Archive for the ‘Jacana’ Category
by Sophy on Apr 11th, 2012
Alert! The shortlist for the 7th annual European Union Literary Award, awarded to a unpublished first novel, has been announced.
The winner of the EU Award receives R25 000, publication by Jacana and inclusion in this year’s Exclusive Books Homebru promotion. Here’s the 2011/12 shortlist:
Denise Cruse — Everything We Lose
CA Davids — The Blacks of Cape Town
Ekow Duker — White Wahala
Ashraf Kagee — Khalil’s Journey
The winner will be announced on Thursday, 19 April, at a ceremony at the French Institute of South Africa in Braamfontein. The 2009/10 award went to James Clelland for his Border War novel, Deeper Than Colour. Notable previous winners include Kopano Matlwa (Coconut) and Fred Khumalo (Bitches’ Brew).
Good luck to the four finalists!







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Saracen at the Gates
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Till We Can Keep an Animal
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by Sophy on Apr 6th, 2012

Today we bring you a short extract from Presidential Portraits, the as-yet-unpublished new novel by award-winning writer, Zachariah Rapola.
Rapola’s 2007 novel, Beginnings of a Dream, was praised by Zakes Mda ahead of its release for its “simple and lucid yet rhythmic diction”. For a sense of what Mda means, keep reading:
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Immediately after presenting his credentials to Dr the Honourable Navinchandra Ramgoolam, Prime Minister of Mauritius, South Africa’s Ambassador designate, Matabane retired to his 6th floor luxury suite at the Labourdonnais Hotel. It was a temporary arrangement until suitable ambassadorial accommodation was found. The suite gave him an expansive view the waterfront. Down below, his eye beheld a couple naval boats. Their Coast Guard markings were distinctive. His gaze lingered on the red, blue, yellow and green coloured flag of the island nation dancing to the wind.
He looked further away. The ocean beyond stretched as far as the eye could see. He was struck by its tranquil surface. A façade. Deadly and deceptive. Oceans and seas cannot profess honour. How can they when during a clash of forces of nature man is guaranteed to come second best?
Oceans and seas cannot claim innocence.
Ambassador Matabane retreated from the window. The embrace of his suite gave him assurance. Yet even at that height and distance he felt weary of the open sea. Tap water he could deal with, because it could be manipulated. Streams and rivers he tolerated, because they presented immediate sources of life. Not oceans and seas.
Oceans and seas cannot speak of incorruptibility when genocide is in their psyche.
Hidden under that rippling mass were deadly agendas and conspiracies spoiling to explode without warning. Idle waves camouflage a deluge raring to rise into furious tsunamis. Still refresh in his mind was the tsunami over Sumatran. So was the other westward-bound tsunami to Madagascar that toppled Ravalomanana installing Rajoelina to power. Deadly and deceptive. The same caressing breezes conceal restless spirits of sailors, fishermen and pirates claimed by waves over the centuries.
Oceans and seas cannot proclaim their virtue…
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Beginnings of a Dream
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by Carolyn on Mar 16th, 2012
Troy Blacklaws’ first two novels, Karoo Boy and Blood Orange, have received international acclaim, and his latest novel, Cruel Crazy Beautiful World, promises to be another fascinating read.
We’re pleased to bring you an extract from Chapter 1 of Cruel Crazy Beautiful World in which Jerusalem (Jero), a young man of both Jewish and Muslim descent, is forced to go to Hermanus to earn a living after his father tells him that “the freeloading’s over”.
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Cape Town. December 2004.
A boy tracks a skinny dun cow along a caged footbridge over the N2 highway out of town. The bridge is wired in to keep crazy cows from jumping and bitter boys from dropping bricks onto motorcars that shark along the tarmac below. For such boys Mandela’s longed-for freedom is a joke.
A haze of smoke and summer dust hangs low over Crossroads shantytown.
Behind us the sun hovers over Table Mountain.
On the roadside a tow truck, like a morbid mantis, dreams up its next victim.
And on the radio Miles Davis blows high, cicada notes.
See my old man with a lazy palm on the wheel of his mystic-green ’74 Benz and his other hand combing his ducktail. Zero Cupido: in his flaring Hawaiian shirt and snakeskin boots, he looks the part of a dodgy Cuban dealer in an American film. In fact he’s half Cape Malay, half Cuban. With just a jot of Hottentot blood. In theory he’s Muslim. In reality he loves his whisky and pig and hasn’t gone to mosque for a long time. He has no intent to go on Hajj, yet he enjoys orientating his life to Mecca. He draws an arrow in the sand with his foot whenever he’s on a beach. He has pencilled an arrow under the roof of the veranda. Ghosting through Cape Town, he’ll cast his eyes starwards to find south and then figure out the angle toMecca. That imaginary notch in his mind keeps the world from spinning too randomly, he tells me.
Now, out of the blue, Zero’s put his snakeskinned foot down. Jero, the freeloading’s over, he said to me. He’ll no longer fork out good money (?!) on a son who is a drifter and a dreamer: forever lolling on the harbour wall, forever sipping cocktails with flaky gay artists, forever writing sappy po-ems. He spat out the word poems as he might a litchi stone. He has no time for fucking daffodils dancing in the breeze. It’s unclear whether he is recycling the one line of poetry he recalls from his school days, or is calling all poets and other artists daffodils.
My old man sees himself as a realist. He endlessly waxes his Benz, fills his hands with a whore’s tits, slices kudu biltong against his thumb, douses his fish and chips in vinegar, turns sizzling chops with his bare fingers and licks them off. He has zero finesse at the bone. His idea of finetuning is running a kind of spit cloth through the barrel of his Colt 45, or measuring and adjusting the gap in his spark plug. He wants the spark to jump far … so it burns clean.
I silently scorn his world of dabbling and dealing, of whistling at schoolgirls in skimpy skirts and shooting pool in murky bars, of totting up takings on a Lion matchbox and smoking fat Havana cigars.
It’s a mystery to Zero how I’m so tuned into the ephemeral, into things neither here nor there. I’m fazed by the sound of old men sucking air through gaps in their teeth. I sniff the wispy smoke from under a just-unlidded beer bottle as if it is perfume. I love Parma ham shaved in opaque slivers. I linger in a cinema long after a film ends to ride out the vibe as long as I can. I enjoy arthouse films with their zen endings that hang in midair. I gaze into a lava lamp until I see flamingos and phantoms. I listen to indie folk and whimsical garage instead of hard rock. All
this renders me a moffie in his eyes. A free-verse fairy with a footloose soul.
He has a point. I still have zip on paper after two years of reading for my thesis on García Márquez at the University of Cape Town. I got lost in the dusty labyrinth of his Latin American mind. All the thoughts I placed on paper somehow became poems … and a play. Lost? This is beyond imagining for Zero. He never goes beyond the Cape Flats without a map in hand. He loves to unfold a road map and follow the N2 all the way to Durban with a finger. Then to laugh at my fumbling bid to origami the map along the original folds again. Ironic, for a man of such hazy ethics to be so focused on compass points in a land where booming shantytowns render maps old overnight.
I curse him for exiling me to survive all alone out in Hermanus: boondock harbour town south-east of Cape Town. Hermaanus. I hope you’ve never heard of it.
We go by a fire raging on a highway island. A wizardy old man shakes a fly whisk at the flames.
My amigos pity me. At dusk today they’ll all head down to the Cape Town harbour for sundowners. They’ll jabber their dreams of recording music and put forward their beer-foam theories on why Mandela’s rainbow dream fell out of focus in this land of antithesis. And where will I be? In Hermanus, other side of Hangklip, far from the jazzy verve of Cape Town.
– My father and my father’s father were fishermen in Kalk Bay, Zero intones. Jero, my boy, you come from a long line of fishermen.
He swivels his focus away from the Benz icon to glare unblinking eyes at me, to spook me out.
This is, I think, his bid to prove the futility and absurdity of my reading García Márquez.
– But Dad, this sea’s been fished dry and the fishermen are dying out. Besides, my other grandfather taught philosophy.
He taught in Vienna until 1937. Then he sailed for Cape Town. He was one of the few lucky Jews. Lucky to have eluded the Nazis then. Lucky too to have keeled over before his daughter fell for a Muslim.
Zero flicks my words out the wound-down window with his ducktailing hand.
– And he had to sell newspapers to put a roof over his head when he came out to Cape Town. Philosophy won’t put fish and a beer in your hands. I tell you flat, my boy, if you want to survive … you have to have something to trade.
That’s Zero’s Survival Tip #1.
He’ll hand you his hard-earned wisdom free of charge. One hand palm up (as if balancing the circle of the wheel) and the other with fingers down (tapping on his drum-taut gut), he may just remind you of Buddha calling on the earth to witness his moment of illumination.
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- Cruel Crazy Beautiful World is published by Jacana Media
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by Sophy on Mar 13th, 2012

We are thrilled to be able to bring you an excerpt from Lolly Jackson: When Fantasy Becomes Reality, written by Sean Newman, Peter Piegl and Karyn Maughan and released by Jacana Media last month.
Lolly Jackson: When Fantasy Becomes Reality reveals the story behind the murder of the late Teazers founder and provides unique insights into his personal life and business affairs. Read an extract from Chapter 2, The King of Teaze, titled “Women, Wheels and Poker”:
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To the outside world, Lolly Jackson was the embodiment of the devil – a shady businessman who had questionable friends and who had been arrested on several occasions for alleged crimes ranging in severity from assault to human trafficking. To add fuel to this fire, Lolly offered no excuses for his life of excess. He glutted himself on fast cars and even faster women, and cared little for consequence or popular opinion. His megalomania sometimes offended the public and Lolly himself encouraged certain misconceptions as there were parts of himself that he was at pains to hide. Robyn Teixeira, who had worked closely with Lolly for many years, says he was simply misunderstood: ‘Lolly chose to be that way. He was a vulnerable man and he took everything to heart.’
Over time I learnt that Lolly Jackson was a complex being and it was this complexity that contributed to the downward spiral of his turbulent life. Lolly was driven, confrontational, and demanded loyalty and obedience. He was ultimately ruled by a cruel taskmaster – his ego – and it needed to be fed. Lolly had to be known – feared, respected or loathed; he cared little either way. To Lolly, anonymity was unacceptable.
The man known to South Africans as Lolly Jackson began his life on 24 September 1956 as Emmanuel Zachary. He was born in Elizabethville in the Belgian Congo to Greek parents, George and Soula. Soula ran a small general dealer store and George was the owner of a Texaco petrol station. In 1960, after weeks of violent riots which left hundreds dead, the country achieved independence and became known as Zaire. Violence continued, mobs ransacked businesses and the Zachary family decided to flee. George reinforced their 1950s Oldsmobile and they broke through the borderpost barricades and fled south to safety, eventually settling in Germiston, east of Johannesburg. In an effort to assimilate the family with their new community, George changed their surname to Jackson. It was Soula who renamed Emmanuel. On returning from three months basic training in the SANDF, a highly excited Soula began shouting that ‘Lolly’ was home (Lolly being a diminutive of Emmanuel) and this expression, much to her son’s chagrin, was echoed by a friend. From that moment on, Emmanuel Zachary was no more.
Around the time Lolly was 22, he met and started dating Vivian Starkey. After a year, Vivian fell pregnant. Driven by a code of responsibility inculcated by his parents, Lolly married Vivian in 1980. Their son George was born soon after but tragically, only four months later, the baby succumbed to cot death.
A distraught Lolly was beside himself and, with what later became his trademark explosive temper already in place, he started upending desks and furniture at work. Later, when grief replaced his anger, he was found sitting at the morgue, refusing to move until staff had to throw him out. Caught up in a personal hell, Lolly blamed Vivian for the tragedy. In the years that followed, the pain receded and two more children were born, Samantha and Manoli. Within six years, however, the marriage was in trouble and the couple divorced in 1986.
As I spent more time with Lolly, I witnessed his wariness of the fairer sex. I think it had a lot to do with his traditional Greek upbringing, where men are deemed superior to women. Lolly subscribed to this mindset, and I believe his wariness had more to do with Lolly feeling that women couldn’t do a man’s job, rather than pure distrust.
In 1990 Lolly met his second wife, Sharon Tracy Fensham, while she was working as a receptionist at Goldstein Attorneys in Germiston. He was a client of the firm and, ever the ladies’ man, he started flirting with Sharon the moment he saw her. Sharon’s boss, who knew Lolly well, encouraged her to accept his client’s invitations to dinner as he saw Lolly as extremely lonely and felt that the company would be good for him. They hit it off after the first date and their meetings became more regular. Lolly was working as a DJ at the time and enjoyed being the life of the party, but he was driven by ambition for greater things and he soon bought a brick and paving factory, making his first million in the years to follow.
Sharon moved in with Lolly five months after that first meeting. The couple were engaged a few times as ‘he kept buying me dud rings’, Sharon good-naturedly remembers. Lolly would boast that her rings were worth thousands, but she’d later find out that the ‘diamonds’ were in fact cubic zirconia.
Sharon recalls that they ‘had a really good relationship, but it was volatile. He was always playing around and flirting. His whole thing to me was he never had affairs and I had to catch him. I spent my life trying to catch him.’
Once married, Lolly and Sharon moved to 40 Kloof Road in Bedfordview. Lolly’s ego dictated that he had to live on this street in the affluent suburb, even though their home was quite dilapidated. It took a year to revamp, but Lolly’s determination paid off. ‘Lolly was passionate about everything he did,’ says Sharon. Unfortunately, the price of this passion was Lolly’s tempestuous mood swings. The slightest frustration would send him into a rage and he’d destroy anything he could lay his hands on, from cellphones and laptops to furniture.
‘Lolly was terrible at fixing things,’ Sharon recalls, bemused. ‘We didn’t even have a proper wall around the property and Lolly was trying to fit the TV into the wall unit. It didn’t have a hole in the back to put the wires through; he was trying to force the wires down the side instead. As I turned around, I saw our neighbours walking towards our house in order to introduce themselves. The next minute, the TV goes flying past me! Lolly kicked that unit to pieces.’
Despite the fact that their relationship appeared solid to the outside observer, the marriage came under severe strain because of Lolly’s flirtatious nature. He would openly tease women in front of Sharon, writing down girls’ telephone numbers on his wife’s cigarette boxes. Lolly explained this by saying that he was only trying to keep her interested. Sharon says, ‘It actually destroyed me in the end. I had to see a therapist after a while.’ It was also difficult for Lolly and Sharon to spend quality time together because of his rigorous work routine, which added to the demise of their relationship.
From the start of their marriage, Sharon had wanted to have a child with Lolly. He wasn’t keen as he was already father to Samantha and Manoli. His attitude changed when he suffered a major heart attack. As Sharon walked into the ward shortly after he had been admitted to hospital, she could see that her husband was terrified. He said he wanted to leave her ‘with something of me’, should anything go wrong in the future.
After falling pregnant with their son Julian, Sharon’s trust issues intensified. Just prior to their decision to have a baby, Lolly had opened up a business called the Gold Card Club which was, in effect, a brothel. Despite promising Sharon that he’d only have to go there to collect money, Lolly spent increasing amounts of time there. Sharon never felt comfortable with Lolly’s involvement in this business and soon the couple’s disagreements escalated to a point that became untenable for Sharon.
Another factor adding further pressure to their relationship was that Lolly was proving to be a poor father. With his old-school Greek notions of parenting, he had no interest in dealing with screaming kids – he liked the idea of being a father, but that was it. In his mind, children needed to be seen and not heard, and certainly not to be the cause of stress in his life. His role therefore became solely that of a provider – one he played perhaps too well. In a discussion about inheritance, Sharon mentions that as part of the divorce settlement Lolly had given Vivian a house. When questioning his generosity, friends had been told that it wasn’t for Vivian; it was for Samantha and Manoli. ‘If he hadn’t given everything to the kids, it would have gone to the SPCA,’ Sharon says. ‘Lolly didn’t trust women.’ Before his heart surgery, Lolly sat up in bed and rewrote his will while his wife looked on. He left the vast majority of his fortune to his children. He was at pains to make sure his children would be well taken care of. Sharon and Lolly were divorced in 1997.
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by Chiara on Feb 23rd, 2012

Scott Smith from The New Age interviewed Nobel laureate Nadine Gordimer, who spoke about her forthcoming novel, No Time Like The Present, and the challenges of writing “in the sunset of a glittering career”. In the interview, Gordimer reveals that her favourite South African author is Mongane Wally Serote and describes his 2002 novel, Scatter the Ashes and Go as “brilliant work that no one has come close to”.






Gordimer says her latest novel is “not about race”. Instead, she explains, “It’s about what those who were in the struggle didn’t have the peace of mind to think about. It’s about the problems that came after freedom. We just didn’t think about what it would be like afterwards. Today, the past still needs to be dealt with.” On the topic of writing at the age of 88, she confesses that she will give up writing if her standards seem to be dropping, as has happened to other ageing writers.
Gordimer also mentions that that one lingering regret of hers is that she never learned an African language:
Nadine Gordimer turns 89 later this year but she’s as sharp as a tack. I still found myself fumbling my words and racing to keep up with her answers or spinning to find the next question to keep the interview going. She’s formidable, with a mountainous reputation, an intellect to boot and an activist’s stance that is respected far beyond the borders of this country, one she has fought so hard to liberate through the sharpness of her pen. She was awarded the Nobel Prize for literature 20 years ago in such recognition. She snapped at me more than once for inaccurately describing her most recent novel or questioning whether she still considers herself an activist, but she was always polite. Just like her writing; considered, deliberate and strong. That said, I think she took a liking to me.
A fan of Gordimer since I was a child, I knew of her since I first knew writing. She, among others, exposed me to what South Africa really was at that time. That was decades ago but her writing today still resonates with the truth as she knows it. She still writes with drive and conviction.




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by Chiara on Feb 21st, 2012


Sir Henry Rider Haggard was a Victorian novelist who helped found the Lost World genre of novels. According to his profile on The Literature Network, most of his adventure stories were set in exotic locations, predominantly in Africa. One of these was King Solomon’s Mines, which he wrote in just 6 weeks in 1885. Haggard’s gothic novel Ayesha cemented his success, with “Ayesha” being referred to both in the works of Freud and Jung, and credited as the inspiration for JRR Tolkien’s Galadriel.
Adding to the list of trivia to be associated with the author, is the finding that Haggard met with and interviewed the first president of the ANC, John Dube. According to Stephen Coan in The Witness, the fact of their meeting was revealed in the first publication of Haggard’s Diary of an African Journey by the University of KwaZulu-Natal Press. Coan says that Haggard’s observations of racial tensions and “prophetic comments on South Africa’s future” contradicts the popular view of Haggard as “a stereotypical colonial author”:






Haggard interviewed Dube in 1913, where Dube spoke about his belief in “education, both literary and agricultural, as a remedy…to bring the natives under better influences”. After Haggard’s death in 1925, Dube collaborated with FL Ntuli on a translation of Haggard’s “all-Zulu novel”, Nada the Lily, published as Umbuso kaShaka. Coan says that “Haggard was clearly in Dube’s mind” when Dube penned his novel, U-Jeqe, Insila ka Tshaka (re-published by Penguin Classics in 2010), set during the reign of Shaka and first published in 1930.
IT might seem surprising that H. Rider Haggard, author of King Solomon’s Mines, has a role to play in the year marking the 100th anniversary of the founding of the ANC, but during a visit to South Africa in 1914 Haggard met and interviewed the first president of the ANC, John Dube. Their meeting only came to light in 2000 with the first publication of Haggard’s Diary of an African Journey by the University of KwaZulu-Natal Press. The Dube interview, Haggard’s observations on racial tensions, migrant labour and the prevailing conditions in Zululand, together with his sometimes prophetic comments on South Africa’s future recorded in the diary, serve to cut against the grain of popular and academic perceptions of Haggard as a stereotypical colonial author.
The diary details Haggard’s visit to South Africa from February to May 1914 while a member of the Dominions Royal Commission (DRC). As a young man Haggard had spent the years 1875 to 1881 in South Africa, in Natal and the Transvaal, as a minor functionary in the colonial service. On his return to England he embarked on a legal career, simultaneously trying his hand at writing. Following the huge success of his fourth book, King Solomon’s Mines, Haggard quit the law for literature and turned out a string of bestsellers, including Allan Quatermain, She, Nada the Lily and Montezuma’s Daughter.
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by Sophy on Feb 8th, 2012


Verdict: two juicy carrots
One hundred years ago this Sunday, the burghers of the South African town of Bloemfontein had an unaccustomed and presumably distinctly disconcerting experience. Deep in the heart of the veld, the high plateau that dominates the South African interior, theirs was a traditional Afrikaner community. Little more than a decade earlier, it had been capital of one of the short-lived Boer republics as Afrikaners fought a courageous but doomed battle against British domination.
Yet it was here on January 8 1912 that hundreds of the country’s nascent black middle class met in formal dress, singing the haunting hymn “Nkosi Sikelel’ i-Afrika” (God Bless Africa). Their mere presence would have been shocking enough to the whites. Yet their mission to unite in opposition to blacks’ secondary status in the then newly formed Union of South Africa was truly revolutionary.
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by wombatsamwilson on Jan 12th, 2012
Verisindaba, the website promoting Afrikaans poetry, has published a selection of English translations of the poetry of Antjie Krog.
The poems come from various sources and were translated by the author, along with Denis Hirson, author of The Dancer and the Death on Lemon Street and I Remember King Kong (The Boxer), Karen Press, author of Home and The Little Museum of Working Life, Richard Jürgens and Tony Ullyatt.
Christmas before the first democratic election
after the rains
the veld gives herself like a slut to the green
of bleak barren plains suddenly nothing
to be seen everything feasts everything
carouses green among thorn trees and braggart tussles
is the vapour of jitters and glue-lick
the hump of karee the foxtrot of wild olive
and for Christmas the cat-bush tiptoes red stipples
wait, see there: the ginger-green pools swell every afternoon
ample with boons of clouds reflecting lightning white
the excess is so unimpaired
so sudden
so cicada-singing
so well-disposedly generous
that it attests to a bloody insensitivity about us
us to whom these velds belong
lied and belied we feel we to whom these velds belong
eroded bewildered assaulted we feel we to whom these velds belong
we fold out hands around our share of chicken and trifle
perhaps the last Christmas together like this
this, on this farm
(From: Gedigte 1989 – 1995, Hond, (1995))
(Tr. by the author)


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- Die sterre sê tsau: /Xam-gedigte van Diä!kwain, Kweiten-ta-//ken, /A!kúnta, /Han#kass’o en //Kabbo edited by Antjie Krog
EAN: 9780795701740
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by Ben - Editor on Dec 25th, 2011
Happy Christmas! Madam & Eve gets South Africa into the spirit with their annual full-page, full-colour strip:


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by Chiara on Nov 22nd, 2011

Tomorrow, 23 November 2011, sees the opening of the exhibition Don’t/Panic at Durban Art Gallery to coincides with COP17, the United Nations’ international conference on climate change. Durban-born curator Gabi Ngcobo told the Mail and Guardian‘s Percy Zvomuya that she put together the 30-plus works based on their “poetic not evangelical disobedience”.
Dont’/Panic showcases the talents of artists such as David Koloane, Mlu Zondi, Clive van den Berg and Moshekwa Langa, all of whom have created works that have a “subversive ways of looking at” climate issues. It runs until 19 February 2012.
The exhibition Don’t/Panic is a homecoming of sorts for Durban-born curator Gabi Ngcobo. It is opening next week to coincide with COP17, the United Nations’ conference on climate change.
The show, running at the Durban Art Gallery, features more than 30 works by South African artists, including David Koloane, Mlu Zondi, Clive van den Berg and Moshekwa Langa, Nigerian-born artist Otobong Nkanga, Eritrean artist Dawit L Petros, Nigerian George Osodi and Moroccan-born artist Batoul S’Himi.
Ngcobo has returned from Bard College in New York, where did a master’s degree in curatorial studies last year.













The environmental summit which takes place in Durban from 28 – 9 December will also feature a range of A-list celebrity speakers including Leonardo DiCaprio, Angelina Jolie, U2 frontman Bono, Arnold Schwarzenegger and Sir Richard Branson.
A-list celebrities including Leonardo DiCaprio, Angelina Jolie and U2 frontman Bono are set to attend the environmental summit Conference of the Parties (COP 17) in Durban, reports Daily News.
Other celebrities also planning to attend include politician and actor Arnold Schwarzenegger and British billionaire Sir Richard Branson.
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