens,Vint With Honour!’ he stated brightly, his fist in the air. Then he turned like the Charge of The Light Brigade into another day of ‘Crush’.

Six months later, I was working as a cellar rat at Grant Burge Wines in the Barossa Valley where, one sweltering February day, I met an eccentric man with a flamboyant moustache. He cycled through the winery on a swanky bicycle, waving regally at the staff. Tanunda in the 1990s was more used to pub brawls and golfing tourists. Without dismissing the world-class pie shop, Tanunda was essentially a hard-grafting, hard-drinking, agricultural village. One didn’t expect strange-looking men on racing bicycles.

‘Where’s my tank?’ he shouted across the crushpad to Craig Stansborough, the head winemaker.

That’s how I learnt we were making a massive Shiraz blend for this strange man – ‘Naturally Australian’ it was called. What a terrible name, I thought.

As it turned out, the man with the moustache was a fellow South African called John Geber. A few years later, I was back in Tanunda, working for him and learning why ‘Naturally Australian’ was a name that actually worked.

But first I had to learn a lesson in perspective.

It was 2001, and my business, Flagstone Wines, was three vintages old. I had been invited by a big bank to present my wines to a group of wealthy private clients. I was sitting next to one of the asset managers, a beautiful young lady hosting our table. We were about the same age – early 30s.

When I sat down after introducing the first two wines, I noticed that she hadn’t touched her wine glasses.

‘They really are nice wines. I promise,’ I smiled and took a swig of my glass. She half smiled back and turned to talk to the person on her other side.

After presenting my last two wines, I saw she hadn’t touched those either. Full of zeal, I touched her forearm. She turned, the stress of the evening showing at the corners of her eyes.

‘Please,’ I implored her, ‘just smell them!’ and I gave her my warmest smile.

She cocked her head, then stood up to turn away. The adrenalin of presenting was pumping through me, so I stood as well. ‘Just smell them. I promise you, they are amazing.’

She turned to me. ‘Mr Bruce, thank you for attending. It has been most entertaining.’

‘That’s actually my first name,’ I mumbled, but her eyes held such a ferocity that I sank back into my chair.

After the obligatory crème brûlée and professed thanks from the CEO, the guests filed out of the mansion to their smart chauffeur-driven cars curved like a black cat’s tail in the circular driveway. I waited at the door for her.

‘I guess wine dinners are a real drag if you don’t like wine,’ I said, unable to hide a slight accusatory tone.

The staff were clearing up behind us and the endless Mozart CD loop had eventually been silenced. She looked at me with that directness. ‘When I was a young girl my father used to sometimes come home late and beat my mother so badly she couldn’t leave the house for a week. Sometimes he would beat me.’ She wasn’t blinking. ‘The smell of alcohol was on his breath and when I smell alcohol, I remember those moments.’

I stood there looking back at impenetrable, dark eyes. ‘I am sorry,’ I eventually managed.

‘Rule no. 1, Mr Bruce,’ she said flatly, ‘your reality isn’t the same as that of others, especially when it comes to alcohol.’

Until that instant, I was a rabid wine evangelist, spreading the gospel about the awe-inspiring, life-changing magnificence of fine wine.

That crushing paradigm shift on the front steps of that big mansion has forever tempered my fervour. Ever since then, I have been constantly aware of the huge responsibility that sits on my shoulders as a winemaker. We can only ever craft wine that is authentic, healthy and made with

love. We can only ever preach moderation. It is our continuous duty to educate, demystify and contextualise wine for the consumer. Wine is both the most sophisticated form of alcohol and the most storied beverage humans have ever consumed. It is by far the oldest form of drug we use and it is as varied, richly nuanced and interesting as the differing environments and craftspeople that influence how it is made. Crucially, it is a reflection of life itself, a confusing crucible of good and evil, an exciting journey of danger and joy. The Ying and Yang of wine is what makes it true. Winemakers play an integral role in creating this reality and we must always be on the side of light.

Back to John Geber, the man with the flamboyant moustache; and fast-forward to 2004. John had just bagged the bluestone Barossa landmark, Chateau Tanunda, in what can only be described as the valley’s deal of the century. It is an extraordinarily handsome building. On its completion in 1890, it was the biggest building in the southern hemisphere and it still takes my breath away. Dilapidated and in need of loving restoration, the Chateau was clearly undervalued and unappreciated when John pounced.

I took the job as John’s winemaking consultant because I needed the money. I had exhausted all financing facilities for my business and had run out of cash. All businesses need cash, but young wineries need more than most because of how much gets tied up in equipment, barrels and wine. As anyone who doesn’t inherit a wine business, or start with oodles of money, knows, running out of money a few years into the adventure is a fairly normal misstep on the winemaking journey. My solution, a common one, was to get a consulting gig. I sold my car to pay salaries for a few months and took a job halfway around the world in Australia. The plan was to earn some hard currency and hopefully keep Flagstone afloat.

I was tasked with cleaning up the winemaking side of the Chateau, cataloguing the barrels and fixing the wine quality issues I found. Since then, I have been so proud to watch how John and his team have put the Chateau’s wines firmly on the international wine map. After a rewarding three-month stint

at the Chateau, I joined John on one of his overseas sales trips. He collected me from Geneva Airport and we drove to a meeting with the buyer at Switzerland’s Co-op supermarket.

After pleasantries and a review of sales, John started talking price for the following year’s supply. At one stage he melodramatically pulled off his shirt and put it on the table with the key for the car.

‘You’ve taken all my margin, my friend; here’s my bloody shirt and car as well!’

This drew a wry smile from the buyer, who I suspect did business with John as much for the Geber Theatre as for the wine itself.

A pattern for the next 10 days soon emerged. We started early, fuelled with coffee and what biscuits we unearthed in the car. We drove for many hours and many miles each day, visiting all the main supermarket buyers in mainland Europe with a boot-load of samples. We never booked accommodation, but when we got tired, we turned off the freeway, found a small village and inevitably had to wake up a B&B owner for a room. We stayed in the cheapest accommodation we could find and only ate at truckers’ stops or petrol stations.

‘Always do selling trips on the cheap, Bruce; it keeps you sharp, keeps you hungry. You can’t let yourself become soft. Otherwise you get sloppy, you lose your edge. We don’t take prisoners.’

I also learnt that John, despite being a sole operator, was the biggest supplier of Australian wine to Europe at the time. But mostly, I learnt about Rock & Roll.

‘Your problem, Bruce, is that you are too clever for your own good,’ he said as we pulled out of a small village just before sunrise one morning.

I stopped rummaging in the glove compartment for biscuits and looked at him quizzically.

‘How many people in the world love watching tap dancing?’ he continued.

‘No idea,’ I answered, not quite sure I was prepared for a Geber lecture so early in the morning.

‘Compared to Rock & Roll, not very many …’ he mused, half to himself, ‘not because tap dancing is less demanding or takes less practice. It almost certainly takes more of both ... and that makes it even more ironic.’

‘I guess you don’t see 60,000-seater sports stadiums sell out to tap dancing concerts,’ I ventured.

He smiled his slightly maniacal smile, which meant he was moving in for the kill: ‘So why on earth do you tap dance, Bruce?’ he charged.

‘I don’t,’ I defended myself.

‘Of course you do. You’re a bloody tap dancer! Look at your branding – fancy, overly clever, self-indulgent marketing names like Music Room, Longitude and Free Run … you’re wasting your time. More depressingly, you’re losing all those customers who would love to taste your wine, but they are walking right past you, on their way to a rock concert!’

We drove along in silence for a few minutes, looking into the rising sun for signs to the freeway.

‘I presume you want sell-out wine stadiums?’ he asked eventually.

‘Of course, but I don’t know how to … and, I’ve got no fallback,’ I said honestly.

‘Well, my boytjie, you’d better learn how to Rock & Roll,’ he looked at me and winked. ‘That’s Rule No. 1!’

‘I am not sure where to begin,’ I admitted.

‘Start by calling your wine Bruce Jack,’ he countered without hesitation.

‘That’s a bit narcissistic and arrogant,’ I pointed out.

‘People buy wine from people, Bruce, not corporations or whimsical intellectuals. Get over yourself. Stop worrying about what people think of you. And find those biscuits, I need breakfast.’

Our self-perception is influenced by what others believe – or at least what they tell you they believe. This partly explains how we find our place in the world. It’s also how we lose our place in the world … it all depends on whom we listen to.

Like you, I know that lady luck also plays a big role – sometimes she deals you a bad hand, sometimes you get a break.

I quickly realised how lucky I was to be driving around Europe with John. I clearly wasn’t a quick learner when it came to marketing and, along with John Geber’s accurate insight, I also believed I needed some luck. Towards the end of 2004 I was still furiously tap dancing in circles, unable to get ahead of the curve. It meant travelling for about four months of the year to try and sell wine. And each time

I depressingly drove off to the airport, I left a young family behind – this time I was on the way to Canada.

Despite my bribe of two bottles to the check-in lady, I was placed near the back toilets, against the tapering side and the last window of the fuselage, known at this end as the fusel-small. My fellow row passengers groaned as they saw me shuffle down the aisle towards them.

‘Oh, no, a fat one,’ the lady gurgled, not quite under her breath.

She swapped her middle seat with her husband, who was already twitching for a cigarette.

Newton’s fourth law of motion states that the cabin crew’s patience thins towards the back of cattle class. While I am sympathetic to their travails, this doesn’t stop me being a bit demanding on the wine front. I need my medication to take the edge off each turbulent jolt of paranoia bumpy flights ensure.

My neighbour hates flying, so we find something in common, and together clear out anything in the small bottle category we can wrangle from the prison wardens of the sky.

On arrival, it’s September 2004 and 5°C. After presenting a tasting to a group of Ontario journalists, I somehow get wedged in a swanky, subterranean Toronto bar (purple barstools and yellow lava lamps) with a guy called Donnie and his minders: Paula’s an ex-cop with what looks like a big stainless steel handgun, and Frank is an ex-ice hockey professional with a squashed nose that shunts to the left when he smiles.

Donnie’s ‘in construction’, he tells me, ‘and a bit of mining – that sort of thing’. We are halfway through the cocktail list (he’s buying for anyone in the room who can keep up), when the manager invites us to help interview Playgirl hopefuls for the new Canadian Playboy TV Channel.

Luckily, I had already bought tickets to see the seminal wine-nerd movie, Sideways, which happened to be premiering at the Toronto International Film Festival that night, so I decline the invitation.

‘You gotta be kidding, Jack,’ Donnie rolls his eyes to the bar.

I don’t remind him that Jack is not my first name. ‘Sorry, sir, the truth is I am a wine nerd.’ I try to explain.

‘Cool!’ exclaims Paula. ‘You know wine. Wow!’ And gives me a high five.

‘You wine nuts are fucking crazy!’ Donnie interjects. ‘Last week some cheerleader insisted I bathe her in champagne! Hell …’ he physically winces. ‘Cost me a fortune.’

We all agreed, however, that it was a fun use of champagne.

Broken-nosed Frank leans across the bar and, in a lilting Newfoundland twang, sings a ditty that ends: ‘Rule No. 1, man, follow the fun, the mun will come …’

Even the mobsters are friendly in Canada,

I think, as I pull on my beanie and bid adieu to my new friends.

The next morning I am on a short one-hour hop to Halifax, Nova Scotia, to give the winemakers’ address at the Nova Scotia Liquor Corporation’s annual banquet wine dinner. To understand the Canadian market in 2004, say the word ‘Corporation’ like you would say ‘Illuminati’.

On arrival, it’s 0°C and two big guys in puffy ski jackets share a cigarette outside arrivals. As soon as they see me, the one comes over, sticks out his hand and says: ‘Welcome to Nova Scotia, sir.’ He helps the other guy put my bags in the back of his buddy’s taxi and waves us goodbye.

‘Do all you guys always help each other with the luggage?’ I ask.

‘Sure, it doesn’t cost anything to help oot.’

This is great. On the trip into town, I ask as many questions as I can, the answer to which might potentially include the word ‘oot’.

I am not a fan of gala dinners with hundreds of people when I have to talk three-quarters of the way through them. To drink or not to drink? Seated with me at the head table is Joan Carol, of the pioneering Penedès biodynamic winery, Parés Baltà, and next to him sits Jesus.

It only takes a few glasses before I say: ‘Hey, Jesus, you must be named after the best winemaker in the world.’

‘Well,’ replied Jesus meekly, ‘I am actually only the export manager for North America and India.’

Jesus, it turns out, sold shedfuls of vino from a massive winery in Valencia called Gandía. I can’t help myself and suggest he develops a new brand for India called Mahatma Gandía. I find this very funny, but I suspect the fourth glass of maple syrup wine is helping.

Suddenly my name is called and I weave off to the podium, convincing myself that if Dylan Thomas could do this sort of gig wasted, so could I.

During the subsequent pub crawl, we walked for miles through what I suspect would be classified a blizzard – 90cm of snow was an impressive sight the next morning as the taxi slid and crunched its way to the airport, where I learnt that no more flights were leaving until the snowploughs turned up.

That night I found Jesus. He was snowed

in as well. I found him in the hotel restaurant and we drank a bottle of Guigal Grenache Blanc and a ripper Shiraz from Mount Langi Ghiran. We swapped hairy travelling salesman stories, compared websites and agreed that any show where the vivacious Patrizia Torti was showing her equally mesmeric Torti Estate Pinot Nero from the Oltrepò Pavese hills was worth a second visit.

Then he said: ‘Jack, my friend …’ ‘It’s Bruce actually,’ I corrected him. ‘Yes, yes, whatever,’ he placated me. ‘It’s muy importante time …’ and he started waving at the waitress who was trying to study for her accounting exam. ‘Es hora de Rioja – it’s time for Rioja!’

The Muga started rounding out the evening when Jesus grabbed me by the shoulder and said in a tone of revelation: ‘Regla número uno, my friend; Rule no. 1 … is simple: Only value is of concern. Fashions come and go … but no matter the price of the wine … it is value, or it is not. It makes the customer happy, or not … value is not a price, it is measured in your customer’s happiness.’

We poured another glass of happiness. ‘Yes, Jack, my friend, this is it, and it is simple.’ It turns out Jesus was right and it changed the way I thought about pricing forever. I would only ever charge what was fair and what I was certain would represent unbeatable value to my customer. It felt as if I had found the drummer for my rock band.

Jump to Germany 2010. I had sold Flagstone and was working for Constellation Wines, then the world’s biggest wine company. Markus Eser (my German sales contact) and I had just re-launched the Kumala brand. Three gruelling 18-hour days of agency meetings, press conferences, sales presentations and heavy dinners were behind us.

I don’t see many toothpaste factory managers getting on a plane to sell their product halfway around the world –why does the wine industry demand this of winemakers? Besides, they don’t teach you sales and marketing skills at Agricultural College …

Snow speckled the windscreen as we swooped out of the dark forest and onto the glistening Autobahn. It was late. We were both tired. We were listening to Stevie

Nicks on the radio and arguing about the origins of Fleetwood Mac, when I heard a disconcerting shudder coming from the engine of Markus’s brand-new Audi A5.

‘That’s coming from your engine, buddy!’ I said.

‘No way, man, must be that French car next to us.’ He was still sniggering when his car started lurching violently as the engine bucked and screamed. He pulled it hard over to the slow lane.

The car came to a grinding halt; the engine sounding as if it was eating itself. Smoke had started billowing from the front wheel arches; followed by the first licks of flame – like the hot, orange tongues of snakes eagerly smelling the snow.

‘Get out! Out!’ I screamed. I grabbed my laptop and my jacket off the back seat. Markus only had time to grab our phones, but had no time to retrieve his jacket or bag, never mind all the wine samples in the boot. In a few seconds, the car was full of dense, black, acrid smoke. As we jogged away, it became a very expensive bonfire.

‘We wouldn’t have got a child out of a baby seat,’ I said, my words wrapped in condensation.

Standing alongside the Autobahn in the middle of a freezing night somewhere deep in the German countryside, with one tweed jacket to share against the cold, I said: ‘Luck, my friend. We just used up a lot of luck.’

Markus looked into the night with its flecks of soft snow. ‘Yes, my friend, we are lucky, and sometimes not so lucky … but tonight, we are lucky.’ And I remember thinking that summed up this industry pretty well.

To be continued …/

Contento Dishes & Drinks. Photography by Michael Tulipan.

Yannick Benjamin.

breaking down barriers in east harlem

Written by: Jim Clarke Photography by: Mikhail Lipyanskiy

In light of the pandemic, any restaurant opening is cause for celebration, but in New York few new restaurants have been as impactful and cheered as Contento. Chef and partner Oscar Lorenzzi’s Peruvian cuisine has been drawing customers from all over to their East Harlem location, but so has the hospitality. In 2003, a car accident left partner, beverage director, and managing director Yannick Benjamin without the use of the lower half of his body, and his experiences have inspired a previously unheard of level of accessibility and inclusivity in everything the restaurant does.

What inspired you to pursue a career in hospitality and wine?

My entire family was in the restaurant business. My father’s from the north of France, from Brittany, and my mother was born and raised right in the heart of the Medoc in Bordeaux. Growing up, I would spend half my summer in Bordeaux, right in the middle of the vineyards. I remember the smell of fermentation, the smell of the cave, and it all seemed so interesting. And I actually had a terrible crush on Sam Malone and the whole team of Cheers; they just seemed like they had the best life.

After your accident, did you think a career in hospitality was still within reach?

My accident happened on 27 October 2003, and I got discharged from inpatient rehab on 9 January 2004. But I remember at the time calling my mom, saying: ‘Can you bring me some wine books?’ I remember getting the layout of the

restaurant Atelier, where I was working. It was a pretty spacious restaurant because it was in a hotel, so I was like, ‘if you move table 27 to the left and get rid of this table, then I can get around.’ I had no idea how challenging this was going to be – that took time.

I think I was probably a year and a half into it when I was like, ‘Shit, this is going to be challenging.’ I have no illusions; I have it better than probably 70% of people in the world that might be paralysed. But there were a lot of hills, a lot of blocked roads, and a lot of places where I had to build my own trails.

That being the case, what was your path back into the industry?

It wasn’t really until late ’04 or ’05, when Jean-Luc Le Dû, who is from the same village as my dad, was opening a wine store. He got connected and it was great to take a few steps back, to really see what the future was going to

Photography by: Robin & Sue. Photography by: Robin & Sue.

I knew that if I were ever going to open my own place, it would have to be barrier-free and accessible. Of course, we have braille menus, we have adaptive flatware, we have an accessible bathroom –we have everything.

be. That’s what I needed to do. I needed to fully understand my body and what this new situation was.

But retail isn’t really my thing. Finally, there was a client who happened to be a member at the Yale University Club.

I had heard about an opening as a sommelier there, so I started picking his brain. The money wasn’t going to be very good, but that wasn’t the point. I just needed to get in the door somewhere. So I interviewed with a GM who hired me right then and there. And he said: ‘You don’t remember me, but I remember you. I happened to be one of the judges at one of the sommelier competitions. And I thought you were the best one at service.’

He never asked me what my shortcomings were. His only question was: ‘Is there anything that we can do to make it comfortable for you?’ I didn’t even know how to respond. I worked there for about eight years and made some really great connections; it really gave me the confidence I needed.

And when you were ready to open your own place, inclusion and accessibility were a priority?

I knew that if I were ever going to open my own place, it would have to be barrier-free and accessible. Of course, we have braille menus, we have adaptive flatware, we have an accessible bathroom – we have everything. We have people who work here with whom they can identify. But in addition, everyone else who works here who’s able-bodied is trained. We have people who have come here from the blind and low vision community, who are deaf, and then myself, who teach them proper etiquette and tableside manners and how to deal with people with disabilities. And that’s the most important thing. I think what we’ve done is create a conversation.

Aslina, to give a South African example; wine from people who are really breaking social barriers, people who are getting rid of that unconscious bias most people have of a winemaker looking like me – yes, I’m on a wheelchair, but just the white male, dressed up in a suit. There are people who are black, there are people of colour, there are people with disabilities who also do make wine, and make very good wine.

What can the wine and hospitality industries do to move forward with these ideas?

I think the world has become a much smaller place, and if there’s information you need, be it from the BIPOC (Black, Indigenous, and People of Colour) community or the disability community, the access is there. I think the key is to be humble. You’ll never get it 100 per cent right, but as long as you’re giving it 100 per cent effort, that’s what’s important. Be willing to learn.

With Contento coming up on its first anniversary,Yannick is now moving forward with a new project: a wine shop right in the Hell’s Kitchen neighbourhood where he grew up. Now that the pandemic has ebbed, he’s also looking forward to returning to live events for the charity he co-founded, Wine on Wheels. New initiatives include the Solera Project, which will provide training and internship opportunities for people with disabilities in hospitality and wine.

Food from left to right:

1. Contento Octopus, Black Chimichurri, Chilled Cauliflower Gazpacho.

2. Contento Ceviche Clasico, Corn, Onion, Cilantro, Sweet Potato, Leche de Tigre.

There are 61 million Americans with disabilities, with $500 billion in spending power; I think we’ve shown that if you build a place that’s physically open and barrier-free, and more importantly, if you create the culture we have, then people are going to come.

The concept of inclusion makes its way onto the wine list, too. The first section of the wine list is devoted to wines that have a social impact, like

For more on Contento.

reading the detectives

watching the detectives,

watching the detectives.’ – Elvis Costello

Written by: John Higgins

We are all amateur detectives.

This is so in the simple sense that we try to understand the world around us and also need to make sense of the behaviour of those who are close to us, as well as those who promise (or is it threaten?) to come close either as acquaintances or friends, as potential lovers or stalkers.

That we are all amateur detectives is the source of the immense appeal of detective fiction.

For over a hundred years, detective fiction has been one of the most successful of popular literary genres, making fortunes (and attracting honours) for writers like Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, Georges Simenon, Raymond Chandler and Dame Agatha Christie. It continues to do so for a whole host of writers today, including a Lee Child

or a ‘Robert Galbraith’ (aka J. K. Rowling).

The genre has also provided the narrative templates (and even the characters) for so many of our favourite TV or streaming series (Sherlock, Strike, Broadchurch, Killing Eve) as well as for a great deal of cinema. (Anyone ready for another remake of Murder on the Orient Express or Death on the Nile? Absolutely! How many detective series can BritBox take? As many as it can.)

As amateur detectives ourselves, we enjoy reading about someone who can so successfully read the clues and indices of social and psychological life. We like to read about a Sherlock Holmes or a Hercule Poirot because we would very much like to read the world and those around us as accurately and with as much insight as these detectives do.

The clue is the thing; that and the expert knowledge necessary to interpret the clue. The successful detective is usually a hybrid, an unusual combination of sociologist with psychologist.

Like the sociologist, the detective enjoys an insight into the social whole that is denied those like his or her readers who are confined to the fixed perspective embedded in our daily grind. Detectives travel across and between all the social strata while we readers remain stuck in our bubbles.

London cab drivers need to study for years to acquire ‘The Knowledge’ that enables them to find their way to anywhere in the 250,000 streets of that dense and complex metropolis. Our detectives have somehow acquired a similarly detailed

‘We’re

They’re

knowledge of their social worlds.

They are as at ease in the palace drawing rooms of a ‘royal personage’ as in the opium dens of the East End (Sherlock Holmes) or drinking fine brandy in the Sternwood Mansion but going on to fight hoodlums the mean streets of Los Angeles (Philip Marlowe). Jack Reacher, while refusing to have a home (or even a backpack) and sometimes referred to as ‘Sherlock Homeless’, is as at home in the overwhelmingly crowded streets of New York (Gone Tomorrow) as in the empty wastelands of Nebraska (Worth Dying For).

‘Come,’ said Hercule Poirot, in Christie’s Appointment with Death. ‘We have still a little way to go!’ He says: ‘We have taken the facts, we have established a chronological sequence of events, we have heard the evidence. There remains – the psychology.’

The psychology. Psychology is not just present in the extreme form it often assumes in one strand of detective fiction. In this strand, the focus might be on the sociopath (think of John D. MacDonald’s Travis McGee novels) or on Oedipal and other family dramas (as do Ross Macdonald’s Lou Archer series or Anne Cleeves’ Shetland novels). Or think of those narratives in which the detective in question may be a psychological profiler and have to deal with a Hannibal Lecter (Thomas Harris’s Silence of the Lambs) or, indeed, a whole succession of variously disturbed killers, as Dr Tony Hill does across Val McDermid’s Wire in the Blood series.

No, the central psychology at work and on display in detective fiction is the everyday sense of psychology that is shared with the amateur reader. It takes in and adopts something like the procedures of observation and analysis present in Freud’s Psychopathology of Everyday Life or Erving Goffman’s Presentation of Self in Everyday Life.

These are the kind of observations available to us in the everyday life of the amateur detective.

Detectives watch with an analytic eye and listen with a therapeutic ear, registering the minutiae of body language and the giveaways of tone of voice. They fulfill Sherlock Holmes’ claim (also that of the therapist) ‘to fathom a man’s innermost thoughts’ by ‘a twitch of a muscle or a glance of an eye’.

All that is needed – it is implied to the reader – is to pay attention. ‘From another

bunch of guys I learned another mantra’, explains Jack Reacher. ‘Look, don’t see, listen, don’t hear.’ These ‘other guys’ surely include Holmes, who constantly repeats to his sidekick Watson: ‘You see, but you do not observe’. That we can also add to this ‘bunch of guys’ one of the greatest of great novelists, Henry James, also suggests the ever closer affinity of the detective story to the realist novel insisted on by P.D. James and Ian Rankin. James’s mantra for the aspiring novelist: ‘Try to be one of those on whom nothing is lost.’

There’s almost nothing to it – for the professional detective. As Hercule Poirot emphasized, interrogation need not even proceed by force. There is no need for the third degree, he insists. ‘No’, he says. ‘Just ordinary conversation. On the whole, you know, people tell you the truth. Because it is easier! You cannot lie all the time. And so – the truth becomes plain.’

Or – the promise of detective fiction is that it can become plain, and visible even to the amateur detective.

And, just in case we readers might begin to make that common move from admiration to jealousy and dislike, we are usually reminded that – as with the sports people we amateurs also admire –professionalism comes at a cost. This usually proves to be a cost we would not be willing to pay.

Holmes, in Conan Doyle’s version, is, after all, unattractively inhuman, and the BBC series Sherlock deals with this by telling us he may be suffering from Asperger’s Syndrome, and therefore still worthy of our now distanced sympathy. Agatha Christie grew to find Hercule Poirot ‘insufferable’, a ‘detestable, bombastic, tiresome, egocentric little creep’. Both authors wished to kill off their lead characters, but brought them back due to the intensity of public demand.

More recently, the formidable Jack Reacher, we gradually come to realise, may well be suffering from some form of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, and his apparently enviable freedom from all constraint and attachment is only achieved at some considerable cost in terms of his real existential isolation. (Indeed, I suspect that it was this growing insight into Reacher’s plight that made his author Lee Child give up the task of writing about Reacher and relinquish him to his brother.)

Our detectives tend to suffer from loneliness, alcoholism, trouble with relationships: just think of a Morse, a Rebus or a DCI Banks. The professionals pay a price amateurs can (hopefully) avoid.

We like – we love – detective fiction because it comforts us with the possibility that our own amateur efforts at reading the world are not only inescapable, but can also, at times, be spot on. Reading detective fiction rewards us with a sense that the world and our place in it make sense.

A clue is only a clue if there is meaning to the world.

A stunning display of Erica irregularis , unique to the Grootbos area.

Sundowners at the new Garden Lodge.

I have been fortunate enough to visit South Africa umpteen times over the last 30 years, and I am often asked by friends and acquaintances about my favourite lodge or hotel. I do not even have to think about my answer, for one place stands out – Grootbos Private Nature Reserve, a magical place 30km southeast of Hermanus to which I have kept returning again and again after my first visit there 13 years ago.

South Africa has a list as long as your arm of great options, so why does Grootbos lead the way in such a distinguished field? It is hard to answer in one sentence, but suffice it to say that, like a great wine, it has multiple layers to it with so much depth and complexity. There is its exterior beauty, which hits you between the eyes, and then there is its inner beauty, which gradually reveals itself over the course of a stay. So

grootbos

Written by: Geoffrey Dean Photography supplied by: Grootbos

important to the whole ethos of Grootbos is its role in supporting both the environment and the local community. Instrumental in that has been the property’s owner, Michael Lutzeyer, a man of real vision and inspiration, who lives on site with his wife, Dorothee. Lutzeyer’s embrace of social upliftment in the area goes back many years to the first decade of the millennium, when he helped set up a football academy in nearby Gansbaai. Around 120 children, aged between six and 19, from the township flock there after school to improve not just their footballing but also life skills, such as learning English. Lutzeyer’s chance meeting with a Grootbos guest, who worked for Barclays, led to the UK bank building a R2.5m sporting clubhouse after the local council freed up some unused Gansbaai scrubland. Another Grootbos guest knew the then chairman of the English Premier League, Dave Richards, who was persuaded not only to fund the installation of a synthetic football pitch but also to pay an annual subsidy of R800,000 to the newly formed Football Federation of South Africa

(FFSA). With a central aim of promoting the sport among the disadvantaged youth of the country, the FFSA set up their HQ at the Gansbaai academy.

I vividly recall how my first stay at Grootbos in December 2009 coincided with a visit to the lodge and Gansbaai by the then South African vice president, Kgalema Motlanthe. He was in Cape Town for the draw, which was due to take place that evening, of the 2010 football World Cup. In the daytime, he and his entourage came out to see the children in action at the academy. ‘I heard some time ago about the fantastic effect the federation is having on the children in Gansbaai, and I wanted to see it for myself,’ Motlanthe told me at the time. ‘It is so uplifting, and I would like to give thanks to your Premiership for their tremendous support and to Michael Lutzeyer for his role. I am a big football fan and I don’t underestimate what it can do to help our youth and lift all our spirits.’

Grootbos has been attracting acclaim from many quarters, not just for its footballing connection. The 3,500-hectare

Ancient milkwood forests.

reserve has been voted The Good Safari Guide’s ‘Best Community Safari Camp in Africa’ on account of its training programmes in horticulture and ecotourism for the local unemployed. These take place at the reserve’s Green Futures Horticultural and Life Skills College, whose plant nursery helps to fund tuition.

David Bellamy, the celebrated conservationist, has described Grootbos as ‘the best example of conservation of biodiversity I’ve ever seen.’ Of the 9,000 plant species found in fynbos, there are 900 on Grootbos alone. More than 100 of these are endangered, and seven were discovered on Grootbos, with four of them thought only to exist in the reserve. These include the Grootbos erica (Erica magnisylvae), and two named after Michael’s father Heiner –Lachenalia lutzeyeri and Capnophyllum lutzeyeri With this extraordinary plant diversity comes enormous insect diversity (over 2,500 different species having been identified, with 26 different ant species exclusive to Grootbos). There is spectacular birdlife (at least 125 species) as a consequence, adding to the feeling that this is a veritable land of milk and honey when you hike or horseback ride through its milkwood forests, cone bushes and sour fig, lobelia and buchu plants. The latter, as one of Grootbos’ botanical safari guides told me, is very good for sore throats and bladder infections.

Equally medicinal are sour fig leaves, which not only soothe cuts, burns and jellyfish stings but also provide crucial refuge for tortoises, who nestle in them during a bush fire as they don’t burn. Grootbos is part of a fire-driven ecosystem, whereby plants use fire to regenerate themselves. Indeed, without fire, some species can become extinct. The last big fire on Grootbos was in 2006, when Forest Lodge sadly burnt down, but controlled burns are carried out now, using firebreaks. In November 2020, a burn of 120 hectares was successfully carried out.

One fabulous panoramic point, high up in Grootbos, is known as ‘God’s Window’ with its sweeping vistas out to sea and of the Walker Bay Conservancy. This is a huge 24,000-hectare area, comprising Grootbos itself, 49 other landholdings of various sizes, and the Walker Bay Nature Reserve by the ocean. Mike Fabricius, general manager of the conservancy, estimates that

Local children taking part in sport activities presented by the Football Foundation.

Guests explore the reserve by 4x4 in Grootbos’ flagship flower safari.

The sunset landscape viewed from Garden Lodge.

there are around 15 adult Cape leopards plus cubs in it. ‘The spotted eagle owl does very well in Grootbos as it feeds on rodents, which are highly abundant,’ he says.

If leopard sightings are understandably rare, what guests can see on Grootbos are six different species of small antelopes as well as caracals, genets, porcupines and honey badgers.

Inside one of the two lodges, the beautiful Florilegium art room features notably fine works by 45 artists from more than a dozen different countries, whose purpose is to record fynbos in perpetuity. It is a stunning world collaboration, and situated in Forest Lodge, which has 16 guest suites. The smaller Garden Lodge, with 11 suites including four family ones, houses the new glass-fronted wine cellar, where Lutzeyer has built up one of the best selections of premium South African wine in the country.

The cellar numbers in excess of 15,000 bottles, of which just over a third are Cape Winemakers Guild wines, which he buys up every year at the CWG auction. As such it may be the most extensive collection of CWG wines available to the paying public. More than 30 Guild members are represented, including the likes of Adi Badenhorst, Sebastian Beaumont, Beyers Truter, David Trafford, Etienne Le Riche, Samantha O’Keefe, Pieter Ferreira, Danie Steytler, Abrie Beeslaar, Niels Verburg, Miles Mossop, Kevin Arnold, Jan Boland Coetzee and Bruce Jack.

To accompany such fine wines – and from many old vintages – cuisine of a requisite quality is, of course, a must. And thanks to Ben Conradie, a top chef, Grootbos’ food is world-class. So too are the suites, with their breathtaking views towards Walker Bay, Cape Point and the Kleinrivierberg mountain range beyond Stanford. Delightfully friendly and efficient staff, all recruited locally, add to the ethereal experience of a Grootbos stay. And I haven’t even mentioned the many other things you can enjoy there, such as whale-watching (in season), shark-cage diving, spa treatments and mountain biking. What a truly special place it is.

For more on Grootbos.

For more about the author.

The cellar numbers in excess of 15,000 bottles, of which just over a third are Cape Winemakers Guild wines, which he buys up every year at the CWG auction. As such it may be the most extensive collection of CWG wines available to the paying public.

Lillian Russell, 1861-1922, wearing plumed hat.

the crypto-feather

A single ostrich feather was once worth a fortune. Like modern-day Bitcoin, it was the unlikely currency of its day.

Written by: Chris Marais Photography by: Chris Marais

Nearly 20km east of Calitzdorp, heading for Oudtshoorn on Route 62, with the Karoo Boom Farm Stall on your right, look sharp left at the Red Mountains.

At the base of those stark crimson outcrops that are streaked with green algae, in an oasis of tall blue gums and old date trees, is a palace fit for a Victorian-era royal in exile. The domed cupola gives it away.

Instantly, the mind’s eye wanders to an age of cavalry officers in uniform, ladies wearing big bonnet hats, horse-drawn carriages in the driveway, and top-shelf parties in the ballroom. With scandal and romance in equal portions.

Welcome to Rietfontein Ostrich Palace, the legendary home of the Potgieter family. They’ve been in the ostrich business, to some degree or another, ever since a day in 1845 when a passing Lithuanian smous (trader) gave a young wagoneer called Armaans Potgieter a valuable tip:

‘Buy land and farm with ostriches.’

This was a time when ostriches were often

killed for plucking, or else captured and plucked while blinded with a sock over the head. Armaans became one of the first ostrich farmers in the Little Karoo. It was his generation that saved the region – and maybe even the ostrich – from eventual extinction.

In the first half of the 19th century, Oudtshoorn was a hardscrabble village described by its detractors rather haughtily as Veldskoendorp – a place of poor man’s shoes. It was officially named Oudtshoorn in honour of a newly appointed Cape Governor who never made it to these shores – he perished on the sea voyage out.

The 1860s began with a killer drought and ended in the Golden Age of the Ostrich. The ostrich farming frenzy really took hold when one Arthur Douglass invented the incubator in 1869, and production was vastly increased when lucerne was planted as ostrich fodder.

Farmers had to find markets for their feathers, and so a host of Jewish Lithuanian feather merchants criss-crossed the Little Karoo as the perfect middlemen in this

fledgling industry – bartering bolts of cloth and other objects of desire for feathers in lieu of cash. The ostrich wing feather was the cryptocurrency of its time.

Oom Swepie le Roux of Doornkraal Farm east of Oudtshoorn is every bit the baronial storyteller, who comes complete with his own family feather palace and a tasty brand of sparkling muscadel-grape rosé called Tickled Pink. The front label sports a running ostrich and the back label speaks of spicy food, good company and naughty women.

Well into his 80s, Oom Swepie tells the story of his Oupa Gert, his Ouma Maggie and the various smouse who visited Doornkraal.

‘They came for the feathers, the fare and the brandy cellar,’ he says. ‘They would arrive from their dusty journeys, and Ouma would make them bathe first. She was also a devout Christian whose life’s ambition was to convert at least one Jewish pedlar, so she’d make them attend a service before dinner.

‘After supper, Oupa and the smouse would

Rietfontein Ostrich Palace.

go down to the brandy cellar, light the lamps, share a drink and discuss the feathers, laid out for inspection. Then the haggling would begin.’

Oupa Gert may have prospered from his lamplight negotiations, but Ouma Maggie, they say, had no luck converting the smouse Back in the heydays of the ostrich industry, when a prime wing feather was worth a small fortune, the new dry land millionaires wanted to tell the world of their riches. The feather boom nouveaux riches had massive mansions built of local sandstone, sparing no expense on architectural extravagances like turrets and parapets that served no practical purpose. Suddenly families had to have ballrooms, homes with 20 bedrooms and coach houses, all built in an eccentric froth of styles that drew from the Edwardian, Tudor, Elizabethan and Victorian eras.

The two architects who made serious names for themselves here were Charles Bullock and Johannes Egbertus Vixseboxse. You see their handiwork all over Oudtshoorn, in the form of mansions that have been repurposed into old-age homes, museums, little businesses and, of late, guesthouses.

Stan Lipschitz, owner of Welgeluk Feather Palace, now a boutique hotel, says: ‘The roof tiles were all imported from Belgium; the stained-glass windows and doors from Holland; the columns from Greece; the woodwork between them from India; marble tiles inside from Italy; and fireplaces from England. The only thing from here is the sandstone.’

Dining rooms for 100 guests, marble baths that held 1,500 litres of water, Italian ceramic tiles around the fireplaces, mahogany inlaid libraries, Carrara marble in the kitchen, Delft and teak fancies, broekielace (cast-iron railings) and burnt bricks, endless verandas, stained-glass windows, big lion carvings and other expensive doodahs from all corners of the earth – it was not the age of minimalism. The diamond magnates of Kimberley and the gold barons of the Witwatersrand stood back in envy.

One can only imagine how the mail order catalogue business flourished in those days, how goods-laden ships flowed endlessly back and forth between continents while ostrich baron bank accounts just grew fatter and fatter with every plucking.

So feather-hat-mad was high society that

when the Titanic went down in 1912, listed on the manifest were 12 cases of prime ostrich feathers. They say the consignment was insured for many millions in today’s money.

It was said that you could buy a Model T Ford with the pluckings from three ostriches, and one perfect plume could be exchanged for passage on a ship to London.

But the Feather Boom was broken on the back of World War I, the popularity of the motor car (hard to fit an ostrich feather hat into the cab, and dangerous to wear same in an open ‘flivver’), and a fashion backlash against the wearing of bird feathers.

Millionaires and ostrich farmers went bankrupt overnight. It was one of the most abrupt commodity collapses ever. Traders and farmers who were worth many millions one day were penniless the next. One feather dealer famously had a cheque for 100,000 pounds honoured by the bank in 1914 and a cheque for 1 pound rejected in 1915.

Feather palaces became heartbreak hotels and many of them were broken down or left to rot.

What do the showgirls of Las Vegas, the Moulin Rouge dancers of Paris, the Mardi Gras Indians of New Orleans, the Samba Girls of the Copacabana on Rio Carnival day, the Belgian Gille characters of Shrove Tuesday, Texas cowboys, Mexican vaqueros and many of your self-respecting Little Karoo restaurants have in common?

They’re all part of the resurgent world trade in ostriches, processing every bit of the bird in some form or other – even the claws and feet are turned into chewy toys for big dogs. The industry uses the feathers for festivals, the skin for Western Wear boots, hats and luggage, and the meat for steaks and biltong.

The Klein Karoo Ostrich Emporium in Oudtshoorn has an extensive workshop where crafters fashion a variety of ostrich goods. Ostrich show farms like Safari, Highgate and Cango tell the big bird story every day to busloads of tourists from every where. And ostrich palaces like Rietfontein and Welgeluk are open for business again.

For more stories about the Karoo.

the great north african ostrich safari

This saga of the South African ostrich industry comes with its own exotic adventure tale, worthy of an Allan Quatermain classic.

At one stage in the early 1900s, the ostrich farmed in the Little Karoo was just so-so. It simply did not possess the ultimate plume quality to match that of the Barbary blue-necked ostrich, found somewhere in North Africa. There was a need to enrich the South African breeding stock with the Barbary, to give the locals an edge over their rivals, the USA. The magical feather everyone was after went by the name of Evans-Lovemore. It was blunt, strong and double-fluff dense.

So a small and discreet party, led by Russell Thornton of Grootfontein Agricultural College in Middelburg (Eastern Cape Midlands), set out in September 1911 on a steamship up the Niger River in the general direction of Timbuktu.

A couple of train journeys later, they were based in Kano, Northern Nigeria. They offered a reward for a sample of the Evans-Lovemore, located a likely source from Fort Zinder in French Sudan territory, recruited more than 100 porters, kept an eagle eye out for Tuareg raiders, and hit the desert with gusto.

Thornton begged the French fort commander at Zinder to allow them to export some of the indigenous ostriches. The answer was a firm non, and so they returned to Nigeria and put out a general appeal for Barbaries once more.

Ostriches from all over the region were presented to the South Africans and gradually, bird by bird, they gathered a flock of Barbaries to take home. Nearly 150 specimens were carefully trucked back to the coast and shipped down to South Africa. Thornton was hailed as a local hero, the South African breeding herds were enriched, and the Americans were full of envy.

Zonnebloem College students from around the same time Grendon would have attended the College. No photographs of Grendon have been found.

robert grendon – a forgotten voice in africa

Poet, scholar, botanist, soldier, journalist, politician, talented sportsman and grandson of a Herero chief – it seems almost unfathomable that Robert Grendon is not a familiar name in South African history and literature. But the story of this remarkable man’s life and work still only lies in fragments.

Written by: Matthew Blackman

What we do know of his life is this: Half Irish and half Herero, Robert Grendon was born in 1867, in what is now Namibia, to a daughter of the chief of the Herero, Maharero, and an Irish trader named Joseph Grendon. One of Robert’s uncles, Samuel Maharero, would lead the famous Herero uprising against the Germans in 1904 in response to the German genocide of the Herero and Nama people.

However, Grendon would escape this history, because in 1877 he, with his brother William and sister Mary, was moved to Cape Town, seemingly on the wishes of his Irish father. There he was enrolled at the non-racial Zonnebloem College, where he excelled both academically and on the sports field. Grendon was one of a handful of Zonnebloem students to sit and pass the University of the Cape of Good Hope’s matriculation examination.

Grendon’s education would set him apart from other mission-educated black students of the Cape. The warden of Zonnebloem, Rev Thomas Peters, had taken a very different approach to education to that of his fellow missionaries. As Peters wrote, there was no reason why a man in the ‘lower employments (as they are called) should not solace his leisure and carry on his mental cultivation by the study of the works of the great thinkers of antiquity.’

Along with carpentry and printing, Peters taught his students Latin and Ancient Greek. This was a practice that even the famous Dr Stewart of Lovedale College ardently disagreed with. As Stewart claimed, ‘the ancient classics are useless in the advancement of the native people … if not hurtful … or possibly evil.’

The newspaper Grendon worked at would publish an article dismissing Stewart’s approach. An article written in Ilanga Lase Natal while Grendon was on its staff, at the beginning of the 20th century, stated that black children were only being educated to speak the ‘language of the ruler’ in order to serve as clerks. Instead, it argued, mentioning Zonnebloem College, blacks ‘must be allowed to go to the same schools [as white children] to get degrees.’

After leaving Zonnebloem, Grendon ended up in Kimberley, by then the financial hub of the Cape Colony. There he worked as a teacher and would take up the study of botany. However, he

appears in the Kimberley newspapers as a sportsman. Several reports show his remarkable talents on the cricket field.

Sport in the early 1890s, if not officially racially segregated, was at the very least segregated in practice. However, on the occasions Grendon got to play against white teams, he did not spare them. The first time a black team – or what was referred to in the press as a ‘South African Malay’ team – played against a ‘European’ invitation team in 1891, Grendon scored 92 runs. The papers described the innings as ‘a brilliant exposition of well-timed hitting, his cutting being particularly clean and hard.’ In a similar match against a white Kimberley team, Grendon took the ‘Europeans’ to the cleaners. Hitting with ‘considerable power and precision’, he smashed 187 out of his team’s total of 260.

According to Grendon’s extended family, Robert (along with the better documented case of Krom Hendricks) was denied the opportunity to play for South Africa. At the very centre of this exclusion was the prime minister of the Cape, Cecil John Rhodes. As Rhodes once said, ‘they wanted me to send a black fellow to [play cricket in] England … but I would not have it.’

As Richard Parry and Jonty Winch put it, Rhodes’ political decisions ‘formalised segregation and apartheid as official policy and took South African cricket on a 100-year journey into a dead-end street.’

But it was not only Grendon’s sporting life that would be affected by Rhodes’ racism. In 1892, Rhodes attacked constitutional rights in the Cape by pushing through the Franchise and Ballot Act. The Cape had a famous non-racial franchise, which allowed men of all races who owned property worth over £25 to vote. Rhodes’ Act increased this qualification to £75, thus excluding mainly black voters.

Grendon played an important role in the agitation against the legislation. As secretary of the Coloured People’s Association(CPA), he wrote to Britain’s prime minister Gladstone. And the CPA organised several multiracial meetings and sent a petition with 4,000 signatures to the British government. Grendon’s CPA was one of the first attempts to unite all people of colour against racist legislation. As Grendon himself explained in a letter to the Diamond Fields Advertiser:

With reference to the Franchise agitation

… From the very commencement, all people of colour were included, nor was the agitation confined to one district, but to the whole colony … the alteration in the Franchise has caused unabated dissatisfaction. The natives are beginning to see the mischief that will be caused by the alteration.

Grendon’s movements after the mid-1890s are something of a mystery. But we know that he went to Uitenhage. The newspaper Imvo Labantsundu reported in 1896 that ‘Mr R. Grendon, the well-known cricketer, has left Kimberley for the purpose of completing his botanical work entitled Illustrated Genera of South African Flowering Plants.’ The work, which he seems to have been illustrating himself, has been lost –if it was ever completed.

Like his book on botany, little of his life in Uitenhage has survived. And we only know what he did next from a small footnote that appears in his 200-page epic poem Paul Kruger’s Dream. In this he states that he served in the 42nd Battery Royal Field Artillery as a forge wagon driver during the South African Anglo-Boer War. In the note he mentions a conversation he had with Gunner ‘Skin’ Cooper after the Battle of Bergendal while ‘in pursuit of Paul Kruger and his band.’

Paul Kruger’s Dream, which he began writing while in the British Army, is perhaps one of the most extraordinary pieces of South African literature. It is one of the first extended creative pieces written by a black South African. Mixing Greek, Roman, Christian and African mythologies, it is entirely unique in its creation. It, too, was thought to have been lost, but was found by the expert on Grendon, Grant Christison, in a box of papers.

The title page of the poem makes it clear that Grendon saw Kruger as a corrupt tyrant. But despite this, the poem itself is remarkable in its attempt to understand Kruger’s motivations. At times it contains an almost unfathomable empathy for Kruger and his Boer nation.

Perhaps equally peculiar to the modern ear is the poem’s dedication to ‘Britannia’. Like many of the black educated elite of the Cape, Grendon had an ambivalent

Grendon played an important role in the agitation against the legislation. As secretary of the Coloured People’s Association (CPA), he wrote to Britain’s prime minister Gladstone. And the CPA organised several multiracial meetings and sent a petition with 4,000 signatures to the British government. Grendon’s CPA was one of the first attempts to unite all people of colour against racist legislation.

Grendon’s Letter to Gladstone.

Ilanga Lase Natal.

William Ewart Gladstone 1892. Cecil Rhodes.

Inanda - Ohlanga Insitute - Ilanga Lase Natal.

attitude towards Britain. As he makes clear in his dedication, he admired Britain for having freed people of colour in the Cape from slavery. And he asks the question:

Can the laws of present nations

All combin’d, thy code outshine? Ancient Grecian—Roman—Jewish— Fade away compar’d with thine.

To be sure, Grendon had been educated by missionaries whose attitudes towards Britain he partly inherited. But there was more to this. Grendon clearly understood that praising Britain could be an effective political tool. That is, holding Britain up to the non-racial ideals the British government claimed to support could well improve the lot of the people of colour in the colonies.

This was not to say that he was not deeply critical of the realities of colonial practice. In 1903, Grendon became headmaster of Ohlange, John Dube’s school outside Durban (Dube would go on to become the first president of the African National Congress). During Dube’s absence from February 1904 to May 1905, Grendon took over the editorship of Dube’s newspaper Ilanga Lase Natal. In the pages of Ilanga, Grendon took the colonial powers in Natal to task. When Natal’s superintendent of education retired, he attacked his lamentable performance:

sad to say, the man from whom we expected ‘great things’ has vanished from our midst, and the ‘educational transformation’ which we do eagerly desire, and awaited with so confident, and so certain hope, has proved a mocking dream from which we shrink in horror, and disgust.

But he did not simply write about the practical failures. He also spoke of the ideals of freedom and equality. Freedom for all, Grendon argued, was a ‘natural right’ to all men, ‘be he black, white, yellow, or red.’ When Dube returned, he was raked over the coals by the colonial authorities for allowing Grendon to publish these ‘radical’ articles. Dube duly sacked Grendon both from the paper and his school for publishing editorials ‘which were entirely against the spirit and policy of Ilanga.’

For the next ten years, Grendon slips into

obscurity. But in 1915 he re-emerges in Johannesburg as the editor of the newspaper Abantu-Batho, the mouthpiece of the South African Native National Congress (later the ANC). Here again Grendon seems to have stuck his head above the parapet. When questions were raised as to the mismanagement of funds within SANNC, Grendon stated in an editorial that this possible corruption needed to be dealt with by the organisation before people become ‘loathe to believe in you in future.’ (Just how those words haunt us and the ANC today.) Shortly after Grendon exposed this controversy, he was removed as editor. We know little of Grendon’s life after this event. He would end up in Swaziland as the tutor to the young Swazi King, Sobhuza. But again, he seems to have lost this job as a result of the colonial authorities’ intervention. Even a local minister, a Rev Xaba, stuck the knife in. As Xaba wrote, Grendon’s ‘views and influence would mislead the young Chief … to the detriment of the welfare of the whole of Swaziland.’

After this, Grendon simply disappears into the mists of time, and we know almost nothing about him. What we do know is that one of South Africa’s most remarkable writers and talented sportsmen died blind and impoverished in a small rudimentary hut near Manzini, in modern-day Eswatini.

To purchase Matthew Blackman’s latest book.

legacy of trees custom guitars

Written by: Biénne Huisman Photography: Shelley Christians

We’re in an old double garage, once a converted yoga studio; now the guitar-building work shop of Theunis Fick. The workshop is in a fynbos-flanked street in Scarborough, on the coast near Cape Point. In this same wild village, musician and luthier Marc Maingard pioneered South African custom guitarmaking and repair in the 1970s. Maingard’s legacy lives on at Cape Town’s Casimi Guitars, co-founded by Maingard’s protégés, Matthias Roux and Matthew Rice. It was Casimi that seduced Fick with its passion for design, music and craftmanship; its dedication to taking handcrafted acoustic guitars to a new level.

At Fick’s workshop, his labrador (named Newton) sneezes at our feet on a parquet floor. Rows of tools perch on hooks against the wall: hammers, chisels, steel rulers, a drill. Light slants through large windows, igniting blonde, honey, and treacle tones in wood pieces carefully lifted in his large hands. He is showing off three guitars in the making; at this stage they look like wood carcasses: layered, curved frames with supporting struts. These, he explains, were all bent by hand on a heated iron.

‘This is a very interesting wood,’ says 29-year-old Fick, lifting a piece of dark timber, cut to fit one of the frames. ‘This will be the back of one guitar. It is called bog oak. See, that over there is regular oak, it is more pinky.’ He gestures to a work bench, then adds: ‘But this is from a forest in England, an oak forest that was flooded like 5,000 years ago. The whole forest was submerged and buried in silt, in bogs. Over thousands of years, the iron and the soil

reacted with the tannins in the oak, and it turned out this colour.’

He sprays the wood with a translucent solution – prep solvent – and the dark hues pop even more, shimmering like velvety fish scales.

Another guitar’s back is cut from fiery red kiaat from Zambia, a pale mark running along the centre grain. ‘I was able to buy this locally,’ says Fick, stroking the timber. ‘This is one of the few pieces of wood I’ve managed to find in South Africa. From a dealer in Joburg – I got lucky. I decided to go for this because it was so unusual. This pale section down the middle is sapwood –it will make it really interesting, it will be a loud-looking guitar.’

The third one is cut from sapele – from West Africa – also known as sapele mahogany. He lifts the sheet, which gleams like poured caramel, with a three-dimensional quiltlike texture in the light. ‘This is also very figured,’ says Fick. ‘This kind of figure is

called “pommele”.’ Pommele derives from the French for apple – pomme –which describes the shimmering circles in sapele timber.

‘Honestly, I don’t know exactly how this happens,’ says Fick. ‘The spacing of the grain lines, that’s indicating how fast the tree grew. The pommele effect has something to do with trees constantly turning towards the sun, I think. And where sapele grows, close to the equator, they’re turning sort of back and forth all the time.Yeah, this is probably the prettiest wood I’ve ever worked with …’

Fick is tall and gangly, casually dressed in tracksuit pants with his hair pulled back in a knot. Making coffee, he takes out a scale to meticulously measure the appropriate amount of fresh ground beans in the plunger. His academic background is civil engineering – a degree obtained from Stellenbosch University. He had just started his first job at an engineering firm in Cape Town, when his love of music and physics converged to lead him down another path.

‘I remember the first time I asked for a guitar – I was seven,’ he says. ‘My mom thought I was going through a phase. She told me if I still wanted a guitar when I was 14, I could have one. Turns out it wasn’t a phase and I still wanted one when I was 14. And so I started playing then.

‘One day, this was in the holiday between finishing my studies and starting to work, I was practising in my room, just playing guitar. I put the guitar down on the couch. It was plugged into the amp by cable, and I tripped over the cable. The guitar went flying off the couch and, yeah, well, it wasn’t a good day.

‘So then I took it to Casimi to get it fixed. And they were busy teaching on the day I got there. Before that, I didn’t even know about guitar building, but I just signed up immediately. Pretty much from the first day, I knew that this was what I wanted to do. For the first time I felt as if there were no limitations to my creativity. I started Casimi’s course the same week that I started working – that’s how I could afford the course as I was earning an engineer’s salary,’ he says.

Quitting his day job three years later, Fick went on to study at the Galloup School of Guitar Building and Repair in Michigan, in the United States. They helped him sell his first guitar to a dealer in Singapore in 2019.

Busy grafting in the Scarborough work shop since last September, Fick will have

The crazy thing about guitarbuilding in South Africa is that we need to import pretty much all of our wood. Even African woods are mostly ordered from America.

made seven guitars (not counting the guitars he built as a student) once the three in front of us are complete. The sapele and bog oak instruments will be shipped to a dealer in the United States, he says, and possibly the kiaat one, too. His basic price without inlays or features is $6,000, about R90,000, which goes up to R125,000.

In a humidity-controlled back room, more sheets of timber are neatly stacked. Next door is a room with various electric saws, sanders and a sawdust collection machine.

Picking wood is about both aesthetic and sound qualities. ‘Selecting top plates is all about mechanical properties,’ he says. ‘The pluck of a guitar string has a very limited amount of energy, so the top plate needs to be as light as possible to make efficient use of that energy. Spruces and cedars are best. On the other hand, back plates don’t really need to do all that much in the final instrument. For the backs, I tend to prioritise aesthetics over mechanical properties.’

He continues: ‘The crazy thing about guitar-building in South Africa is that we need to import pretty much all of our wood. Even African woods are mostly ordered from America.

‘So, for example, this is Hawaiian koa. I mean I got it from a guy in Hawaii. I just thought it’s really pretty.You see the flame in it? Yeah, there’s a sort of ripple in the wood, its called “flame”, or “curl”. This one has a particularly crazy set. And here, this is European spruce, from Italy. I found it online and imported it from America, from a guitar timber merchant. Over here, this is ebony, an African wood, also ordered from America. All that shipping, it gets really expensive.’

Why is African wood not available for sale locally? ‘So, instrument woods are pretty much the highest grade of wood you get,’ says Fick. ‘So it’s like the very rare, very select pieces. And there’s just not a market for that kind of material here – yet. There’s one dealer in Joburg who sells guitar woods, but they’re limited. I think the guitar-building industry in South Africa needs to grow a bit for it to be feasible.’ He adds that he is curious about the properties of yellowwood – something to explore in the future.

Wrapping up, Fick reflects on his working hours. ‘Sometimes I tend to work until midnight. I go until it’s done. Doing this,’ he gestures at the workbench,‘I just forget about time.’

Every guitar that leaves the studio carries a handwritten and gilded label, with a unique number, the model and the year it was built, and the wood that was used in construction. The calligraphy is by Andrew van der Merwe, aka @beachscriber, a professional freelance calligrapher from

Cape Town. Andrew does a wide range of work in the letter arts field - everything from branding design such as The Drift labels to murals, and from the humble writing of names on certificates to elaborate illuminated addresses for presidents.

For more on Theunis Fick Guitars.

the national poetry prize background, update and 2021 winners

The National Poetry Prize, now in its third year, is administered with the help of New Contrast magazine and sponsored by Bruce Jack Wines.

The competition is open to anyone who is a South African citizen or resident. In 2021, 111 poets submitted 474 poems, which were judged by Maneo Mohale, Siphokazi Jonas and Nathan Trantraal.

When we first conceived of this project, it was to New Contrast, as the oldest literary magazine in South Africa, that we gravitated for support and guidance. New Contrast is responsible for choosing the judges and administering the process. Bruce Jack Wines is responsible for providing procedural guidance and financing the project. We both market the prize.

The act of naming is such a powerful and important process. Perhaps it is my obsession with words, but I believe naming anything from a child to a poetry prize is a deeply spiritual act, which is why we often observe the naming act through ritual, action, and often in public. It takes effort and deep thought to get it right.

Cassius Clay didn’t just wake up one day and decide he liked the ring of a new name: Muhammad Ali. Spurred on by injustice, he first threw his original name into a swift river along with his Olympic gold medal. He chose to reinvent his own reality through naming, and so laid the foundation on which to build an alternate history of his world and our world.

Spurred on by a burning desire to help elevate poetry in South Africa, we debated and discussed the name for this prize with New Contrast at great length because it is so close to our hearts. We settled on ‘The National Poetry Prize’, without inserting the name of a brand or business in the title. We wanted this important project to have as much in-built resilience and planned sustainability as possible. We wished not only to give it the best chance possible to outlive any particular sponsor, but also create, through the name, a sacred space in which poets could own their own voices, without the encumbrance or philosophical friction that comes with the imposed cultural and energetic aura of a sponsor’s brand.

Also, I always experience the way sponsoring companies insert their chosen brand into the name of sports stadiums, organisations, etc. as tacky and incongruous. I remember the strange sense of loss when, in 1996, Newlands Rugby Stadium was changed to Norwich Park Newlands – 106 years after the first match was played. I had watched games there from the age of five with my father, been a Newlands ball boy and played on that endeavor-soaked field, so this name change felt almost like blasphemy, or at least a violation of history by people with money and no sense of the sacred. I even sent a letter of protest to the Cape Times. But then again, like people who are allergic to bee stings, I am overly sensitive to the sting of words.

A few sponsors later, Investec bank stepped onto the scene and reinstated the name to the original – Newlands. I was overjoyed and wrote enthusiastically to the CEO thanking him – I imagine that missive may have found its way into the inbox marked ‘From Loony People’.

I have no issue with sponsorship, of course. We all understand the financial realities and how sponsorships can benefit both the parties and public participants. We are proud sponsors of Edinburgh Academicals in Scotland and False Bay Rugby Club in Cape Town, but we don’t insist that they change the name to accommodate our support. We are a long-term foundation sponsor to the ocean rehabilitation and social upliftment organisation, The Beach Cooperative, as well as the foundation sponsor of the music education organisation The HeadStart Trust, among others; including The National Poetry Prize.

The National Poetry Prize is growing every year. With significant prize money in the context of poetry prizes globally, as well as a dedicated and efficient administrative structure, we have ambitious plans for an interactive website and marketing campaign. In time, we believe it will become financially self-sustaining and the prize will have no need of a sponsor. It will then be in a position to pick and choose a sponsor if that is what it wants to do.

If you, like me, believe in the power of words, then we will agree that the platform poetry provides is so exciting and rewarding. I also believe poetry is the best way to get at the essence of this energy of words. If language blossoms in a sun-drenched grove of fruit trees, poetry is like plunging your fingers beneath the skin of a ripe orange to free the juicy words.

Bruce Jack

judges

SIPHOKAZI JONAS

Siphokazi Jonas is a poet, playwright, performer and producer. She holds an MA in English Literature as well as an undergraduate degree in Drama and English. As writer and performer, she has produced four one-woman poetry shows in Cape Town and Johannesburg. Her most recent stage production, #WeAreDyingHere, was performed at Artscape Theatre and Joburg Theatre to positive reception. The production was adapted into a short film and has screened at several international film festivals. Jonas has been a featured act at numerous poetry sessions and festivals around the country. She has also performed alongside renowned musicians, including Sipho ‘Hotstix’ Mabuse, Freshlyground, Pops Mohamed, and Dizu Plaatjies. Jonas made history in 2016 as the first African poet ever to perform at Rhetoric in Los Angeles, California. In 2016, she was the runner-up for the Sol Plaatje European Union Award.

Siphokazi is a storyteller, and ordinary lives fuel her work in poetry and in the theatre. Her experience of growing up in Komani, in the Eastern Cape, during the transition years of South Africa’s democracy has an ongoing influence on the stories that she tells. Her work engages questions of faith, identity, gender-based violence, cultural and linguistic alienation, black women in rural spaces, and the politics of everyday lives.

MANEO REFILOE MOHALE

Maneo Refiloe Mohale is a South African editor, feminist writer and poet. Their work has appeared in various local and international publications, including Jalada , Prufrock , The Beautiful Project, the Mail & Guardian , spectrum.za, and others. They’ve served as a contributing editor for The New York Times and i-D, among others. They were Bitch Media’s first Global Feminism Writing Fellow in their inaugural 2016 class, where they wrote on race, media, sexuality and survivorship.

They have been long-listed twice for the Sol Plaatje European Union Poetry Anthology Award, and their debut collection of poetry, Everything is a Deathly Flower, was published with uHlanga Press in September 2019. In 2020, they were shortlisted for the Ingrid Jonker Poetry Prize, the youngest finalist of that year. In 2021, Everything is a Deathly Flower won the Glenna Luschei Prize for African Poetry.

NATHAN TRANTRAAL

Nathan Trantraal is a poet, cartoonist, translator, screenwriter, critic and short story author originally from Cape Town. He has made cartoons for the Cape Times , the Cape Argus and Vrye Weekblad, and writes a bi-weekly column for Rapport. His work has been exhibited in Cape Town, Munich and Amsterdam, and his poetry translated into French and published by Lanskine Paris in 2020. Nathan holds a Master’s degree in Creative Writing from Rhodes University. He is currently a lecturer at Rhodes University at the School of Languages, where he specialises in Kaapse Afrikaans and the graphic novel.

As the end of the world seemingly looms, this poem is an offering to soothe the bitterness. It is a map of the lies we tell ourselves to cope with insurmountable circumstances, and an ode to the incessant human urge to look for a silver lining despite glaring uncertainty. It is also a tribute to the dutiful parents who see the chaos hit the ground first – and do everything in their power to protect their families from it.

1st Prize

suitcases by sisanda kubeka

Before the family road trip, a father lays out the emergency kit in front of his children like a map of precious secrets. He explains, coolly and precisely, how each item is just as crucial as the next.

A box of matches and a few pints of room temperature water. A list of emergency numbers, scribed in barely legible handwriting. The morning paper.

A cooler box, filled to the point of suffocation with chilled drinks no one will be bothered to finish.

A Bible.

No one will read it but having it within arms’ length is imperative.

A pair of pliers, tweezers, and screwdrivers.

The full names of each of his children, both present and absent. A tiny flask of whiskey for when it all goes wrong.

A book of spells, hidden. For when the whiskey runs out.

Every peculiar thing is accounted for in the memoryevery corner covered with caution and care. then added to the coveted list.

The kids don’t have to think about the emergencies, he says, but he does.

The children just show up, coddled by the safe assumption that someone has thought of a backup plan.

Father- bearer of backup plans and ill-fitting nuts and bolts for the in case.

His only hope is that they don’t recognise the activity behind his eyesthe worrying, the fortune-telling, the preparation.

It sinks into the cornea like black tar- it leaks across the white marble like a runny stain on porcelain tiles.

The dad jokes are buried somewhere beneath the mess.

The reassuring gaze battles its way through.

He loads the car, and by noon the kids are in the backseat, asleep.

The mother sits in the passenger seat, unconvinced that the work is done. She has a list of her own tucked under the tongue. Behind her eyes is the eternal replay of every sermon she has ever attended. Like God’s unsung secretary, she combs through His word with so much precision she may as well have written them herself. She finds a verse fit for this moment and turns it into a prayer.

The kids would say the family stopped going to church years ago but that would be a lie.

Church never left; it evolved into something she can carry with her. Nowadays she’s had to learn to find the pastor in every mundane thing, like the silver-haired American news anchor whose voice warms up the living room as if it were an ongoing prayer. Afterall, what is church if not the sole reminder that we are on God’s time. CNN delivers God’s word like a death sentence.

The conflict in the Middle East persists, Trump’s America is burning, and the rest of the world is the unfinished sentence that dissolves tragically into a commercial break.

There are enough flies for every video of starving children in Africa because God put each one of them there. The flies are His children too, their wafer-thin wings beat through the atmosphere on His time.

Millions hover in front of the TV like famished worshippers on Sundays. And the mother has perfect attendance. Each headline is yet another emergency she must be ready for in case the rest of the family is not (and they won’t be). If faith is simply fear personified, then her love is like vengeance. The father looks at the GPS as if he doesn’t know the way already. The mother looks ahead, into the depths of her own prophecies.

This poem is a story about my village and faith. My understanding of spirituality springs from this specific place and I return here each time I run dry. It has become a recurring revelation. When I wrote it, I wanted the imagery to transport the reader to that familiar innocence and curiosity of a child in church.

2nd Prize

silence in church by zizipho bam

It has been raining all week. The rain does not pour anywhere as much as it does in my village. The bridge spread across the river even goes under. People seek refuge in their houses away from the very rain they prayed for. The rain takes everything, from the trees above the concrete to heaps of land all moving with the mass of water.

There is a Moravian Mission in the village of Tinana in the Eastern Cape. The church is at the end of the village near the bridge. The church bell sings into the Sunday dress slit and hem of the praying women. Out of hiding, the sun comes out and the village marches down to the mission.

My grandmother says not to talk, fiddle with my clothes, or run around in the house of the Lord. The white benches are filled with everyone I know from the village within a few minutes. The choir begins to sing a song from the Hymnbook and I watch as the ceiling stretches open like my grandmother’s voice. Water clashes, breaking branches and voices, the sermon is ushered softly into the river.

There is a presence of silence that I have come to know inside these walls buzzing with “How great thou Art”. When the river is empty it echoes the song of the church. When the church is full it swallows me up and I watch myself wanting to speak, wanting to sing, wanting to clap my hands but I am paralyzed by the silence.

We cannot hear each other underwater, only the praise songs God has orchestrated for the day vibrating in our throats. The pulpit is a container of prayers flowing over the riverbanks. Eroding at the alter, a whisper grows into a voice chanting praises. A cry cracks the back of the church. Then silence becomes a song humming itself between the gasps of breath.

I watch as the ceiling blasts open from the heavy load of holy noises and I want to become the ground shaking from the explosion, I want to become the furniture rising from the ground, or at least the water bursting in from all sides, swinging the doors and windows open. But I can feel my grandmother’s stare on my back and my lips do not move.

I wonder if I am ever going to be anything but silent here, perhaps free. Anything but this silence I feel creep in like a stutter as it numbs my entire body. When the storm subsides and the rain returns to the sky, my spirit is kneeling at the alter oozing a kind of peace my body has never encountered. It has also filled the pulpit with a prayer pulled out from the bottom of my belly.

And yet my lips have not moved. The pleats on my dress are still and straight. I am seated upright on the bench.

Listening to God.

3rd Prize

The poem was inspired by a conversation I had with my aunt. We had been craving koesisters and thus started talking about their origins.

I thought about the cultural significance of koesisters in South Africa, and what this means especially in this time where our complex cultural heritage is put in question.

koesisters by jerome coetzee

Sunday afternoon, the day of rest, the time of day when the world stops and the atmosphere is filled with a craving, a tradition and we go on the hunt, if the pockets allow it, but we sometimes las together to find the antie who has the sign painted in bright colours that says: Koesisters freshly baked

And our Sunday that honours rests and everything holy calls on the different names of our ancestors, the different recipes passed down as instructions: Should you feel lost, an outcast, a 2nd class citizen

It is in this moment that we feel the need to order more, if the pockets allow it, but we sometimes las together and pass on gratitude for those hands that survived to make a koesister, and we gather around that which makes us holy, the too light and too dark koesister. Honoured for its resilience, With or without klapper

With full stomachs we know we are allowed to rest, allowed to be grateful on the day we eat koesisters

Commended

I remember reading Hansel and Gretel when I was younger and being bothered less by the witch than by the father leaving his children in the woods, even after he has had the opportunity to reconsider. I wrote the poem at a time in my life when I was preoccupied with my own biological clock and the slow disintegration of my body into crow’s feet and grey hair. What I’d internalised as imminent ugliness seemed reflected in the way that men sometimes write about women online. The hatred – bitch, cunt, fat cow – feels so visceral, so rooted in the body. I wanted to communicate this heightened, almost kitsch vitriol, from the point of view of the witch. But I also wanted to offset the rage by giving her a sly sense of humour.

the woodcutter, the witch by betony adams

The earth is swung around the sun. Tick tock, the green clock’s set to its detonation: BLOOM! Spring, that hectoring thing. The sky has its goddamn heart wide open. The wanton blossoms skirts-up to the bees’ intimacies. The woods are wet. The thaw, the thaw is sore.

My clock’s ticked. This flesh tent’s full of clowns, age’s slings and cages, beaten beasts with teeth, the oestrogen trapeze. A circus trick. A nursery reversal. And you: tomcat happy with your fresh-plucked wife. A peach, they say. A plum. Conjugal stone-fruit!

I saw your poor lost poppets through the trees last season, they looked set to freeze. I followed them follow their hopeless stone rope home. Spied them fed love’s crusts and put to bed. Come day I stole their trail of bread.

But how I baked and baked for them instead.

The edible dears. Love’s little loaves, boneless as dough. My heart rose on their sweetly yeasty breath. The winter woods were dark and full of death. Yes, I barred the windows. Yes, I locked the door. But they escaped. They got away. Or should I say what is meant. You came for them. They went. You wore remorse like your grey hair, with flair. The widows and the pitchforks were all wooed.

Oh I know how I’m known, a crone. Hag, old bag, nag, a real drag. Fat cunt with the lip and the fishwife eye. Lose-lose prude or floozy. I’m a lime. My spinster liver bottling bile like the year’s preserves.

Nothing for it but the oven. In it like the witch.

‘Toyi-toying for Tutu’ recalls a memory of the day I attended the Arch’s inauguration. I reflect on how it impacted on me, how it was a formative event in my developing awareness and awakening political consciousness.

toyi-toying for tutu

(Goodwood Stadium, 7 September 1986)

by christine coates

You never know at the time that you’re being awakened, can only see it in hindsight.

When I think back to that Sunday, how we drove to Goodwood, the cooling towers of the Power Station, pink watsonias in swampy fields between sewerage works and golf club, someone’s lost shoe.

thin trains of clouds in an otherwise blue sky.

Held in suspension as a steel band played Ladysmith Black Mambazo, people milled about the stadium, youths toyi-toying, singing as they waved their fists.

I took a sip from your water bottle without shaking. Let’s not talk, I said.

A woman, praise-singing, arms held high.

began a slow shuffle dance as the Eucharist service ensued and people lined up in rows.

The day turned from gold to red. The Archbishop of Canterbury was saying … just ask for pardon.

Youths lifted their knees, toyi-toying again around and around the stadium.

I wondered how the next years would be, but for now I could feel the layers peeling away, scales falling like leaves.

We didn’t know the time but we stayed on, watching until the buses arrived to take everyone home.

Commended

Commended

The poem, ‘My SMS’, belongs to the People’s Poetry as it uses the poetics that are decodable to all categories of readers (academics, poets and general audience) and concerns itself with the matter that features in the daily life of the ordinary people, and can be performed, etc.

my sms by ms mlandu

Go, my SMS go! to him at the foot of mountain ranges of mine dumps.

Delay by no currents in space, move in your lightning’s pace.

Straight to the small gadget in his pockettrouble his heart’s pocket: as you remind him of his oath, in the City of Gold.

Wait for him in his talking box if he is still in the bowels of the earth, cracking precious rocks there beneath, my SMS.

Brave if he is behind a mini-skirt, behind a see-through skirtbewitched by the fumes of her perfumes: state the state of this stead.

Put before him this bruised body of my heart drubbed by solitude, and this husky body of my health its sap sipped by the lonely service to our home.

And, and this fireplace that is ever cold, go to eGoli!

Let him drown in this deluge of tears from my strain-reddened eyes. There in the robotted cement world, my SMS.

If you find him his brains bended by the bottle, stick there like tick to a beast: he is sure to read.

Confident, the number we use is correct. in a lightning’s lash, to him please dash!

Aware the years have heaped up since he took off his tool box and never looked back; and that it was hard even to know his Number, The man who forgot his home.

He is surely aware of the constant talk of our two children who want to know when he will be back home, please go to him!

And quick, quick, tell him, tell him! because of all this I now feel tick of something in my womb.

Tell him must come kiss new baby in this stead. Tell him my SMS!

Commended

The ‘unrest’ in KZN in July 2021 brought to light many disturbing truths about our country – about what matters and about who matters, but not always why. This poem’s epigraph from Ronnie Govender, taken from his play about the 1949 Durban riots, applies to us all. Cruelty comes in many forms.

by nick mulgrew

For the sake of TVs, the one security guard said, thousands had emerged from the corrugated hills. It was late when the largest warehouse exploded. The size of the smoke-plume could only be known by the orange flame that rose beneath it, a new bloom in the valley’s cut palms, that grew as large as the eyes that bore its witness.

The detritus left after our small apocalypse was as meaningful as an eight-day week: powder and soil; cardboard spontaneously confettied; overturned containers, their slack jaws picked clean. In the floral kingdom of plastic bags the hi-vis vests recover first, germinating on the bridge that still stood despite the protestations of those who stood on it.

Forget the two boys who lie under that loose and concrete blanket. Remember: it was for TVs

that they came – so someone had said – and because it was such a simple thing for which they had come, it was one also to overlook them among the carrion of cold-chain centres and the ribcages of factories –things that someone still cared for still.

But only things are still, and still the things are, parentless mannequins discarded outside the city’s ransacked shopfront. How naïve it is to expect care in death when there is no care in life. Sanctified, the sweeping brooms sweep out the remains of things, urned, or interred in mind –ash is only dust with provenance.

for two boys who died under queen nandi drive

“All mercy deserted them.”

– Ronnie Govender, 1949

Commended

‘Dearest’ came to me like a fever dream. I wanted to be more experimental with my poetry and writing this was an exercise in letting go and just having fun with words. The poem blends multiple realities together, drawing on how anxiety and paranoia can dominate the mind even when we are trying to be rational and logical. Writing ‘Dearest’ reminded me that even in times of grief and confusion, words will pull me through.

dearest, by ariana smit

Dearest, In the months since our final correspondence I have come to the realisation that you were wrong. It was a difficult conclusion to come to there is an intruder coming in through the bathroom window mostly because I am faced with the embarrassment of my sycophantic logic and he is inside now the reality that I did not need what I had so sweetly asked for. In the past I have been I can hear him at my bedroom door cheerful and deferential, ensuring you of my passionate devotion to the work and its mantra of he is pouring himself out now, I can see his slick coming underneath mental stability through feminist praxis my bedroom door yet there was something in that promise of life after devotion that did he is God and full of spikes not, fill me as it should have. I am left with no other option but to terminate he is spectral and wielding a blunt knife my hope climbing onto the sheets now for any future there is a pulling and a scraping against my heel with all you have taught me in it. I am grateful for the opportunity can you hear him to have been in the presence of such greatness can you hear me but I should have begun the journey the blade cannot pierce through flesh towards my own greatness he is angry a long time ago. Yours forever,

Commended a little death by charika swanepoel

A flock of Biblical swallows murmur in migratory dance and suddenly it’s Wednesday again.

The Cameroonian doctor who takes my blood pressure post-vaccination admits the people are difficult here and no one speaks English. “It’s a long way” he says, after fourteen years in Finland. I nod and he sees I understand the silence.

After a few swirling vortexes I begin to feel like myself again.

In the library’s recycling section, I find a water-damaged, Finnish copy of Coetzee’s Life and Times: Michael K:n elämä and I hold the book close as though it warmly holds me back. I started a Finnish class but keep pushing French words into the empty slots for foreign words, what to do with half the grasp?

Lead swallows screech and I bring Michael K home because I have to and perhaps, I’ll learn enough of the Finnish variant to die the first death over again, and again. Because speech is the point where the sea swallows, where sand slowly gives way to land, and man appears like a Botticelli figure only to meet a shore wind that beats but brings no water. What to do with half the grasp? The one-sided struggle with language?

‘A Little Death’ is about being lost in the world and trying to find some way through/out via language and creativity

Scan the QR code to find out more or to enter the competition visit www.newcontrast.net

“you can find poetry in your everyday life, your memory, in what people say on the bus, in the news, or just what’s in your heart.”

carol ann duffy

BETONY ADAMS

Betony Adams is finishing her PhD in physics at UKZN. She also works in science communications for The Guy Foundation.

Poetry means a lot of things to me. But recently I’ve started to appreciate how poetry can be funny at the same time as being serious.

winning poets

ZIZIPHO BAM

Zizipho Bam is a South African poet, copywriter and visual storyteller currently based in Cape Town. Born in 1996, the award-winning poet writes to reimagine and map out a path for healing through written and performance poetry. Her work has been published in New Coin Journal , Woven With Brown Thread and Yesterdays and Imagining Realities: An Anthology of South African Poetry.

Poetry for me is a way of life. It is the greatest honour to express myself and tell stories in this manner. I see it as my duty to write and create.

CHRISTINE COATES

Christine is a poet from Cape Town and holds an MA in Creative Writing from UCT. She has published three collections of poetry: Homegrown (Modjaji Books, 2014), Fire Drought Water (Damselfly Press, 2018), and The Summer We Didn’t Die (Modjaji Books, 2020). Her debut collection Homegrown received an honourable mention from the Glenna Luschei Prize. Christine’s poems and fiction have been published in local and international literary journals and widely anthologised; she has participated in numerous literary festivals and has performed her poems on Badilisha Poetry X-Change.

I write and read poetry daily to find solace, to distil my worries and cares, to return to love, to reconcile myself to the world.

JEROME COETZEE

Jerome Coetzee is a writer, poet and master’s candidate in the Department of Afrikaans at the University of the Western Cape. His research focus is on Afrofuturism in contemporary Afrikaans literature. When he is not writing, you can find Jerome at a local poetry reading event with a pen in one hand, a notebook in the other, and always with a cup of tea. In his spare time he also enjoys mentoring and facilitating online poetry workshops. He has been published in Die Student , LitNet, Writing360, MatieLit and many more. Find him on instagram @coetzee_jerome.

Poetry is life. I always tell my mentees that poetry should reflect your lived experiences. ‘Write from the heart,’ I tell them, as corny as that may sound. You must write things that will make others stop and think; as poets, we must be brave enough to say the things that others are too afraid to say.

SISANDA KUBEKA

Sisanda Kubeka is a writer, poet, theatre practitioner and artist based in Johannesburg, South Africa. She is guided by a deep commitment to making visible the lived experiences of black and queer women and gender non-conforming people, as well as black communities at large. This interest in community shaping and building is evident in the worlds she creates, supported by a feminist ideological foundation. Kubeka’s poetry has been published in many notable South African literary journals. Sisanda obtained an honours degree in Theatre and Performance from the University of the Witwatersrand and is currently completing a master’s degree in the same discipline.

Poetry is an essential means of communication for me. Where life fails to make much sense, poetry fills the gaps and gives me a tool to help me navigate the myriad emotions I feel on a daily basis.

MS MLANDU

M Soga Mlandu was born in the district of Mount Frere and lives in Mthatha in the Eastern Cape. He has published many isiXhosa school books as well as English books of essays, short stories and poems. Soga edited South Africa is Part of Africa written by Kenyan author, Anthony Kambi Masha. In 2013, Soga was the Mellon writer-in-residence at Rhodes University and he is the recipient of four South African writers’ awards.

Through writing poetry, I interpret my interactions with myself and my interactions with the world in a brief, emotive and well-worked expression.

NICK MULGREW

Nick Mulgrew was born in Durban and is currently living in Edinburgh, where he is completing a PhD in Writing Practice with the University of Dundee. He is the author of four books; the most recent is a novel, A Hibiscus Coast . Since 2014 he has run uHlanga, a poetry press publishing the best in South African poetry.

Poetry is figuring out our lives by other means. It’s not always successful, but that’s not the point.

ARIANA SMIT

Ariana Smit is a writer, editor and artist based in Cape Town, South Africa. Born in 1995, her work is inspired by growing up on the KwaZulu-Natal coast and draws on themes of home, diasporic identity, gender, sexuality, and water. Her poetry and prose have been featured in several literary journals and collections including Prufrock , Ja. Magazine, and Dwelling. Ariana is currently working on her debut novel.

Poetry is a space for freedom. I use it to laugh, cry, make fun of myself, and talk about things that are difficult to access otherwise. I love nothing more than the giddy feeling that comes from writing or reading a poem that surprises me.

CHARIKA SWANEPOEL

Charika Swanepoel is a South African scholar and doctoral student at the English Department of the University of Turku in Finland. Her research interests include modernism, religious syncretism, and secular philosophy. Her creative work has been published by Rattle, Glass Poetry, Literator, the TS Eliot Society of the UK and others. You can follow her on Twitter @CharikaSW or Instagram @charikadoingthings.

Both creatively and academically, writing helps me negotiate meaning with and from an otherwise hostile and empty reality.

Champagne and potato chips and The Seven Year Itch (1955).

the bling’s the thing

Written by: Anthony Rose

The joy of celebrity culture struck me forcefully as I was checking out the evening’s TV schedules one day to observe that, at precisely the same time, the three main UK TV channels were showing Pointless Celebrities, Celebrity Antiques RoadTrip and Celebrity Catchphrase. At other times, you could catch Celebrity Bake-Off, I’m a Celebrity get Me Out of Here and Celebrity Best Home Cook (confession: I have watched this one). While Pointless Celebrities sums it up rather neatly, celebrity is clearly a must-have accessory to many, and so it’s not surprising that our lives have been increasingly enriched by A, B, C and Jay-Z-listers keen to share the celebrity lifestyle with those with stars in their eyes and bubbles in their wine glass.

The association of celebrity and champagne goes back long before Kate Moss and Johnny Depp were the luxury bubble bath suspects in a tabloid news story claiming that the celebrity couple filled the Victorian bath at the Portobello Hotel in London with 36 bottles of the house champagne (hardly enough for a bath for one, let alone two). The Victorian-era stage actress, Sarah Bernhardt, got there first as she reputedly liked to have an occasional bath in Perrier-Jouët’s Belle Epoque Champagne. Marilyn Monroe, too, is reported to have taken a bath in 350 bottles worth of champagne. The message is clear: when you’re a celebrity, you don’t just get to drink champagne, you get to completely redefine the bubble bath.

The celebrity wine bandwagon has recently accelerated with indecent speed. No sooner had the news of a Kiwi Sauvignon Blanc launched by Sarah Jessica Parker been announced, than rosés from Kylie Minogue, and, to top it all, Cameron Diaz’ ‘clean rosé’ followed the Sex in the City star breathlessly. Then, just when you thought it was safe to emerge from behind the debris of recycled bottles, a press release arrived for the launch of Brad Pitt’s Fleur de Miraval Rosé Champagne. ‘Enough already,’ joked

someone on Twitter, but it was clearly not enough because along came yet another deathless press release singing the praises of Cara and her sisters Chloe and Poppy Delevingne’s prosecco, selling for a pricey £25 a pop. Not to be outdone, back came Kylie with a cava. Have I tasted it? I should be so lucky.

Celebrity fizz fits the narrative long embraced by the big brands that their sparkling wine is a luxury product, and the image is burnished further by association with the glamorous persona of the celebrity. In some spurious alchemical transformation, we are led to believe that this very extravagance not only sprinkles a little stardust on our own tawdry lives, but somehow transforms fizz into a wine of luxury status irrespective of its intrinsic quality. Even before Brad Pitt conceived his champagne, The Who’s lead singer brought out a Champagne Roger Daltrey to commemorate the band’s 50th anniversary, and Santana teamed up with Mumm to create Santana DVX, a fizz made by Mumm Napa Valley, accompanied by some distinctly dubious lyrics.

In the case of Jay-Z, you have to hand it to the celebrity rapper. The full story of how

Jay-Z’s Armand de Brignac maturing in Champagne Cattier’s cellars. Photograph by Anthony Rose.

he came to own the Armand de Brignac Champagne brand is worthy of a book in itself, but the fact is, however absurd the prices being asked for this champagne, made by the estimable house of Cattier in Chigny-les-Roses, and, since 2021, half-owned by LVMH, these are excellent champagnes, and Jay-Z, previously a Cristal devotee, obviously recognised their quality. What we may never know is on what occasion he uses the Armand de Brignac Midas, a giant bottle equal to 40 standard bottles of champagne that can’t be lifted, let alone poured, by a single person.

For his part, Brad Pitt was already immersed in wine with the Miraval Rosé project which he shared with Angelina Jolie. Made by the much-admired Perrin brothers of Château de Beaucastel, Châteauneuf-duPape fame, Miraval Rosé is a delicious Provence rosé. Flushed no doubt with its success, it was a logical and clever step for Pitt to join forces with the Pierre Péters family to create Fleur de Miraval Champagne whose first ‘limited edition’ of 20,000 bottles came with an accompanying celebrity price tag of €340 per bottle. Logical because Pierre Péters is one of the top champagne producers in Le Mesnil-sur-Oger in the Côte des Blancs. Clever because, as a rosé, the wine stands out from the Péters range based on blancs de blancs. This year, Pitt’s Fleur de Miraval was poured at the 94th Oscars on 27 March.

Next up for the bubble challenge was the actor and singer Idris Elba, best known for his roles in Luther and Mandela: Long Walk to Freedom. Elba, like Pitt and Jolie, also ‘makes’ a Provence rosé, but for his champagne, he teamed up with the house of Sanger in Avize after visiting Avize Viti Campus, a wine school and champagne house, with his then girlfriend (now wife), Sabrina Dhowre. After their stay, Champagne Sanger offered Elba a batch of the wine to sell under his own label. So it comes with a good story. But Elba, a self-confessed fan of Veuve Clicquot, seems to have had some involvement with creating

the blend itself. Clearly he has not just an eye but a nose for the golden globes of champagne too. Jancis Robinson, tasting his 2010 Sanger, Porte Noire Blanc de Blancs, £89, in 2020, pronounced it ‘thrillingly good’.

At around the same time, the Canadian hip-hop star Aubrey ‘Drake’ Graham, who uses the social media handle @champagnepap, launched Mod Sélection Champagnes in partnership with Maison Pierre Mignon, a family-owned champagne house based in Le Breuil in the Vallée de la Marne. According to Brent Hocking, founder and CEO of Mod Sélection Champagnes in West Hollywood, the rap artist’s input was: ‘none’. The NV Brut retails for a not insubstantial £305 while the more recent 2008 rosé and Séléction Réserve are also pricier than Moët & Chandon’s prestige cuvée, Dom Pérignon. Influenced perhaps by Armand de Brignac, the bling element spills over into the exceptionally gaudy packaging with its coppery brown metallic coating and embossed labels. In a celebrity name-drop to be proud of, Hocking says that their selection emphasises the Meunier grape ‘like our neighbours at Krug’.

Is there no end to the dizzying merry-goround of celebrity bubbles? Apparently not. But whereas in the past the link between champagne and celebrity was all about glamour per se, it seems that today the woke celebrity is adding street cred to the brand by importing the same notions of sustainability to which the Champagne region itself is waking up. Only this February, Champagne Telmont signalled that its move towards biodiversity, recycled glass, renewable energy and organic production had encouraged no lesser a figure than the Hollywood star Leonardo di Caprio to invest in the 110-year-old champagne house.

To purchase Anthony’s book, FIZZ!

Is there no end to the dizzying merry-go-round of celebrity bubbles?

in defence of worms

There was a time when the only thought people had about earthworms was how to exterminate them. Then two men, an adventurer and a stick-in-the-mud, came to their defence.

Written by: Don Pinnock Illustrations by: Ludwig K Schmarda’s in his Journeys Around the Earth, 1861

Of the great worm hunt, which began in the early 1850s, history has retained only the faintest traces.

We know there was a book, Ludwig K Schmarda’s Reise um die Erde (Journeys Around the Earth), published in 1861, and a copy or two are undoubtedly in some German university library. For all but the most dogged researcher, however, details of the journey are today inaccessible.

We are left to speculate. Contemplating another long, dreary German winter, Professor Karl Schmarda, a university biologist, chose instead to take an extended sabbatical and set sail in pursuit of his strange passion: worms. Today they are still regarded as slimy, distasteful things. In his day, they suffered added associations with death and serpents. Of the few publications of that period that survive, almost all deal with their eradication.

Undeterred by the inevitable bad jokes from his colleagues, Schmarda set sail for Ceylon, where he found yet-to-be-named

worms in profusion. He dug them out, dusted them off, sketched them and moved on. South Africa attracted him next, though he failed to find there the world’s biggest earthworm, Microchaetus rappi (up to four metres, found in the Eastern Cape). Then he braved the southern oceans to dig up worms in Australia, New Zealand and, finally, the Americas.

He returned triumphant, bearing the sketches and remains of 191 new species of leech and worm, wrote a two-volume monograph in which were included his illustrations, then drifted into scientific obscurity. He was mentioned in a few biographies, but a recent book on the history of earthworm ecology doesn’t even footnote him. The illustrations you are now looking at have not seen the light of publication for more than 140 years.

Apart from his sketches, however, the interesting question about Professor Schmarda’s travels is: Who fired his interest in this obscure branch of science, now

known as invertebrate ethology? The answer raised even more questions about strange biological fascinations. It was Charles Darwin, that Victorian champion of revolutionary ideas concerning natural selection and the origin of species.

Between 1831 and 1836, Darwin sailed around the world in the Beagle. In those five years he gathered experiences, material and notes that were, eventually, to lead him to the notion of natural selection – the idea that chance mutations over great lengths of time lead to the evolution of species from lower to higher forms, including us.

The trip, however, exhausted him and caused his health to deteriorate. He had contracted Chagas’ disease, a prolonged and debilitating ailment similar to African sleeping sickness, though it was never diagnosed in his lifetime. His doctor strongly urged him to ‘knock off all work and go and live in the country for a few weeks.’

He went to ground at the country seat of his uncle, Josiah Wedgwood (of pottery

fame). While strolling the fields, Wedgwood suggested that, by bringing earth to the surface in their castings (faeces), earthworms must undermine any objects on that surface.

The young Darwin, eager of mind but with a disinclination to travel, ever again, further than he could walk, seized on the idea. He sat on his uncle’s wide veranda drinking tea and watching worms –for weeks. On hand was JC Loudon’s Encyclopaedia of Gardening, which listed earthworms, along with snails, caterpillars and other insects, as noxious animals. Poisons for eradicating them were quoted.

Darwin disagreed with him. In 1837 he wrote a paper, which he read at the Geological Society of London. In essence, it stated that earthworms created essential vegetable mould, aerated the soil and, over time, raised surface levels of the earth. The paper was translated into German and had piqued Schmarda’s interest. His destiny was to go on a long journey and remain obscure.

Darwin was never to leave the country side again. Being of the wealthier classes (and marrying into the Wedgwood empire), he bought himself a small estate in Kent and, in the following decades, focused his attention on his other publications, which established his fame.

He hadn’t saved earthworms from a bad press, and horticultural literature continued to devise methods for their extermination. As far as worms went, that seemed to be that.

By 1877, after 40 years of battling against an often hostile church and general public over his evolutionary theories, Darwin –then famous beyond his humble imaginings – considered himself to be a spent force. In a letter to an old friend, Reverend Jenyns Blomefield, he wrote: ‘My dear Jenyns, you ask about my future work; I doubt whether I shall be able to do much more that is new. I suppose that I shall go on as long as I can without obviously making a fool of myself.

‘I have a great mass of matter with respect to variation under nature; but so much has been published since the appearance of the Origin of Species, that I very much doubt whether I retain power of mind and strength to reduce the mass into a digested whole.’

About that he was correct – no more writing about evolution was ever again to flow from his pen. For the next six years, until his death in 1882, Darwin disappeared

into profound contemplation of his lawn and the paths surrounding it. Beneath them were an unimaginable number of worms.

History was to show, however, that they had never been far from his attention. In his letters, now housed in Cambridge University Library, are notes – from academics and relations – which suggest that Darwin, glued to his estate like a barnacle, had been cautiously enlisting aid in worm work.

‘My worms have not turned up any earth since I enclosed them,’ informed one note from his niece, Lucy Wedgwood. Another brief correspondence, from Archibald Gerkie of Edinburgh University, was headed: ‘Some notes on the action of the earthworm.’

It turned out that three of Darwin’s sons (he sired 10 children) had been raising earthworms in pots and reporting the results to their father.

In October 1881, to the astonishment of those who thought Darwin was a spent force, he brought to press a book with the rambling title The Formation of Vegetable Mould Through the Action of Worms with Observations on their Habits. It was to be the foundation of modern soil science and much more.

To write it, he had hardly moved from his lawn and adjoining field, sending his sons and friends poking round fields, woods and ancient ruins all over the world. His conclusions were, as usual, controversial.

Earthworms, he discovered (by shouting at them), are deaf, but (by breathing on them) extremely sensitive to touch and have enough perception of light to distinguish between night and day. They’re hermaphrodites, but share sperm by entwining, have five hearts and can live in air or water. Without moisture they die.

To make holes, they shove sand aside when they can, and consume it when they can’t, grinding rock particles to smaller pieces in their gizzards and extracting nutrients as soil passes through their gut. They line their tunnels and any open spaces under the ground with their castings and also stack them above their holes.

At night, they close their holes by dragging leaves down them or rolling small stones over them.

Though most of this is fairly basic, little of this was known. The combined effect of these actions and what they implied,

The young Darwin, eager of mind but with a disinclination to travel, ever again, further than he could walk, seized on the idea. He sat on his uncle’s wide veranda drinking tea and watching worms – for weeks.

Charles Darwin.

however, turned Darwin’s final book into an overnight success.

By painstakingly observing them (at night – earthworms are nocturnal), Darwin discovered that, in seizing leaves to close their holes, the worms always grabbed the pointed end, which permitted easy passage down the hole. This occurred even when he cleared all leaves and ‘strewed’ small paper triangles – the earthworms always attached themselves to the sharpest point. This, wrote Darwin, implied intelligence.

By counting and averaging the number of worms in various soils, he calculated that in temperate zones there were around 133,000 worms a hectare (some recent estimates run at more than two million).

Weighing their castings brought to the surface, he discovered that earthworms were the planet’s prime earth-moving equipment, bringing an annual average of up to 30 tons of soil to the surface across each hectare. In a million years, ‘not very long in a geological sense,’ they’d covered Britain in around 320 billion tons of earth.

The planet’s entire soil, he speculated, had passed through the alimentary canals of worms. To it they’d added useful intestinal chemicals, broken-down vegetable matter and ground-down sand. Without this process, almost nothing on earth would grow – and life as we know it wouldn’t have existed at all.

From forays by his sons to Beaulieu Abbey in Hampshire, a Roman villa in Gloucestershire, the remains of a Roman town at Silchester, Stonehenge and other similar sites, Darwin assembled information suggesting that ancient walls and pillars (such as those at Stonehenge) could be toppled by the action of worms beneath them. Entire ruins, he found, were quite soon covered over by the castings of earthworms.

‘Archaeologists,’ he wrote, ‘are probably not aware how much they owe to worms for the preservation of many ancient objects.’

In an attention to detail that would surely have driven a less pedantic mind crazy, Darwin measured the volume of dry castings that rolled down slopes, wet castings washed down by rain, and ‘castings blown to leeward by wind’.

He could write: ‘In a day of rain, for every 100 yards in length in a valley with sides sloping six degrees, 480 cubic inches of

damp earth, weighing above 23 pounds, will annually reach the bottom. On the same slope annually, nearly seven pounds of dry castings will cross a horizontal line, 100 yards in length.’ These are merely statistics until you realise that Darwin was out there with ruler and scales, measuring entire hillsides.

‘When we behold a wide, turf-covered expanse,’ he wrote in the conclusion to his book, ‘we should remember that its smoothness, on which so much of its beauty depends, is mainly due to all the inequalities having been slowly levelled by worms.

‘It may be doubted whether there are many other animals which have played so important a part in the history of the world, as have these lowly organised creatures.’

It may be doubted, one could add, that so much important scientific speculation had ever taken place on the evidence of a small field and a single front lawn.

A year after the book’s publication, Darwin had joined his beloved worms beneath the ground. His study is today considered to be the first work in a then-unnamed branch of biology –ecology – and the foundation of both invertebrate ethology and soil science.

As the English translations were prepared, German, French, Italian and Russian editions were being translated.

Professor Ludwig K Schmarda, then 61, would undoubtedly have read the German translation. If any colleagues were still around who had doubted the sanity of his great worm hunt, he would have felt well vindicated.

Darwin, it seems, never read Ludwig K Schmarda’s Reise um die Erde or he would surely have referred to the monographs in his study. It’s a pity. He would have enjoyed them.

This article first appeared in Maverick Life on 19 July 2020.

Anstey’s Building, Johannesburg. Photograph by Donald Davies.

art deco

Written by: Tanya Farber Photography: Alain Proust

On a cool April morning in Paris in 1925, the area around the Grand Palais on both sides of the Seine was a hive of activity and excitement.The very first day of the Exposition Internationale des Arts Décoratifs et Industriels Modernes had just dawned, and 15,000 exhibitors from 20 different countries were ready to receive eager visitors. Over the next seven months, this feast of modernity drew no fewer than 16 million guests and, in essence, birthed a new movement in visual arts –Art Deco – that broke with the traditionalism of the past.

Associated with the age of jazz, glamour, Hollywood, modernity and advances in travel, it made its mark on graphic design, ceramics, fabrics, household artifacts, and, most notably, architecture.

More than 12,000 kilometres away, on the tip of Africa, the nascent country of South Africa had only existed as a union for one and a half decades, erasing the separate entities of two Boer republics and two British colonies.

While cities like New York, Los Angeles and Miami in the States quickly embraced the modern aesthetics of the movement into their architecture, it would take a few more years before South Africa caught on.

What it left in its wake at the tip of Africa is fascinating: In the same way that sedimentary rock can capture and preserve a moment in ancient history and show

what nature had come up with at the time, so architecture does the same for humanity.

Our built environment leaves behind a three-dimensional map of style, power, taste, architectural fashion and, sometimes in its wake too, destructive forces that come to bear on the buildings of that human-made place.

In sum, historical moments and movements make and break architectural styles.

And, as it so happened, two major cities in South Africa experienced their first big boom of development shortly after Art Deco had established itself in the USA and parts of Europe.

In those regions, at first it was all sleek geometry, sunbursts, bold colours and decorative motifs, but within a short space of time, it became slightly more subdued, albeit more sleek, incorporating chrome plating and stainless steel, and featuring more curved and smooth surfaces.

This resulted from advances in transport, where aerodynamism was key, and a feeling of ‘motion’ made its way into the style, morphing then into a revised version of Art Deco known as Streamline Moderne.

In the case of Johannesburg – and its nearby mining town of Springs – and Durban, their Art Deco fates were linked, and both the more decorative style and the streamlined style began to appear.

By the time South Africa became a Union in 1910, a railway system was in place between then Natal and Transvaal so that the goods could move between the ports and the Witwatersrand goldfields.

The First World War had interrupted the growth of the cities, but by the time the Art Deco exhibition had revealed her treasures in 1925, the goldfields were flourishing once again.

‘At that time,’ says Donald Davies, chairperson of the Durban Art Deco Society, ‘our international economy also began to flourish, and so you found huge volumes of goods and services moving through the ports of Natal.’

With people pouring into Durban looking for work, high-rise buildings sprang up in the CBD where people hadn’t stayed before, he explains.

Suddenly, there were blank canvases in the form of new buildings on which the Art Deco style could be poured.

‘There were very specific things that drove Art Deco,’ says Davies, ‘and one of

them was a resistance to a British style.’

With a growing Indian population in the very cosmopolitan Durban, and Johannesburg in the old Boer republic quickly becoming one of the most cosmopolitan cities in the world, there was a drive to move away from colonial architecture imposed by Britain.

‘Neither city wanted to adopt British architecture as they flourished. It was a sort of style rebellion against the Brits. You will also find Art Deco in places like George, and even in platteland dorpies you will get a splash of it.’

In Durban, Art Deco expressed itself in the typical geometric shapes and bold colours of the movement, and even as it showed off the ornamental glamour that was typical of the style globally, local motifs and themes were incorporated as had happened elsewhere.

Quadrant House on the Victoria Embankment, for example, reflects a maritime background, whereas buildings like Ebrahim Court and the Essop Moosa Building embody the spirit of the Muslim traders who were working their way up the city’s hierarchy in the 30s.

The elegant Hollywood Court, as the name suggests, targeted those who wanted to associate themselves with glamour, while the lion motifs on the beautiful Surrey Mansions with its rounded corners spoke of Africa.

While Johannesburg is still regarded as one of the richest treasure troves of Art Deco across the globe, it wasn’t over a long period that the style made its mark.

It just happened to be a decade of a major growth spurt for the city’s economy.

As architecture academic Federico Freschi describes it in his paper published in De Arte: ‘In accordance with other centres in South Africa, the Art Deco style arrived late in Johannesburg and departed early. The bulk of the buildings now described as Art Deco were erected between 1931 and 1939, at least half a decade after it had become common currency in America and Europe.’

He says that all the stylistic features associated with Art Deco are visible in the buildings of the period and, at a superficial level, Johannesburg ‘might even be seen as a kind of Art Deco microcosm since it is within this period and often in the general style that Johannesburg experienced massive expansion and modernisation.’

academic Federico Freschi

his paper published in De Arte: ‘In

Africa,

While Art Deco residential apartment blocks can be found in high numbers around the city – especially in Killarney, Greenside and Yeoville – the best-known and most beautiful public buildings or mixed-use buildings include His Majesty’s Building on Commissioner Street, the Barbican Building on Rissik Street, and the exquisite Anstey’s Building on the corner of Joubert and Jeppe streets.

The latter street became a repository for many notable corner buildings, including Castle Mansions and Manner’s Mansions and, most famously, Astor Mansions, which is said to mimic the Chrysler Building in New York, displaying as it does the same repeated curved zigzag.

Another celebrated building that speaks of Johannesburg’s economic power at the time is the graceful Anglo American headquarters built in 1937 at 44 Main Street in the CBD.

Despite the CBD’s fall as the powerhouse area of the city, Anglo American stayed there until 2020 when it finally moved to Rosebank, leaving this gorgeous building behind.

Freschi highlights the abandoning of

As architecture

describes it in

accordance with other centres in South

the Art Deco style arrived late in Johannesburg and departed early. The bulk of the buildings now described as Art Deco were erected between 1931 and 1939, at least half a decade after it had become common currency in America and Europe.’

Anglo American Corporation headquarters building, 44 Main Street, Johannesburg.

Detail, entrance door, 44 Main Street, Johannesburg.

The lobby, 44 Main Street, Johannesburg.

Hollywood Court, Durban. Photograph by Donald Davies.

Surrey Mansions, Durban. Photograph by Donald Davies.

the Gold Standard in 1932 and the coalition government of 1933 as underpinning the economic boom that ushered in the era of Art Deco in South Africa.

It was during this era that architects engaged in Art Deco as a type of ‘selfconscious modernity’ that was about ‘style rather than substance’.

Using the so-called Gold Standard, many countries had used a fixed quantity of gold as the standard economic unit for their monetary system.

As the Great Depression struck, many countries went off it and devalued their currencies.

South Africa remained on it briefly, but finally, under JBM Hertzog, abandoned it.

The price of gold in the land then shot up and a new phase of economic expansion kicked in.

The following year saw the coalition between Jan Smuts’s South African Party, which was predominantly English, and JBM Hertzog’s Nationalist Party, which was Afrikaans.

With these new political configurations and an economic growth spurt, South Africa turned away from the colonial classical style of architecture.

Buildings got taller, Art Deco’s more eclectic nature became appealing, and local architects saw themselves as part of a global movement rather than the designers in a somewhat parochial country.

‘Architects in South Africa were increasingly incorporating depictions of African animals and people into their decorative programmes, particularly in public buildings. The challenge to the orthodoxy of colonial classicism began to assert itself in the early 1930s … and this led to experimentation with other forms,’ says Freschi.

Johannesburg embraced the inspirational modern style of Art Deco, especially as it appeared in New York, and along with its growing cosmopolitanism was dubbed Little New York.

It did not take long, however, for the Art Deco excitement to reach Cape Town too.

According to Andre van Graan, a heritage architect in Cape Town, ‘the style was disruptive and at odds with the prevailing – and extremely conservative – approach of the practitioners at the Cape Institute for Architecture. Instead, Art Deco architects

were taking inspiration from worldly developments, natural phenomena and archaeological discoveries.’

He adds: ‘Across the city, office buildings, apartment blocks, cinemas and petrol stations were adopting the new style.’

Still passionate about these buildings, he says one of the most beautiful Art Deco buildings in Cape Town is the Holyrood apartment building in Queen Victoria Street.

‘The building was designed by Cedric Sherlock in 1939 in the so-called “Streamlined Moderne” style with its focus on vertical movement. It reflects a shift in the way housing in Cape Town was perceived, and marks the move to flat building which was a new form of housing for the city,’ he explains.

Another gem in the Mother City is Market House on Greenmarket Square. While it reflects Art Deco’s very distinctive character, it shows how Art Deco itself is highly eclectic.

Says Van Graan of Market House: ‘It was designed by the great Art Deco architect WH Grant in 1930, it has highly decorated Art Deco facades influenced by the 1925 exhibition in Paris. It draws inspiration from Cubism, Aztec and Inca discoveries, the exhibition itself, and even includes South African references, such as the protea.’

But perhaps one of the best-known Art Deco buildings in the country, listed by Van Graan among his favourites, is Mutual Heights on Darling Street.

It came at the tail end of the Art Deco era, shortly before the Second World War gave way to a far more functional style of architecture known as International Style which did away with the ornamental excess of its predecessor.

‘This is probably one of the best Art Deco buildings in South Africa. Designed by Fred Glennie and Louw & Louw Architects, it was constructed in 1939 and embodies Art Deco forms in its stepped ziggurat outline. It has magnificent bas reliefs by Ivan Mitford-Barberton and a spectacular entrance foyer and banking hall, superbly detailed and constructed of marble and travertine.’

While Art Deco buildings reflect a rich layer of history in the country, how they are perceived and treated today also speaks of the shifts in human history and how it makes its mark on the built environment.

According to Van Graan, about Art Deco buildings in Cape Town, ‘I don’t think that they are sufficiently appreciated, and changes and demolitions have had an impact on them. Changes to windows, where steel horizontally glazed windows are changed to aluminium windows, and where balconies are enclosed, have detracted from their appearance. There is a lot of development pressure which has led to the loss of many apartment buildings through demolition or over-scaled additions.’

In other parts of the country, it is decay rather than development that has stripped many of these beautiful buildings of their once-proud beauty.

But only time will tell what their fate is: again, just like the sedimentary rock, new layers of history are still being added.

Mutual House, Cape Town.

Holyrood, Cape Town.

The old banking hall, Mutual Heights, Cape Town.

Mutual Heights, Cape Town.

Mutual Heights, Cape Town.

red-tailed tropicbird

A tiny white dot coming closer, up there in the blue. What a sky. Full of possibility. Bird-watching is like that sometimes, the lawn bright, Constantia Nek car park at my back glittering in windscreens. And me watching the sky.

Written by: Vernon Head Photography by: Trevor Hardaker

RARE BIRD ALERT!

My iPhone still blurting out the message, a bit like a foghorn before a storm. Other birders are on their way. But I’m first on site, on the scene as it were, at the hotspot. And it was hot here, almost midday. Cape Town summertime. Cars full of birders are coming – yes, that is what we are called, like swimmers swim and runners run, like the living breathe, birders ‘bird’ (it’s a new verb!); some call us ‘twitchers’, which is okay too (especially in this heat); we chase the rarest birds, those that are not supposed to be here, lost in a way, then found by us. It’s our special way of seeing the natural world, a revelation that has changed my life, and then we place the bird name on our list, oh what a list it is, collected memories, ultimate triumphs – cars full of birders are coming.

I squinted at the white dot, still so far away.

Restaurant car parks are always busy on a Saturday afternoon, it seems. Rows of cars glistened, a dark blue one twinkling like a bay. The food must be good. I could smell seafood, hear it sizzle, many prawns on a grill, or maybe a big freshly caught kabeljou curling with that crackled skin. A group of little boys chased each other on the lawn near the sprinkler, the tall one holding the shortest one’s takkie in the air, out of reach, all of them laughing.

A car windscreen looks like a tiny sea of shiny swimming fishes; the sun can do that on curved glass. As it so happens, it was a seabird I was after right now, how appropriate, I guess we needed little bits of sea up here then, on this high saddle

between two mountains, vineyards below, houses below that, yes-yes, I was quite far from the coast to be sure! Crazy birder, you might say, looking for birds in unlikely places. The thing is, someone had seen this particular seabird drifting high overhead while they were playing golf in the middle of suburbia, and somehow the word had gotten out to us straightaway. It’s heading towards the gap in the mountains, can you believe it, probably a shortcut to Hout Bay and the ocean beyond, they had said. So here I stood, binoculars dangling, spotting scope fixed to a tripod trained up into the air like some sort of gun, or at least that’s what the little boys called it. They stood next to me in a row now, one of them with a finger in his nose. What are you looking at, sir? I’m looking for a Red-tailed Tropicbird.

It might just come up this way. See that white dot over there?

This particular species’ Latin name is Phaethon rubricauda, breeds in the Mozambique Channel, scarce further south, with only four or five records here, preferring the tropical and subtropical open waters, loves fish, especially flying fish, and squid (not grilled prawns), is pure white with a red bill and long red tail and a wingspan of just over a metre, will be a new one for me, is what I wanted to say to the boys, but they had run off.

Oh, oh, oh, what a white dot was coming my way!

The thing about watching the sky is that it’s never empty, anywhere. Birders know every kind of sky. (They know every kind of wilderness, birds are everywhere.) All of us know skies, the thing is, we humans have claimed it all, you see. The whole world is our sky, all open space taken now, nothing really wild any more, freedom gone. Two helicopters had shuddered by already, one quite low shaking the leaves off the tops of the oak trees nearby, tourists inside wanting a closer look at Constantia Nek’s menu written on a big blackboard on the edge of all those cars, I surmised. Seafood is king in Cape Town, in any seaside city, I suppose. Not much of it left these days, of course, I could’ve told the boys that, time is running out at the coast, I would have said. Save the Sea, I would have gone on, with a smile. Save the Seabirds. Down below towards the far mountains in the east a Mango Airlines flight was cutting the horizon in two and I could just make out its orange tail, as if it were a kind of life raft, bright, adrift and alone on the swell.

We are alone, you know, on the land, in the air, in the sea. A single thing on a single globe, revolving around and around in vain, trying to figure ourselves out. But some of us have the birds at least. A bit of a relief, like biting into crispy-fried calamari with lemon-butter sauce after a long day on the beach, like landing a prize gamefish for the grill or swimming from A and finally getting to B.

The white dot was so much bigger now, rising, higher, perhaps lifted by a breeze, pushing at the air. I couldn’t get calamari and prawns out of my head.

Are we as lost as a tropicbird?

Cloudless days are really quite beautiful,

come to think of it, moisture never far away though, the scent of life ever-present in the air, if we care to look, holding all of us together, I reckon, with invisible glue made of hope.

Something special has got to happen here. Now. I smelled the sky, nostrils wide, perhaps a nectar-from-pollen thing was overtaking my mind, the fragrance of summer flowers on the edge of the car park alive. I can feel it approaching on this wave of heat. This air is like music too, a bit of a fanfare would be nice, I might have told the boys, but they were too busy rolling down a steep bit of garden. Everything is rushing in this place of cars and food and fun, all of it a wild slope long ago, you know, I would have said, pointing to distant fynbos hills. Life can be like a seabird birdsong, I might have yelled.

The white dot was right above me now, the sun catching its side so that I could see clearly, not really winged at all, more like one of those floating hearts; you get balloons in all shapes and sizes these days, some filled with hot air, others with dreams.

The shortest boy said that he liked balloons and I couldn’t argue with that.

To purchase Vernon Head’s book, The Search For the Rarest Bird in the World.

sea dogs

‘When I enter the ocean I am escaping the human world where I am alone and where I am not at the top of the food chain. It’s a place where wild elements are involved and where I’m not in control of everything. You are also entering a silent world where creatures treat you differently.’

Steve Benjamin, Animal Ocean Seal Snorkeling Experience

Written by: Bobby Jordan Photography: Steve Benjamin

We are closing in. Nervously, noiselessly, we step onto the wooden raft that shivers on the glassy skin of Wednesday morning. Just Brett and I. But there are three of them, all with sharp teeth. Brett has a stick with a hook on the end. Fat lot of good that will do if things get ugly, I think to myself, although Brett doesn’t look worried at all. One of them lifts its head. This is it. No, wait, it has gone back to sleep, all 100kg of it in a furry brown pelt and white whiskers.

‘Lazy bugger,’ chuckles Brett, lifting his stick. Suddenly they are all up and grunting and lurching across the raft on their flippers, then disappearing quickly over the side. Except for the biggest one, which turns right on the edge to tell us how disgusted he is with the whole situation – being hustled into the drink at dawn by two humans armed with a stick. When we peer into the water they are still there, trailing bubbles from their fur and ogling us as they flash past.

Sea dogs. Also known as Cape fur seals. I am on a Wildlife Walk at the Victoria & Alfred Waterfront in Cape Town, to learn more about a species I have lived alongside most of my life and never understood. Seals at the beach, at the harbour, at the bottom of the kelp forest when you’re holding your breath, and surfacing next to you in the backline at Muizenberg, just as the shark siren goes off. We have an awkward relationship, man and seal, as if we’d like to be friends but just know somehow that it wouldn’t be a good idea. Once, long ago, when I was less sensible, I tried to pat one on the head and had a rude awakening; they’re just not that into us. ‘Seals are not pets,’ says Brett, who leads me past a ‘haul-out’ spot on the quayside where a Fisheries official received a nasty bite. ‘They are wild animals –not something you stroke. They are also remarkable animals, playful and inquisitive, and much stronger than most people realise,’ says Brett, who has met enough of them to keep a safe distance. ‘They can beat each other to a pulp – that doesn’t seem to bother them. They behave a bit like dogs – they will bark and come and investigate anything.’

Brett is my guide: a veteran animal welfare expert who can virtually speak seal, or so it seems judging by the way they mutter away every time he draws near. Brett is the Two Oceans Aquarium Marine Wildlife Management Programme Coordinator –

a nuggety, good-natured environmentalist who wears the ethereal calm of somebody who understands his tiny place in the animal kingdom. Yes, he happens to be human, but that has little to do with him, really.

His task now is to make sure humans and wildlife all get along, as much as possible, within the V&A precinct, where there are insightful lessons to be learnt about cohabitation with our marine cousins.

The Cape fur seal is one of 33 seal species, from the smallest – Siberian Baikal seal at less than 40g – to the Antarctica elephant seal, which grows to over three tons. Cape fur seals are physiologically unusual in that they have ears with external flaps (true seals don’t) and large fore flippers and forward-rotating hind flippers that allow them to not only swim more powerfully but to gallop on land. This could explain why they are not universally adored: they can chase after you if annoyed, and move surprisingly fast, even the big ones, which weigh in at over 250kg. But for most people who spend more time looking at the ocean than playing or working in it, seals are cute.

Nevertheless, protocols must be observed, insists Brett, whose ‘conflict minimisation’ job at the V&A is a vital precaution in Africa’s most popular tourist destination –which is equally popular among seals, who are drawn to the fish and their own luxury accommodation. A case in point is the jetty Brett has just policed, one of several lashed together temporarily, directly in front of the Table Bay Hotel. The seals moved on almost as soon as the jetties arrived a few weeks back. So Brett and his two patrollers chase them off every morning, much as they used to do inside the V&A marina, where seals frequently used to nap aboard luxury yachts and powerboats, before Brett made life difficult for them. ‘Seals like to come here because there are lots of fish and spaces to climb out and rest,’ he explains.

‘On the boats they were sheltered from the wind and the rain – a great place to be – but were causing damage and breaking things.’ Seals excrete oil through their skins – a natural waterproofing – which is great for seals but not for boat owners and their Meranti decks.

But troubles in the marina were only one of several factors giving rise to the V&A’s wildlife management programme; a far more

Two Oceans staff on a seal rehab mission in Hout Bay.

From left to right: Vet Dr Brandon Spolander attends to a seal injured by a plastic entanglement. V&A staffer holds up a plastic hoop removed from the injured seal.

The platform is specifically designed to allow team members breathing space while disentangling plastic from seals.

A member of the V&A’s seal rescue team swims beneath the seal platform with a plastic-removing ‘hook’.

serious problem is plastic, which humans dump in the ocean at the rate of around 8 million pieces a year – a staggering total estimated volume of 269,000 tons. With their curious natures, seals are particularly at risk of entanglement, with plastic bait hoops a major cause of injury. The increasing number of casualties on their doorstep was a major driver of the V&A’s wildlife programme.

Brett leads me onto a wooden platform adjoining the Two Oceans Aquarium, where a large male seal is trying to sleep. ‘That’s Blondie.’ He points out the light streak on the furry pelt that stirs as we approach. Brett’s stick is clearly not popular – and the seal lets out a series of rasping barks that stops us in our tracks. But even at a distance we can clearly see a deep scar encircling Blondie’s neck. ‘It’s looking a lot better than it was,’ says Brett of the old plastic bait hoop wound. ‘The salt water keeps wounds quite clean and we don’t see a lot of infections.’

Unlike the floating jetties in the Victoria Basin, the fixed jetty inside the marina has been custom-made to facilitate an effective solution when seals become ensnared in plastic. The jetty slats are wider and higher than normal, which allows divers to sneak beneath the jetty with specialised equipment of the kind Brett brandishes in his hand. By maneuvering the hooked poles between the slats, divers can hook onto the plastic entanglements and pull so that they snap free.

‘It works really well – the seal doesn’t even know the diver is there,’ explains Brett. ‘He will bark and then lie down again.’

The technique isn’t intrusive and reduces the need to sedate seals in order to remove the plastic that’s cutting into their flesh, allowing affected seals to get back into the wild and compete on even terms. Many of the V&A seals nurse other injuries when they arrive, for the Waterfront population are largely outcasts – males still too weak or young to contest with alpha seals over at the breeding colonies, and young females still hoping to get in there.

While seals are only one of several target species in the V&A’s wildlife programme –the list includes Cape clawless otters, seabirds and sunfish – they are, in many ways, the flagship species, accounting for the bulk of the workload.

Brett’s efforts speak to a new ethos of

living beside nature, rather than off it, and my wildlife walk suggests that seals are finally getting the respect they deserve after enduring a fairly torrid few centuries. In Namibia, home to the most Cape fur seals – of which there are roughly two million along the southern African coastline – the seals are still hunted at the rate of 60,000 pups and 8,000 adults a year: the pups for their fur, and the adults for their meat. Closer to home, seals are often targeted by fishermen, who consider them a pest and competitor for increasingly scarce resources.

Are we pissed off with seals? Are we jealous of their superior underwater skills (30-minute breath-hold and 1,500ft dives)? Or does this relationship mirror our other largely unsuccessful attempts to live at close quarters with other wild animals such as baboons?

With their obvious intelligence, seals also enchant us, as if we can’t help imagining what it must be like down there, mucking about with dolphins and jellyfish.

But there is good news too about our relationship with seals. Humans are increasingly spending money keeping seals alive, not killing them. A recent mystery of unexpectedly large numbers of dead seals along the coast evoked widespread sympathy, and social media amplified civil society concerns.

Tourists can swim with seals off Hout Bay, or watch them from Seal Island ferries. The rise of eco-tourism and Marine Protected Areas is contiguous with increased appreciation for the benthic environment (the environment at the bottom of a body of water, like a sea or river bed), and was evident long before filmmaker Craig Foster’s Oscar-winning My Octopus Teacher. There are currently two dedicated seal snorkelling companies operating out of Cape Town, and one in Plettenberg Bay. In addition, scuba-diving operators visit the waters surrounding some of the biggest seal island colonies around Cape Town.

‘They are big mammals that interact with you, not because they are trained to do so or being fed, but simply because they are curious and interested,’ explains photographer and adventure tourism operator Steve Benjamin from Animal Ocean Seal Snorkeling Experience.

Benjamin says the allure of the Cape fur seal is the chance to interact with a wild

mammal in a world increasingly devoid of wilderness experience.

Says Benjamin: ‘When a seal visits you underwater, it is genuinely curious and that is special – and finding curious and naive (about humans) animals these days is ridiculously hard.

‘It really feels as if they are letting you into their world for a short time, and that is what people connect with; being able to enter the water and see these creatures behaving on their own terms, and to leave knowing that you have just looked into a natural world for a while and left again.’

I am back with Brett, staring into the seal world and feeling confused as another basking male stares past my thoughts into the wild part of me. Yes, we are all entangled. Can we ever be set free?

The question bubbles up from the sediment of a trillion bursting days. I poke it with a stick.

For more on adventures with seals.

humility and the x factor

Written by: Bruce Jack

Like its mother, Pinot Noir, brilliant examples of Pinotage are few and far between. But like Pinot Noir, those examples, if you are fortunate enough to encounter them, are life-changing. Initially they are so enticing and at the end of the bottle so beautifully satisfying – like a light goes on in your mind; like a secret trapdoor opens and you step into another world – a fabulously ethereal world of heady aromas, seductive flavours and intense, luscious sensations. Your head spins and you fall in love.

My personal experience is that wines like these aren’t readily crafted from varieties that are generally of better than average quality, like Cabernet Sauvignon, Tempranillo, Merlot or Shiraz. Rather, they seem to be made from the recalcitrant, edgy varieties like Pinot Noir, Pinotage, Monastrell and Nebbiolo. I have no idea why this should be. But something magical happens when these tricky varieties unexpectedly shine. The effect is momentous – as though they rocket you up to heaven, blazing past those other consistent and trustworthy achievers.

These are outsider varieties, grown and made by people whose passion is equal to their obsession. Like those who believe in these varieties, they appear to play by their own rules. And they don’t much care if you misunderstand them.

But for all their oblique personas, it’s also true that the best examples of these varieties make a spectacular impression and stay with you forever. Just one bottle and they become that elusive holy grail of a wine experience all my fellow wine nerds will recognise.

Addictively, you wade through dozens, sometimes hundreds, of underwhelming examples in the obsessive expectation of replicating that first-crush wonderfulness. Delicious complexity, luscious balance, intensity of poised, clean, layered flavours; and above all a palpable, arresting, charged character. These wines have presence, the X factor. They make you smile giddily and encourage you to jump around with delight. They light up the world of wine. And that’s why we love them so unconditionally.

Pinotage terrifies winemakers. Like a thoroughbred racehorse it smells your fear at 20 paces, making the confrontation more daunting for the apprehensive and inexperienced. I have been humbled by every attempt at growing and crafting a great Pinotage. Every now and again my team and I rise to the challenge.

The Challenge

You do not have to climb Mount Kilimanjaro, the highest mountain in Africa. It is certainly not a challenge to undertake lightly. However, if you are born in Africa, it is something that seems to appeal on a deep and meaningful level to many people. Perhaps it is about standing on the highest point of our continent. It’s a very African challenge and for many a spiritual rite of passage.

In the same way, no one forces you to make Pinotage. In at least two cases I know of, Pinotage has gone ‘wrong’ in the cellar and destroyed burgeoning wine businesses, forcing investors to sell out of a financial cul-de-sac. Pinotage represents a serious risk – to both the experienced and those unfamiliar with its idiosyncrasies.

As a result, Pinotage terrifies winemakers. Like a thoroughbred racehorse it smells your fear at 20 paces, making the confrontation more daunting for the apprehensive and inexperienced.

I have been humbled by every attempt at growing and crafting a great Pinotage. Every now and again my team and I rise to the challenge. A good result is powerfully energising, but never relaxing because you know the next vintage could spell disaster for your reputation.

But because Pinotage entices you with

flashes of unquestionable brilliance, you keep trying to capture this in a bottle. It is ruthless when you make a mistake, but it can also carry you to the top of the world.

The Basics

Pinotage is basically a South African grape variety. While there is Pinotage grown elsewhere in the world, notably in the United States, New Zealand, Brazil, Israel and Canada, the vast majority (over 98% I reckon) of all Pinotage vines are planted in South Africa.

In 1925, Professor Perold of the University of Stellenbosch ‘invented’ Pinotage by crossing Pinot Noir and a relatively obscure Rhône variety, Cinsault. In those days in South Africa, Cinsault was called Hermitage, in the same way that Shiraz was called Hermitage in Australia. The name Pinotage comes from the meshing of these two names – ‘Pino’ from Pinot Noir and ‘tage’ from Hermitage – Pinotage. Today it is the most widely planted locally bred variety in South Africa, significantly sitting at 8th most planted grape – about 6,500 hectares.

Grape hybridisation takes place naturally and spontaneously as well as intentionally, as in the case above. Another famous intentional hybridisation is the Riesling/ Sylvaner hybrid from Dr Müller of Thurgau, called – you guessed it – Müller-Thurgau, once planted more extensively than Riesling in Germany. Recent DNA analysis has shown that the parents are in fact Riesling and the evocatively named Madeleine Royale.

Unexpectedly, unlike Cinsault and especially Pinot Noir, Pinotage has great colour derived from an abundance of acylated anthocyanins (robust, stable and easily polymerised colour compounds) in the skin. Unlike Pinotage, the main anthocyanin found in Pinot Noir grape skins (often over 65%) is called Malvin3-Omonoglucoside, and is a non-acylated anthocyanin, which means it is an easily damaged type of colour compound (especially by oxygen, which renders it colourless). This is the main reason that Pinot Noir often has a low colour intensity compared to varieties like Shiraz or Pinotage. Cinsault is hardier on the colour front, but not a standout colour

champion either.

At one time, this led to speculation that Pinot Noir wasn’t one of the parents of Pinotage. However, once you have grown and made both varieties, other characteristics common to both become obvious.

Sensorially, there are similarities. Pinotage displays aromas of both Pinot Noir and Cinsault, showing strawberry and cherry that one finds in Pinot Noir (especially in cooler Pinotage vineyard sites), and blackcurrant and plum that one finds in good Cinsault examples. Pinotage also often has a hint of dark chocolate flavour in the grape, as does ripe Pinot Noir. This comes through more often in Pinotage wine, and is often confused with a barrel flavour, when in fact it is a flavour found in the grape and the wine naturally. Finally, there is an intriguing Indian spice you get in Pinot Noir during fermentation (especially in Sonoma County) that I’ve only ever also come across in Pinotage. High-altitude sites display intense mulberry, which again can be picked up in Cinsault, but for me it is also enticingly reminiscent of Malbec.

Anyway, the suspicious murmurs of false parentage were eventually quashed in 2007, when Pinot Noir and Cinsault were confirmed – by means of a DNA PCR analysis by ENTAV (Etablissement National Technique pour I’Amélioration de la Viticulture) of France – as the proud parents.

To me, Pinotage has more in common with Pinot Noir than Cinsault in the vineyard. Like its ‘mother’, Pinot Noir, Pinotage can be a challenging variety to grow and make well, whereas Cinsault can be pushed in the vineyard, is disease resistant and relatively easy to work in the winery. Much of the viticultural literature refers to Pinotage as an easy grower, which it is, but I’ll explain why that doesn’t make it less tricky.

In the vineyard, both Pinot Noir and Pinotage are only moderately disease resistant and, more significantly, react negatively to high yield – which is the number of bunches or amount of fruit weight each vine carries, and therefore, by extrapolation, what each hectare of vineyard can bear.

If you want to make great, or even just good, complex wine from these varieties, you have to allow the vine to carry much

less fruit than you would for many other red varieties (this fact again sets them apart). The obvious financial implications follow: these are varieties you seldom see being made well in big, cheap volumes. I don’t believe every vineyard has to be a low-yield producer. Balance in viticulture is everything and vineyards are grown for specific purposes – not all vineyards are grown to make poised, layered fine wine. You can grow a vineyard to carry 20 tons per hectare on deep, flat, alluvial soil with irrigation and exuberant vegetative growth. The resultant wine will be perfect for juicy entry-level price points. In this sense, the grapes produced in this way are ‘fit for purpose’ and the vineyard is, from this perspective, in balance.

On the flip side, if you want to make intricately complex, breathtakingly lovely wines with deep, balanced hypnotic concentration and a long life expectancy, you will undeniably require a vineyard site where the vine is in balance at a much lower yield.

Because Pinot Noir and Pinotage seem to dislike being pushed to produce high yields, albeit for slightly different reasons, you almost never find huge-volume Pinot Noir or Pinotage that is consistently impressive. Try drinking most of the deadly boring, big-volume Burgundy blends and you’ll know what I mean. Generally, only the lower yielding, smaller volume examples are complex and exciting. Compared to the hardier, more dependable other red varieties, Pinot Noir and Pinotage just naturally respond better to lower yields and particularly more specific care in the vineyard. At the end of the day, they both need to be fussed over more than normal.

What’s not to like about Pinotage?

I find it strange that Pinotage still divides opinion. I always read with a certain amount of bewilderment a negative review of Pinotage. Not because I expect the wines themselves to all be delicious. As with Pinot Noir, there are boring and, even worse, faulty examples of the variety. But so often the reason offered for underwhelming Pinotage is that the wine is made from Pinotage. This is just bizarre. Such an opinion marks the critic as an ignoramus, especially about the fundamentals of viticulture and oenology, and an

inexperienced taster to boot. I inevitably can’t help consigning them, for the moment at least, to the ‘interested amateur’ box.

I guess my real problem is that I can’t help thinking that the critic who blames a bad wine on the grape variety is either just an unoriginal thinker or a wayward bigot.

It would be laughable and similarly inexcusable to any thinking wine-lover if the same critic, on tasting a handful of Pinot Noirs, blamed Pinot Noir for the many dreary and sometimes defective examples thereof.

We’d all be up in arms. We’d point out that the reason one wine is dull was possibly due to the atrocious weather that year, or the reason a wine is oxidised was that the farmer’s wife had an affair with his neighbour and he just couldn’t concentrate on winemaking, because his heart was broken. We’d never allow someone to bash a grape as mercurial and heart-breaking as Pinot Noir.

Of course, we’d agree that Pinot Noir is a termagant, irascible thing to grow, and a devious, almost treacherous thing to craft into a wine, but we’d never, ever allow someone to blame the grape – especially when a bad result is obviously and inextricably always the fault of some other influence: the sloppy viticulturalist, or the weather gods, or the broken tractor, or the neighbour’s alluring aftershave and new Mercedes-Benz.

I’ve seen winemakers wither, knees shaking, in the face of a disobedient tank of Pinot Noir. Pinot Noir can crush your spirit, destroy your dreams and, when you are down and out, stamp on your ego until you are a whimpering wreck. And so it is with Pinotage as well. But none of this is any reason to blame bad wine examples on the grape variety.

So why is it that we put up with people blaming the Pinotage grape for the unexciting examples we come across? It’s wrong and therefore also a bit stupid.

Pinotage and the X factor Wine, more than any other agricultural product, is a living narrative. Within each bottle lives a story of challenges and triumphs – each one a unique account stretching back millions of years. It starts with how the soil, within which the vine grows, was formed – a time when great

continents smashed into each other, throwing up mountains, which gradually, achingly, are scarred and weathered into steep valleys of schist, tenacious cliffs of hard granite or rolling hills of iron-rich shale.

Each bottle reflects how the vines prospered, or the grapes suffered in the scorching summer heat. Each glass tells how the leaves were battered by the drying wind, and the canes grew heavenward. Each sip reveals how conscientiously and lovingly the wine was crafted, and how well it has survived the journey to your lips. In each aroma and flavour molecule is a memory of this collective energy. Nature, human intervention (and especially the timing thereof) and luck combine to tell a story of circumstance and cycles.

Effortless access to masses of information and penetrating technology characterises our modern life. Yet, the more communication devices we have, the less we seem to hear each other. The brighter our streetlights, the less we see the stars. The more accurate our personal satellite navigation equipment, the less we know of our origin. The more time-saving devices, the less time we have.

But wine still has the ability to be a true product of time, manner and place – the coincidence of geography and occasion. Real wine, made truthfully, has the magical ability to bind us to the rhythmic cycles of seasons and offers us the bearings of history, seasons, handiwork – stuff that still grounds us.

We can all taste authenticity, integrity and joy in wine no matter its origin or variety. It jumps out at us when the wine has a presence and an energy – what some people call the X factor. Pinotage is a great vehicle for this X factor.

To purchase Bruce Jack Pinotage wines.

Billion Oyster Project’s shell pile is located on Governors Island. Here discarded shells, donated by NYC restaurants, cure for a year before being returned to New York Harbor as the foundation for future oyster reefs.

the billion oyster project

Written by: Jim Clarke

Last December, a humpback whale visited New York City, taking in the Intrepid Sea, Air, and Space Museum, the World Trade Center, and other sites –from the water, of course. Over the past dozen years, cleaner waters have made whales an increasingly common sight in New York Harbor, but a much smaller form of marine life is leading the way in making New York City’s waters even more hospitable: oysters.

The tasty bivalves have a long history in the harbour. When Henry Hudson dropped anchor there in 1609, it was home to 89,000 hectares of oyster reefs. They were enjoyed by local Lenape people long before his arrival, but as the city grew into a metropolis, New Yorkers’ love for oysters, together with pollution, ended their time in the local waters by the early twentieth century. The Billion Oyster Project is bringing them back.

The project is the brainchild of Peter Malinowski. The idea came to him when he was teaching aquaculture at the Urban

Assembly New York Harbor School, a public high school on Governors Island, south of Manhattan, that instills students with an environmental awareness and prepares them for careers on the water. Malinowski, together with Murray Fisher, the school’s director, launched the programme in 2014; the goal is to seed the harbour with a billion oysters by 2035.

This is not a culinary venture. Thanks to the 1972 Environmental Protection Act, New York City’s waterways are cleaner than they once were – technically, the harbour is clean enough to swim in almost half the days of the year – but it will be a long time before eating a filter-feeding mollusk from such an environment will be a healthy choice. But the very fact that oysters are filter feeders is one reason for the project’s existence: cleaner water. A single oyster is believed to filter 50 gallons of water per day; by one estimate, a billion oysters could filter the entire harbour every three days.

The project does have a culinary side, however; oyster larvae need flat, hard surfaces, ideally high in calcium carbonate, to form into spat, which then grow into fully fledged oysters. New Yorkers remain enthusiastic oyster eaters, and Talisker Whisky sponsors

a collection programme that gathers those shells from dozens of participating restaurants and brings them to Governors Island. When the COVID-19 pandemic temporarily closed many restaurants, the project worked with struggling oyster farmers and appealed directly to consumers, who had found new opportunities to enjoy oysters at home. The programme has collected more than 900,000 kilograms of oyster shells so far.

The project cures the shells in the sun to get rid of bacteria and parasites – a sixmonth process – and then places them in wire cages that hold them in place. At a new facility in Red Hook, Brooklyn, the shells are set in disused shipping containers and inoculated with oyster larvae; the cages are then deposited into targeted spots in the harbour. So far 75 million oysters have been installed in 18 locations across all five boroughs of the city, but the pace is accelerating – the Red Hook facility has five times the capacity of the original location on Governors Island.

At this point it is difficult to precisely measure the impact of the oyster beds on water cleanliness overall, but a sure sign of improvement can be found in the startling biodiversity they have engendered; the reefs

Illusion Rivera shows how oysters grow on top of one another, creating three-dimensional reef structures. Photo courtesy of Billion Oyster Project.

A team member shows a student how to measure an oyster with calipers. Photo courtesy of Middle School 50.

Team members deploy donated farmed oysters, in biodegradable bags, into a reef off Governors Island.

Photo by Lexey Swall for The Pew Charitable Trusts.

Cranes lift gabions – filled with juvenile oysters – out of large oyster-setting containers and into a reef site at Hudson River Park. Photo courtesy of Billion Oyster Project.

Students return bagged oysters to New York Harbor after monitoring their growth in Lemon Creek Park on Staten Island. Photo courtesy of Billion Oyster Project.

Students prepare adult oysters – donated from New York oyster farms during the COVID-19 pandemic – for an installation off Governors Island. Photo by Lexey Swall for The Pew Charitable Trusts.

have become homes to many smaller forms of marine life such as sea robins, pipefish, sea horses, and pufferfish.

‘After water cleanliness and biodiversity,’ communications director Helene Hetrick says, ‘the third thing, which is exciting and a bit more long-term, is building up the oyster reefs to the extent where they can actually diffuse the strength of very strong storms and storm surges. As waves hit the shoreline, they’re naturally broken up by the way that oysters form into reefs.’ This means the reefs can help control flooding and limit erosion. New York City has over 600 miles of coastline, and in 2012 Hurricane Sandy showed how vulnerable the city could be to bigger storms that climate change is making more common.

The project’s public outreach efforts are prodigious, and more than 11,000 volunteers have enlisted to help (including Yannick Benjamin, profiled elsewhere in this issue). Corporate and institutional support continues to grow, with the New Zealand winery Villa Maria the latest company to sign on just this year. The reefs have become educational destinations for more than 8,000 students from over 100 New York area schools, and the project works with several other groups that seek to improve access to the water and encourage New Yorkers to make use of it. ‘I think the bigger picture of what we’re trying to do is reconnect New Yorkers with their harbour,’ Hetrick says, ‘and with this incredible natural resource that for the most part goes unused or underutilized. So, oyster restoration is the lens through which we’re reminding people that they don’t necessarily have to go upstate or to Florida or other places to be by the water and enjoy nature. They can do it right here in New York City.’

a history of eating oysters in new york

For more on this project.

When Henry Hudson arrived, he found that the local Lenape people were eating oysters by wrapping them in seaweed and roasting them. As the city grew, oysters became the mainstay of many poor New Yorkers, who consumed them in dingy ‘oyster cellars’. In 1825, Thomas Downing, a black man from Virginia, created the first ‘respectable’ oyster cellar, making oysters a popular dish for New Yorkers of every stripe and earning him the nickname ‘The Oyster King of New York’. (A devoted abolitionist, his cellar was also an important safe house on the Underground Railroad, funneling escaped slaves to freedom in Canada.) It’s estimated that later in the century, New Yorkers were consuming a million oysters daily, and oyster carts plied the street much as hot dog vendors do today. Today oysters, brought in from Long Island and New England, are a bit of a luxury, though savvy New Yorkers know that oyster ‘happy hours’ abound.

Khaya Maloney inspects a hop leaf.

hops on city rooftops

On the roof of a multilevel car park in central Johannesburg, a determined engineer-turned-farmer grows the unlikeliest of crops. Lucy Corne went to visit South Africa’s first inner-city hop farm.

Written by: Lucy Corne Photography by: Lucy Corne

It is a year, almost to the day, since I first met urban hop farmer Khaya Maloney. Looking back, it kind of sounded like one of those rendezvous your mom warned you about. I had ‘met’ Khaya on Twitter and slid into his DMs to arrange a visit to his rooftop hop garden. ‘Set your GPS to Constitution Hill parking garage,’ he had typed. ‘When you get there, the security guard will point out where I am.’

It’s not a part of Johannesburg I am particularly familiar or comfortable with, but at least there was a security guard, I had thought. On arrival at the car park, I was less comforted by the presence of said guard. I got the distinct impression that I had woken him from a light slumber. And who could blame him? Mine seemed to be the only vehicle in the entire car park

and, as my footsteps echoed in the near-darkness, scenes from old episodes of 24 rattled around my head.

The dark doorway I was directed to by the now once again snoozing security guard had me wondering who might be waiting on the other side. Someone masquerading as a downtown farmer to lure people to this deserted corner of the city? Jack Bauer himself, ready to tell me in his pained voice that ‘we don’t have a lot of time’? There was no-one. Just a scaffolding staircase that did little to lower my pulse rate. I emerged onto the car park rooftop and instantly relaxed as my eyes focused first on the two tent-like greenhouses and then on the smiling face of Khaya Maloney – Johannesburg’s first hop farmer.

Small screen inspiration

In February 2021, when I visited Khaya, he was just getting started and had sold the spoils of his maiden harvest to Soul Barrel Brewing in Franschhoek. Few people knew anything about his ballsy enterprise to grow hops in downtown Jozi. Today he’s been the subject of numerous articles and has become something of a celebrity in the local beer scene.

It all began one Sunday night in 2017. Khaya was rounding off his weekend with an episode of Carte Blanche when a piece on rooftop gardening in New York caught his attention. Having become disillusioned by his chosen career in civil engineering, he started looking into agri-entrepreneurship, despite having no farming background at all. ‘I saw this report on hydroponic gardens,

where the produce was being sold to local restaurants. It just made so much sense to me,’ says Khaya. And after some research, he decided to try his hand at growing hops.

‘I had looked into the local craft beer industry and realised that South African brewers lacked choice when it came to hops,’ says Khaya. ‘Either they import hops at great expense, or they have to buy from SAB. I was inspired by the idea of hydroponic farming on an inner-city rooftop and thought well, why not grow hops? How difficult could it be?’ He laughs at the memory, for he now knows what a delicate and fickle plant the hop can be.

Climate control

Months of research began, as Khaya worked out how to cultivate hops in the middle of a city, got to grips with hydroponic farming and also worked on finding the funding to get the whole thing off the ground. Eventually he secured a scholarship to learn the ins and out of agriculture and set up a pilot programme at Mad Giant Brewery in Newtown. ‘At first it was a small-scale experiment to see if hops could grow in Johannesburg,’ he says. ‘After a year or two of my crops dying and coming back to life, I learnt a lot about hop-growing. The biggest lesson was how demanding they are – you can’t go away on holiday for a few days and expect them to still be alive when you get back!’

And it wasn’t just a matter of learning about hops. He also needed to master the art and science of hydroponics. ‘Hydroponic farming allows you to completely control the climate conditions,’ Khaya explains. ‘I use fans when it gets too hot, I can trick them into thinking it’s night time, or I can lengthen the day with lights when needed. There really are a lot of pros to the process – it’s sustainable, it’s low-emission and it’s water-wise.’ Hops are usually only harvested once a year – in South Africa, the season is late February to early March – but by manipulating climatic conditions, Khaya is able to complete a harvest every three months. ‘What you lack in hectares, you make up for with the extra harvests,’ Khaya says.

By 2020, Khaya had got to grips with hydroponics, graduated from hop-growing 101, found enough funding to get started, and eventually secured a rooftop spot thanks to local organisation Wouldn’t It Be

Cool (WIBC). WIBC operates the Urban Agriculture Initiative (UAI), which had a goal to start 100 farms on 100 Johannesburg rooftops. Now all he needed was some hops.

Global demand

After spending hours on Reddit, Facebook and Google, Khaya realised that importing hop rhizomes (root cuttings) would take his entire capital – and the next year or two of his life. Getting the rights to grow local hops was similarly tricky. Then, on one of his mammoth googling sessions, Khaya found Gert van der Waal. Gert had started growing hops in 2017 on his farm north of Pretoria. He was instantly taken with Khaya’s determination and agreed to supply him with rhizomes and cuttings to finally set up his hydroponic hop farm.

Today, Khaya has over 500 plants on his 300-square-metre farm, Afrileap. He grows Kracanup, a high-yielding Australian hop, and Gert’s own variety, NAK, whose exact parentage is unknown. Since we first met, Khaya has completed four harvests and has received orders for his hops and hop oils from as far away as Russia, Germany and Israel. Enquiries have flowed in from more than 50 breweries, including some in South Africa, although at the moment Khaya doesn’t have the capacity to supply them.

The city centre rooftop farm was never the endgame though, and Khaya still has plans for expansion. ‘This is just the pilot,’ he says, ‘the experiment, showing the world that it’s possible. The end goal is to have 100 hectares under glass.’ And over the past year, Khaya has made great strides towards his ultimate goal. ‘I have developed partnerships with both private and public sector institutions and now have expansion plans in George in the Western Cape.’

There is great interest among South African craft brewers when it comes to using fresh hops rather than the usual dried cones or pellets. And if Khaya can perfect his model, local breweries could feasibly be offering fresh hop beers throughout the year – something unheard of around the world.

Until the full dream is realised and the expansion complete, Khaya can be found tending his rows of hydroponic hops on a car park roof in Johannesburg. And while the location might seem a little unlikely at first, if you ever get the chance to visit, I’d highly recommend that you take it.

This article first appeared in OnTap magazine.

the history of hops

Hops have been used in the brewing process since at least the 8th century. Before that a mix of herbs commonly known as gruit was added to beer, but hops gained popularity in part because of their natural antibacterial properties. The aromatic flowers are used to add bitterness to beer, as well as aroma and flavour. There are thought to be around 400 different aroma compounds in the oils found within the hop plant. Hops are added at different stages during the boil, and can also be added post-fermentation in a process known as dry hopping. Since the start of the global craft beer revolution, hops have become the star ingredient in many beers, particularly the ever-popular IPA with its dominant hop aromas and flavours. Hop farmers around the world are constantly experimenting to develop new hop varieties with different flavours and aromas.

For more on Khaya’s project.

For more on WIBC.

Artwork by Allendre Hine based on a photo by Oladimeji Odunsi –Unsplash.

mothers of invention

More than half of African entrepreneurs are women –the highest percentage in the world. And, they are increasingly using local knowledge and unusual resources to benefit both the economy and the environment. Here are eight ecopreneurs who’ve invented ingenious and sustainable solutions to some of Africa’s most pressing problems.

Written by: Alison Westwood

Wealth from weeds: Achenyo Idachaba, Nigeria

With its lush green leaves and showy purple flowers, water hyacinth looks pretty enough. But this invasive aquatic weed clogs waterways and depletes fish stocks. In Nigeria, it’s such a scourge that local names for it are associated with death, destruction and dashed hopes. Achenyo Idachaba was sure that there must be a win-win way to take care of the environment by clearing the weeds and turning them into an economic benefit for communities impacted by the infestation. Her answer: creating desirable handicrafts woven from the plants’ fibres. Achenyo learned traditional weaving techniques and partnered with basket makers to create a range of home and fashion products. MitiMeth has created over 150 job opportunities and has trained more than 600 women and young people in decor and textile weaving. www.mitimeth.com

A perfect package: Afomia Andualem, Ethiopia

Plastic packaging is creating a plague of pollution in Ethiopia, which has the dubious distinction of being the fastest growing plastic consumer on the continent. Afomia Andualem is working to change that. She and her team at Agelgil EcoPackaging use clean energy sources to transform crop waste into sturdy, sustainable packaging. Not only does this reduce the plastic waste and deforestation caused by conventional packaging, it also turns crop waste into extra income for local farmers. Plus, all the waste from making the packaging itself is turned into fertilizer, neatly tying up the process. www.facebook.com/agelgil.packaging

Green cycling: Bernice Dapaah, Ghana

In Ghana, gridlocked traffic, air pollution and environmental degradation are the worrying side-effects of economic growth.

Bernice Dapaah’s bamboo bikes offer an alternative route towards sustainable development. The bicycles, which are fashioned from locally harvested bamboo, are lighter, more durable and more ecofriendly to produce than traditional metal bicycles. Bernice and her team also train other young women to make the bikes, and encourage them to set up their own workshops. ghanabamboobikes.org

Water from air: Beth Koigi, Kenya

When Kenya’s summer rains failed to arrive in 2016, Beth Koigi felt the helplessness of having no access to water for months at a time. The experience inspired her to experiment with ways to provide water to rural communities in arid areas. Driven by the knowledge that there is six times more water in the air than in all the rivers in the world, and by the fact that more than half of Kenyans don’t have access to drinking water, she and her team found a way to

harvest moisture from air. The all-in-one Majik Water system is powered by solar panels, and harvests, stores and dispenses clean, affordable drinking water to off-grid communities. In 2020, Beth was featured in the Netflix documentary Brave Blue World: Racing to Solve Our Water Crisis, where she helped to advocate for clean water on a global scale. www.majikwater.co

Clean sweep: Catherine Chaima, Malawi

Cassava, groundnuts and bananas are three of the most popular crops in Malawi. However, groundnut shells and cassava peels aren’t seen as useful composting materials, and the sheer volume of banana leaves produced means that masses of agricultural waste pile up around farms. In her final year of studying chemical engineering, Catherine Tasankha Chaima started investigating the properties of agricultural by-products. She discovered that these leaves, peels and shells contained potassium hydroxide, a type of lye used to make liquid soap. She and her partner Ethel also used indigenous knowledge to identify natural antibacterial ingredients such as moringa to replace harsh commercial chemicals. The result was Cathel soap, a product with the potential to create extra income for farmers, reduce waste, harness indigenous ingredients, and supply Malawians with affordable and hygienic soap.

Pollution as a solution: Marie Ndieguene, Senegal

Farmers in Senegal often struggle with access to affordable food storage, so much of their hard-won food ends up going to waste. Civil engineer Marie Ndieguene and her team developed a clever construction technique to turn landfill waste into food storage units. Old tyres are used for the walls, linked by sticks and plastic bottles for stability. The walls are lined with recycled plastic bags and then covered in local laterite clay, which hardens into a weather-resistant thermic envelope. Using zero energy, the storage units can keep food crops cool and fresh more than six times longer than traditional storage methods. ‘We are working with the community to tackle pollution and food insecurity, solving two problems with

one innovation,’ says Marie. www.facebook.com/ EcobuildersMadeinSenegal/

Buzz off elephants: Mavis Nduchwa, Botswana Botswana’s farmers have an elephant problem. Crops, homes and lives are lost every year in human-wildlife conflict. Growing up, Mavis Nduchwa knew that elephants feared bees. So, when she started farming, she hit upon the elegant idea of using beehives as living fences. The hives cause elephants to steer clear, protecting crops and saving human and elephant lives, while simultaneously restoring bee populations, and creating additional income from honey. Kalahari Honey has trained and supplied beehives to more than 500 rural women in elephant conflict areas, and buys back and sells the raw desert honey they produce. Sadly, Mavis died in August 2021, just before her 38th birthday, but her bees and her legacy live on. www.kalaharihoney.com

Barrels of fun: Paulina Alfeus, Namibia

Jobs are scarce in Namibia, even for qualified boilermakers. So, in their final year of training, Paulina Alfeus and five of her friends started looking for cost-effective ways to use their skills to start their own business. Noticing the large number of discarded oil drums lying around their harbour town, and the high price of imported wooden furniture, they decided to turn oil barrels and other scrap materials into funky furniture with a uniquely Namibian flair. Paulina and her team design and produce a range of upcycled sofas, chairs and tables, which they sell to lodges, hotels and individuals – creating local employment opportunities while helping to clean up their environment and reduce deforestation. www.facebook.com/ power6investment/

From left to right:

1. Water from air: Beth Koigi, Kenya.

2. Kalahari Honey: Mavis Nduchwa, Botswana.

3. Pollution as a solution: Marie Ndieguene, Senegal.

4. Wealth from weeds: Achenyo Idachaba, Nigeria.

5. Barrels of fun: Paulina Alfeus, Namibia.

6. Green cycling: Bernice Dapaah, Ghana. 1.

2.

3. 4.

Funeral pyres, Varanasi, India. Photograph by Helovi.

Bonfire night, Nottingham, England. Photograph by Charlie Ellis.

the ancient lure of bonfires lives on

‘From the longest burning source is a golden base beat, an ancient rhythm that Fire is our mother tongue

So bring your fire and let’s gather where all sparks meet.’

– Bushfire Director Jiggs Thorne

Written by: Jeremy Daniel

Since the dawn of humanity, the spectacle of a bonfire glowing red-hot against a cool night sky has enchanted our species. For those who gather to bear witness, there is something transformative in its raw power that honours the past, clears space for the future, and somehow acts as a bridge between this life and the mysteries of the afterlife.

These traditions play out all around the world wherever people gather to mark the passing of time.

In Finland, the short summers are not to be wasted, and bonfires are key to celebrating the arrival of midsummer (known as Juhannus). A giant ten-metrehigh bonfire is built out on an island in one of Helsinki’s parks. Over 10,000 people are known to gather and wait for the moment when a newlywed couple, instead of driving off on a honeymoon, rows a boat across the lake and ignites the bonfire that will blaze through the night and honour the god Ukko, who would bring

great summer harvests to Finland.

That sense of tradition and ritual is as ancient as man’s fascination with fire.

In the Middle Ages, cattle were led through the smoke of a bonfire to protect them. Engaged couples would leap through the flames of the bonfire to seal their vows on May Day. At the onset of winter, coals from a bonfire would carefully be carried home to light the fires in family hearths. Even to this day in Japan, large fires called ‘bon-bi’ are set to welcome the return of the spirits of the ancestors.

Many people assume the word itself means ‘good fire’ – as if it’s a mashup of the French bon, which means ‘good’, and the English word ‘fire’. But scholars have traced the earliest reference to a passage in a book by John Mirk from 1486 that speaks of a ‘bone fyre’. During the Middle Ages it seems that villagers used to gather large piles of bones, which had been discarded from animals that the village had consumed, and burn them ceremonially.

Of course, ‘good fire’ would never be correct as the full descriptor. There has always been a darker side, too, to a ritual conflagration. Throughout history, people have used the symbolic nature of a public bonfire as a weapon to destroy history and dominate others.

Think back to the spectacle of ‘witches’ being burned at the stake, or the Nazis building giant conflagrations of banned books in the public squares. Histories are erased in the flames, and evil is all too often unleashed in a roaring blaze.

That dark history is a key part of the story. When it comes to popularising bonfires across the Western world, it’s the action of one man, the failed English revolutionary Guy Fawkes, over 400 years ago, that probably had the biggest impact.

At the time, England was ruled by King James I, the only son of Mary Queen of Scots, and the first protestant King of England. As a strong advocate of royal absolutism, James often came into conflict

with Parliament and made many enemies. A small group of determined Catholics hatched a plot to overthrow the king and install a Catholic on the throne. They decided to place an arsenal of explosives beneath the Houses of Parliament and detonate them while the king was present.

One of their members, Guy Fawkes, was an explosives expert in the military, and he was chosen to carry out the dastardly deed. But 10 days before the plan was to proceed, a letter from an anonymous source was sent to a lord, warning him to stay away from

Parliament on that day. The letter found its way to the king, who initiated a search of the cellars beneath Parliament where he found Guy Fawkes and 36 barrels of explosives hidden under piles of firewood and coal. Fawkes was arrested and sentenced to a gruesome death.

In the aftermath of that thwarted attack, the English Parliament declared 5 November a national day of thanksgiving, and the tradition of building effigies of Guy Fawkes and burning them in great bonfires began and spread quickly around the world.

The idea of seeing your loved ones immolated may seem awful to modern Western sensibilities (although, of course, cremation is increasingly popular), but for centuries, people have created massive funeral pyres for practical as well as symbolic reasons.

The Vikings were fiercely pagan people who believed that the smoke from a fire would help carry the remains of their loved ones to the afterlife. Prominent members of society were dispatched in elaborate ceremonies that entailed funeral pyres being

Joensuu –Aerial view of midsummer bonfire.

Photo by Lev Karavanov.

built on ships that were then set alight and launched out to sea. On those ships, the deceased were laid to rest with a selection of their most precious possessions that would indicate their social standing to those in the afterlife who would be receiving them.

Clearly, that tradition has faded away with the demise of the Vikings, but Hindu cremation ceremonies are still very much with us today. They believe that burning the body is required in order to help the departed soul get over any residual attachment it may be holding onto for

the body it has recently inhabited. Hindu funeral pyres are no small affairs, requiring over 500 kilograms of wood and often taking almost six hours to completely burn the body.

So much has changed in the world, and the addictive glow of our cellphones seems to outweigh everything else. More and more we look to an imagined metaverse and find ways to ignore the natural world all around us.Yet, despite all that, humans everywhere find reasons to gather in open spaces and deliver great pyres of wood to

the flames and connect with one of the base elements of our universe in a timeless, precious ceremony.

For more about the author.

caribbean paradise

Written by: Caspar Greef Illustration by: Alain van Heerden

On the beach just outside Coquitos Bar, workers were filling up sandbags.The barman, Danny, plonked down a Balboa beer on the counter in front of me. White wisps of condensation tendrilled off the bottle.

‘Now that’s what I call a cold beer,’ I noted. ‘Smoking-cold. Perfecto. By the way, what’s with all the sandbags?’

‘The Russians are coming,’ said Danny.

‘So, we’re fortifying the beach. The guys with the barbed wire will be here next, and once the barbed wire’s up, they’ll plant landmines, and I think the idea is to also scatter some floating mines in the sea.’

I looked out to sea. It started off turquoise, melded into green, and then turned blue like Buddha’s eyes, the colour of a brilliant sapphire. Across the way was a small, jungly outcrop with a few houses on it. Isla Solarte, known as Nancy’s Kay in the days when pirates and privateers sheltered there. To the left was Isla

Bastimentos, with its palm tree-fringed beaches, sea turtles, poisonous red frogs, reggae music and Afro-Panamanian inhabitants – the descendants of slaves.

To the right, moored in the bay, was the big pirate ship Black Magic, which swayed to the sound of techno beats on Wednesdays and weekends.

I scratched my ankles, forearms, hands, neck. Slight, albeit temporary, relief from the ceaseless itching. The chitras – sand flies – were feasting on my flesh, as was their wont. I’d forgone repellent in the

four months I’d been here in the belief that I’d develop some kind of immunity to the odious critters, but sitting at this bar was often an exercise in maintaining equanimity, one that would tax even a meditator who had attained the lucidity of mind found in the fourth jhana.

‘What on earth do the Russians want with this place?’ I asked Danny, knocking back a deeply satisfying glug of Balboa. He laughed.

‘No, they have no interest here. The sandbags are to stop the beach from disintegrating when the next storm hits.’

I’d been here – Isla Carenero, part of the Bocas Del Toro archipelago in the northeast of Panama – when one of those storms hit.

I remembered apocalyptic drumrolls of thunder, the black night turned blue by lightning that pierced the sky – projectiles flung down by an angry god – palm trees buckling in the wind and rain so hard that it stung. ‘Good luck with that,’ I said. ‘Can’t see those sandbags giving the beach much protection, but I reckon your bar’s going to be around for a while.’

At least, I hoped so.

Coquitos was one of the coolest bars I’d been to during the two years in which I’d knocked around Central America – and I’d been to quite a few bars in that time.

Danny played the best music on the island – chillout lounge, acid jazz, reggae, dream house, calypso, Colombian love songs, electro-swing – always tailored to his clientele, a motley and colourful crew of expats, locals and tourists.

And I’d fallen in love with the island –Carenero – a relatively undiscovered piece of paradise in the Caribbean, with fewer than 1,000 residents, no vehicles, just narrow paths and alleys and rickety planks over streams; jungle and swamps in the interior, bougainvilleas, hibiscus and orchids, parrots, sloths, boa constrictors and caymans, brightly painted wooden houses standing crookedly over the sea on stilts, the smell of woodsmoke, the sound of roosters crowing, the thud of falling coconuts hitting the ground …

I had thought this place could be the end of the road … buy a wooden shack on the beach and meld into the gentle Caribbean rhythms until the time when tomorrow failed to come.

But …

A couple of months ago I had written a story about Carenero and Coquitos for a South African publication.

The story contained these paragraphs: I also met André (not his real name) at Coquitos. A tall, rangy South African from Slummies (East London), André lives on a yacht moored in the bay between Isla Colon and Isla Carenero. ‘My sugar mommy’s gone back to Canada,’ he told me one night. ‘I’m gonna miss her … she looked after me and we had a lot of fun. It was hard to keep up with her, despite her age – she’s older than my own mother, you know.’

I had met André’s sugar mommy, a spritely and lively, and attractive woman.

‘How old is Judy (not her real name)?’ I asked.

‘She’s 75, bru …’

However, in the story, I didn’t call him André, but referred to him by his real name. Ditto, Judy.

Ben, a friend from South Africa, had also met André, then he’d travelled north, across the border to Costa Rica. A while ago he had sent me an email:

Guess who I just bumped into? André. And, man, is he pissed off with you. And, by association, me. I was sitting on the wall watching the sunset and I noticed a dude looking over at me. Thought it might be André, but what are the odds? Then he came over and I was all, howzit bru, thought it was you, have a beer. His face was hard and angry.

‘Do you know me?’ he said over and over. ‘I’m not your fucking bru.’ He asked if I’d seen you lately and if I’d read what you wrote.

I said I had but wasn’t sure what the issue was. He said you might as well have taken a knife and cut his throat. Absolute psycho aggro directed at you but through me.

He kept saying, ‘You’re a friend of Caspar’s, aren’t you?’ He seemed to think you and I sat down and wrote your piece together. Outraged that things you two spoke about at Danny’s ended up in print. Said if he ever sees you again, he will kill you. Yeah, he used the actual word. And told me to pass this on to you.

I took another swig of Balboa and wondered whether André would, in fact, kill me. People do disappear here. The serial

killer Wild Bill (William Dathan Holbert) murdered five Americans on the archipelago. Shot them, buried them, then looted their bank accounts. Took a while for people to twig that something was happening … foreigners drift in and out of these islands all the time … one day they’re here, and the next they’re just gone. I must have looked concerned, because Danny asked: ‘What’s the matter? Still worried about the Russians?’

‘Fuck the Russians,’ I said. ‘I’m worried about André. He wants to kill me because of that story I wrote.’

‘I don’t blame him,’ said Danny. ‘That was stuff he told you in private at a bar, and the next thing you publish it in a newspaper for the world to see. Anyway, I don’t think he’ll kill you.’

‘I don’t know about that,’ I said. ‘These South Africans are crazy. Especially the ones from East London. Do you know if André is back in town?’ ‘I haven’t heard.’

‘Okay. Una más Balboa, por favor.’ It arrived smoking like they always do. I took a satisfying swig, then felt that something was very wrong, like a wolf had swallowed the moon. André had walked into the bar and was sitting a few seats down, glaring at me with hatred lighting his eyes. He took a photograph of me with his cellphone. Then he dragged his forefinger across his neck in a throatslitting gesture.

Maybe, I thought, this place isn’t quite the paradise I made it out to be. Maybe it was time to move on.

Sam Nhlengethwa 1955. Grazing I. Etching on paper. 78 by 93.5cm. Strauss & Co.

fiction:

the lesson

Written by: MS Mlandu

I followed my father’s goat almost all the autumn day. This was what I did every year as this brown and black-headed goat had a habit of hiding her kid after giving birth and returning home from the veld alone.

On the same day she gave birth, the she-goat started giving her kid orders; then through strictness started teaching it to obey them. One of the orders that she gave her kid was to hide under the rocks or beneath some bushy shrubs. When she was sure the kid understood and obeyed the orders, she left it and returned home for the night.

In their aloneness in the veld, many things happened between the two animals. The goat suckled her kid – nudging it tenderly with her face, but also kicking it impatiently if it continued to suck at her teats after she had told it to stop. The kid twisted its short tail rhythmically from side to side while it joyfully sucked the milk of its mother, and sometimes also teased its mother, poking her with its hornless head. Then the two animals lay side by side on their bellies sharing the

warmth through their bristles.

She left her kid in the wild for a few days or weeks sometimes, because she didn’t trust man for the safety of her kid. She also hated the dogs for their barking and the look of plunder in their eyes.

She would rather let her kid grow up in the wild until it could more or less look after itself. When she arrived back home with it – sometimes still moving unsteadily on its soft hooves behind her and dropping milky dung – she stamped the ground with her foreleg hoof and, if she saw the dogs moving towards her beloved thing, angrily attacked them with her two upwardpointing horns. Before she scratched the ground under her with her divided hoof preparing to lie down for the night (as goats like to do), she first looked around for their enemies.

Recently the she-goat returned from the veld with her weight reduced, showing traces of blood on her hindquarters. She was tired and restless. After dropping a few

pellets of dung and scratching the surface of the earth, she lay down, resting her tired body. ‘This goat has again given birth to her kid in the wild and left it there,’ I said to myself and sighed.

Joy that the goat had multiplied was mixed with irritation and anger, imagining the hardship I was surely to endure following her in the veld day after day to discover where her kid was hidden so that I could retrieve it for my father. The newly born kid was part of my father’s wealth now. It had to be brought home. Also, I was anxious for the kid’s safety as the bushes near Mhlotsheni Village harboured jackal, African wild cat and ingqawa

The following morning, I opened my father’s kraal gate and drove out the goats for the day’s grazing. I kept an eye on the brown and black-headed she-goat, because I had a plan to save myself much trouble.

Immediately upon leaving the kraal, she broke away from the flock, following a separate path, her ears drooping, eyes cast

to the ground. The flock went towards the gently sloping eastern part of the nearby bush while she walked steadily south towards the hills, apparently lost in her thoughts. It was a bright, clear day without a cloud in the sky and just a faint breeze –perfect weather to track a goat, I thought.

I let her walk for a while, then broke away from the herd myself and, without her noticing, circled around towards a huge old tree that was on the outskirts of the bush.

Hidden from her, I climbed up into its thick boughs to monitor her movements and moods. Almost as soon as I had sight of her, I had to clamber quickly down for she had started trotting in yet another direction, this time towards a thicket of thorn trees.

By the time I had climbed down she had disappeared. Blocked by brambles and scratched by the thorns, I forced my way into the thorn thicket where I had seen her slip in – my eyes on the ground to track her hoofprints and my ears alert to the sound of her movements or bleat of her kid.

In a clearing, she suddenly slowed and started browsing on the soft low-hanging tree leaves and succulents, as if she hadn’t a care in the world. I suspected she wanted to check if I was following her. I kept very still and watched. I believed her destination was nearby and braced myself for the excitement of discovering the kid’s hiding place. When she moved on again, I dropped and crawled as quietly as I could on my knees.

Suddenly she turned and ran fast past me, brushing aggressively against the branches of the short trees to my left. As if by magic, a swarm of angry hornets filled the air and I realised she had intentionally stirred their nest. I turned and, bending low, ran for my life, my arms held up to protect my eyes from the thorns. Even in the thicket the hornets repeatedly stung my face and head.

When I eventually outran the thicket and the swarm, I sat down and tenderly rubbed my palms on the painful areas of my face and my head to soothe them. I thought of my responsibility to the flock. The worst of the pain subsided and eventually I was able to go in search of her again.

I found her travelling through an area of the bush where the fleshy-leafed trees were tall and touching their neighbours so that sometimes you couldn’t tell which branch belonged to which tree. The forest still

retained its coolness of the previous night and I could smell a beautiful mix of perfumes from various kinds of flowers. These attracted some long-beaked and long-tailed birds, and also large butterflies from the koppies.

The goat was enjoying the new, steeper terrain that opened up as we climbed into the sunshine. It became rocky with huge boulders and brilliant orange and red aloes growing in the crevices. She moved with agility and speed, demonstrating that this was her natural habitat, not mine. She seemed to be playing a game of jumping from one stone to the next in everincreasing leaps, easily widening the distance between us.

I was losing her so I reverted to my previous tactic and climbed a tree. Still jumping from rock to rock for a few minutes, she seemed to be enjoying her own acrobatics. Then she unexpectedly turned down towards the banks of the Umzimvubu River that was gurgling peacefully below as it flowed past our village. I sat there in the boughs and watched her bend her forelegs and sip to quench her thirst. I realised how thirsty I was.

From there, she walked following another circular route back to the area of the bush where the rest of my father’s flock was grazing. But she was not content to my eye. She was tense, the bristles raised from her ever turned-up tail to her head. Her appearance reminded me of any mother who had been away from her baby, now panicking for its safety. She let out a bleat, just once – mistakenly or on purpose –I couldn’t tell. She constantly sneezed wildly, her long and pointed ears erect.

I reluctantly climbed down from the tree. As I approached my father’s herd I saw traces of her leaking milk on the ground and on the flat stones. When I was close enough to her I saw her full udder hanging painfully between her hindquarters.

‘Let me show her that I have discarded my plan to follow her,’ I thought, and sprinted past her to the rest of the flock. I had been defeated by the clever old she-goat, but that is not what concerned me. I felt very bad for delaying the necessary meeting of the two animals. When she was sure I had learnt my lesson, she turned back towards the thorn thicket, and I let her go alone.

The goat was enjoying the new, steeper terrain that opened up as we climbed into the sunshine. It became rocky with huge boulders and brilliant orange and red aloes growing in the crevices. She moved with agility and speed, demonstrating that this was her natural habitat, not mine. She seemed to be playing a game of jumping from one stone to the next in ever-increasing leaps, easily widening the distance between us.

Sam Nhlengethwa 1955. No Grass II. Lithograph on paper. 35 by 50cm. Strauss & Co.

Silverbacks riding a West Coast peeler.

Strandveld.

west coast stoke

Justin Fox packs his surfboard and takes to the West Coast road on an old-style, soul-surfing safari.

Written by: Justin Fox Photography by: Justin Fox

Back in the 1990s, when I was a student in Cape Town, a West Coast surfing trip offered the Great Escape. A long weekend up to Elands Bay, with ‘boards and beers and babes’, was the holy grail, especially after year-end exams. For many Cape Town youngsters, E Bay meant the first kiss, first babalas, the first green tube of eternal stoke.

Three decades later, and still a surf acolyte, I planned a road trip with my partner to the Weskus haunts of old. I loaded the car with surfboard, braai grid and tent; Tracey packed hampers of food and weird, practical stuff like sunscreen and mozzie spray.

It was a bright, early summer’s day as we hit the R27, Californian rock filling the car and our grins as wide and carefree as 18-yearolds’. We paused to check out the breaks at Blouberg and Bokbaai, then pressed on to

Yzerfontein where we rented a self-catering cottage on the beach. Boogie-boarding grommets were splashing about in the shore break and I joined a few silverbacks riding a large, fast wave until sunset – a decent first sortie to get me in the groove.

North we drove, bound for legendary Elands Bay, the best surf spot in the Western Cape. We crossed the Berg River and hugged the coast past Dwarskersbos, then over a rise and down to lovely, reed-rimmed Verlorenvlei where thatched langhuises line banks aflutter with every waterfowl under the Weskus sun. We checked into Elands Bay Hotel, an old-school establishment that’s been around since the surf toppies were grommets. It’s no nonsense, no frills, and lies just above the beach and caravan park where we used to camp on student jaunts.

A decent swell was bending into the bay, so I suited up and paddled out. A steepling set hove into view and I paddled hard to catch one: into a crouch and down the line, smacking the lip and tearing clean bottom turns, then carving my signature along the face before peeling off. ‘Witblits for the soul,’ I thought as I paddled back into the line-up.

Later, as the sun slipped into the drink and stained the land all naartjie, Tracey and I walked along a rocky, mussel-strewn ledge and climbed the bluff to a cave filled with San paintings. A giant eland adorned the rock, like a totem to the surf god of the point. Beside us, a group of dreadlocked surf rats smoked zol and gazed at the pearly dusk.

We retired to the Wit Mossel Pot, a beach-style backpackers and restaurant that serves salty fare and delights the surfer

Weskus Hokkie.

Weskus Hokkie.

Yzerfontein.

crowd. The decor was old surfboards, dream catchers, flotsam and sea wrack. Supper was proper hake and calamari and slap chips washed down with a workmanlike Two Oceans white (why bother with two: only the icy Atlantic counts). The music was deep, mellow trance; a sign on the wall read: ‘You book out but you never leave.’ Damn, I thought, if I had a spare year to burn, I could easily mislay it here.

Next day, the road led inland around the rim of Verlorenvlei, then north past Wadrifsoutpan. When I was a lad, Farmer Burger’s was talked about in hushed tones: a secret spot on a private farm. Legend. These days, Farmer Burger junior (a surf devotee called Albert) rents out a bunch of surf shacks on the family farm, Steenbokfontein. The best of them is Weskus Hokkie, which has the whole Robinson Crusoe thing down pat with seashells and driftwood, a bathroom embedded in the rock and a home-made Jacuzzi fed by donkey burner. This is as close to surfer heaven as the West Coast gets. As the boerie and tjops sizzled on the braai, we wallowed in our outdoor tub, frothing with rooibos foam, and watched the stars surfing that long, long Milky Wave all the way to the horizon.

In the morning, we moseyed into the sleepy fishing dorp of Lambert’s Bay to squiz the surf. As it happens, Yo-yos was cooking. It’s a reef break in front of the caravan park that goes both left and right. I duly suited up and joined a pod of dolphins and whooping teens shredding the wave. Hell, I could still just about do the schoolboy thing, despite my two-score years and some.

We pressed further north on a bit of a flier, looking for uncharted surf spots. At Garies, we turned off the N7 onto a gravel road that led through bleak, semidesert country. After an hour, we came to the mouth of the Groen River – dark blue ocean after so much brown earth. This wild stretch of shoreline is called Groen-Spoeg, a coastal section of the Namaqua National Park that offers wilderness camping.

Our engine droned in four-wheel drive as we crawled north on sandy tracks. The lime green shallows on our left were thick with the nodding heads of kelp. Skittish ostriches trotted beside us, keeping pace with the car for long distances, their feathers

Weskus Hokkie.

Wit Mossel Pot.

streaming and legs a high-kicking blur.

We reached a lovely cove called Varswater – a beach with rock pools at one end, tall boulders at the other and an empty campsite above the sand set amid rich Strandveld vegetation. Waves pounded the shore in an unending harangue, churning the foam into yellow planktonic soup; the air was still and fragrant with fynbos and kelp.

We unpacked our things and erected a small tent. Braai grid, charcoal, cooler bag, foldout chairs: within five minutes we were the proud owners of a new home. How to fill the long evenings, we wondered? We needn’t have worried. Looking up, we stared at the great celestial television screen where the first stars began to glitter in a sky still rimmed with shades of salmon and purple. The hiss of meat on the grid matched the sound of tidal surge racing across the beach.

The next day was devoted to surf exploration. We struck north, following a web of old mining prospectors’ tracks, staying as close to the shoreline as possible. After kilometres of dunes, we reached Boulderbaai, which lived up to its name, followed by an outcrop called Policeman’s Helmet, which did the same, especially when viewed from the seaward side.

Eventually, I found a promising break –unnamed, unsurfed, unsullied – beside a rocky promontory near Skuinsklip. I was a little nervous about this off-piste surfing lark, but Tracey called me a wuss and that did it. I pulled on my suit, hobbled over mussel beds and squishy sea anemones to the edge of the shelf, waited for a set to pass, then dived in and paddled through the kelp. Soon, the Atlantic’s anaesthetic took effect and I lost contact with hands and brain.

For hors d’oeuvres, I caught a long, walling left that wasn’t half bad, then settled into scratching the shelf and jumping clear of nasty shallow sections that sucked almost dry after take-off. The kelp heads made kissing noises around me as they rose and fell on the swell. It felt as though I was sitting in the canopy of a forest like an aquatic primate, not taking many rides but loving the sensation of ‘wilderness surfing’.

At last, a big set steamed over the horizon like a herd of eland. I paddled fast out to sea to meet it, then swung round. Three strong strokes and the water hollowed beneath my feet. Then I was up, cleaving along a vertical face, white water crunching behind, my head

flush with the wall. I tore along, spray whipping from each turn, fins dug in for purchase. Nearing the rocks, the wave began closing out and I carved off. Yes.

Over the ensuing days, we found our grip on time and things of the city beginning to slip. There was so much freedom; the kind of freedom most South Africans have lost. To be able to leave your stuff on a beach and disappear for a day on a surfing mission, only to return and find it still there. No thieves in the night, nor by day, save the odd hungry jackal. There was precious little fresh water, so the ocean was our bath. Swimming was a twice daily ritual; salt caked our skin. At times, the surf was big and unrideable, pounding the beaches with a vicious shore break. We were sucked and pummelled, tossed about like marionettes to emerge on the sand invigorated, our flesh singing.

We grew possessive of the solitude. A peace of sorts had grown inside us and it matched our surroundings. This was coupled with a diminishing need for the things we’d normally have considered necessary, or even essential. There was not the slightest hint of boredom. In fact, boredom seemed a symptom of too much, rather than of lack. Nights were the fullest: full of beauty and emptiness.

But it couldn’t last. We were low on provisions, the surf had turned to mush and Cape Town was calling us back. On our last night, the westerly increased to a gale and buffeted our tent canvas so loudly we couldn’t sleep. With the first glimmer of dawn, we got up and packed. The arc of Groen River Lighthouse, more than 20 kilometres to the south, scythed through the gloom like a great blade of light.

Before leaving, we stood for a long while looking down at our cove. The beach was burnished steel, the sea and western sky were sheets of grey. Arrow lines of cormorants, fired in salvos from the deep, approached the shore. We waited until the moment the sun lifted above the rise and rinsed the beach in clear light, then climbed into the car and drove south along the sandy track that led to Groen River, to Garies, and back down the long and lovely West Coast road to the city.

Our wayward week had filled us up with surf and stoke, calamari and boerewors, and a home-made Jacuzzi under the stars. We’d be back.

‘How about next weekend?’ said Tracey.

GLOSSARY

BABALAS: hangover STOKE: excited, thrilled GROMMETS: young surfers

LANGHUISIES: ‘long houses’, typical West Coast thatched cottages SET: group of (large) waves WITBLITS: moonshine spirits or firewater ZOL: marijuana cigarette BOERIE: boerewors TJOPS: lamb chops

For more about the West Coast.

For more on Justin Fox’s novel.

nft’s and wine: now and next

Written by: Simon Pavitt

While both the off-putting acronym and the shiny hype surrounding ‘NFTs’ might not be enticing for some, the underlying technology of a digital security offers compelling potential for manufacturing, distribution, the material economy in general and the wine industry in particular.

NFTs really hit mainstream culture in 2021 when the market for digital-based assets grew from $100 million in 2020 to $21 billion by the halfway point of 2021. That number was already at $42 billion in 2022. A larger spread of investors are clearly starting to come to grips with the underlying technology of NFTs, which is, in short:

‘… a unit of data stored on a digital ledger, a.k.a. a blockchain, which means it cannot be copied and is non-interchangeable. Digital files such as photos, videos and audio clips can be uniquely identifiable; therefore, it is like owning an original in digital form. The fundamental power of NFTs is the authentication of ownership when transferring the assets in a transaction.’

The wine world has already seen NFTs utilised to disrupt, evolve and enhance the industry.

For the Winemaker: The Digital Twin Let’s take the iconic Bordeaux estate Pétrus as an example. The château can create a digital twin for each bottle of its 30,000-bottle annual production. Each bottle can be ‘minted’ as a unique digital token. The NFT is a digital document that can identify one true owner of the bottle

of wine as a digital product.

The estate immediately has a database of every bottle of wine produced. During bottling, it can add a tamper-proof seal and tag system such as vinID that eliminates the threat of the original being drunk and refilled, as well as counterfeited bottles.

In the future, anyone in possession of the bottle will be able to check if it is authentic and, if allowed, see its history – for example how many times it’s changed hands on the secondary market. This level of traceability and authenticity is revolutionary.

Additionally, the NFT can be used to provide engaging content from the winemaker to the customer, e.g. information on the supply chain that formed part of the making of the wine. The bottle’s owner can transfer ownership to someone else, which then gets logged on the ledger, with the château notified for data insights.

While it is their blood, sweat and tears

in production, winemakers struggle to financially benefit from the secondary market sales of their wine. When tracking the performance via the Pétrus index (e.g. from Liv-ex), the price performance of the last ten physical vintages has risen over 350% since December 2003. Collectors, investors and speculators will have profited from buying and selling Pétrus. The estate does not see any of this profit (of course, it can hold back stock and release that onto the secondary market, so it’s not totally missing out). If, however, each bottle were traded only via the digital token, the protocol would be that Pétrus receives a royalty each time the bottle changes ownership … royalties for the creator!

In the future, winemakers can be rewarded for every sale as well as have a clearer picture of how many bottles of a top digitised vintage are left in the world, leading to a new dynamic in pricing.

For the bottle owner: The Utility Wine NFT

Originally, NFTs were seen as speculative assets on the assumption that with scarcity, price premiums often follow. But many were questioning their usefulness or long-term value – leading to the rise of the utility NFT. Utility NFTs are designed to provide additional value that can be unlocked as and when required (many in the hope that the value of the NFT remains as it continues to provide perks, access and unique benefits to the owner). Creators and developers realised that they could add redeemable rewards or unlock access to ‘membership’-style experiences to create more value associated with the ownership. By owning a bottle, you unlock additional perks and educational materials that only you as the owner can access. The owner can learn about how to store safely, protect the asset, and even when best to consider selling onto the market again – this time with in-built, proven authenticity. The future is building communities that can be nurtured and supported based on their NFT ownership.

For sharing: The Digital Cork and Tasting Tokens

The committed winemakers think about what happens when a bottle is opened and consumed. Only when the bottle has been enjoyed and finished is their job truly done.

There can be tags on the bottle to provide an alert when opened. The bottle tag links digital to real world as a ‘digital cork’. The owner of the bottle could have their digital cork converted into a collectible, unique digital artwork that can also be sold, traded or displayed as a keepsake of the experience. Potentially, the rarer the bottle, the more valuable the associated digital artwork.

There has always been a rich association between wine and art. And NFTs continue to bring the two together. Tristan Le Lous, owner (with his family) of Château Cantenac Brown, is breaking new ground with a raw-earth fresco sold as an NFT. The winemaker is constructing a one-of-a-kind raw-earth cellar set to be complete in 2023, with a commissioned piece of biodegradable artwork by Finnish artist David Popa. The temporary artwork, entitled ‘The Power of the Earth’, is preserved as a video, and auctioned as an NFT.

Club dVIN, launched in 2022, created the concept of the digital cork with the belief that NFTs are not just for ownership, but for sharing. The owner of the bottle can also mint up to 12 Tasting Token NFTs and share them with those who are present drinking the wine, having a tasting experience. Tasting Tokens prove the experience. Holders can share their Tasting Tokens on social media and collect them as a tasting journal (which can be visualised on a map, timeline or organised by the people you shared the experiences with). This is a wonderful communitybuilding opportunity for brand owners.

The NFTs allow you to remember and relive amazing wine experiences and connect with other wine lovers and collectors. As the taster accepts the token in their wallet, the vineyard gets notified, enabling it to be able to track the bottle. You can imagine wine enthusiasts looking to be the first of their friends to collect a 10-year vertical or one of each of the Super Tuscans, for example.

Tasting tokens are starting to be adopted by industry leaders: Club dVIN provided the tasting tokens for an exclusive Robert Parker + ‘Sine Qua Non’ dinner. All 100 participants received a special Tasting Token for the 27L bottle.

In the future, collectors and consumers could switch from wanting to own wines to wanting to collect digital experiences/ proof of tasting wines …

For the wine collector: The Digital Wine Cellar

Just as with digital art NFTs, owners want to display their assets. What’s quickly developed in digital art are digital museums allowing others to see one’s collection. A digital wine cellar can let an owner check out their own wines as well as provide others with an immersive look around and explore. This is how to show off while keeping those precious bottles safe.

In the future, collectors or investors would have the ability to showcase and sell bottles from their collections, from inside their digital cellar.

Wrapping up

A good recent example of NFT adoption by the wine industry was the first wine NFT auction held in South Africa. In a joint venture between principal auction house Strauss & Co, wine merchant WineCellar. co.za and sommelier Higgo Jacobs, several lots of vertical collections were sold. Prices exceeded expectations, with the unique digital contracts holding between 20 and 50 vintages, with collections from 66 to 288 bottles.

The winemakers can now track those bottles sold, and the NFT owners can leverage the associated utility tokens. They now also have liquidity – being able to sell the NFTs to others. Or when they open the wines and share, they can issue tasting tokens to those with whom they enjoy the wines. Alternatively, if they are collectors, they can showcase the wines to everyone in their digital cellar.

It doesn’t take too much imagination to realise that the future is a wine industry where the underlying NFT technology (with maybe a new name) becomes part and parcel of crafting, promoting, buying, consuming, sharing and collecting wine … digital security is here to stay in wine.

Club dVIN screen. Photo by Emily Wild.