Lucky Packet: 10 Stories from South Africa This Week

Here’s a pick of ten stories coming out of South Africa this week…from a buzzy area in Joburg and whale art in Woodstock to moulting penguins and a surprising re-count of marchers.

1.The New York Times focused this week on Melville, Johannesburg, which has risen from the ashes numerous times. Once again, it seems to have defied all the naysayers…except instead of being a night-time haunt – that’s now Braamfontein and Maboneng – you now go there for fun, shopping and eating in the sun. “[A] pleasant daytime walk along tree-lined Fifth Avenue, away from the main Seventh Street strip, opens onto its quiet delights: a clutch of antiques shops, independent designers and good dining,” says the article. It includes The Great Eastern Food Bar, Superella, 27Boxes and perennial favourite the Service Station Cafe.

2.Long-time gonzo journalist, world traveller and major Karoo lover, Chris Marais has come out with a fabulous book The Journeyman A South African Reporter’s Stories, about his often insane exploits as a journalist. For anyone who grew up in the ’70s, or lived through the turbulent days of apartheid’s end, or remembers that controversial sexploitation magazine Scope, or who wants to be a journalist, this is a must-read.

3. If you missed it, here again is the highly viewed photograph by Pieter de Groot of the Drakensberg Amphitheatre, #SouthAfrica, posted on SAPeople’s Facebook page. He says, “With the Tugela reduced to a trickle, I decided to skip the classic shot of the Amphitheatre and to hike up past the ranger’s hut towards Lion’s Ridge where this photo was taken.”

4. Sports highs and lows. The same week South Africa has its first National Sports Week, Gauteng Premier David Makhura has authorised an investigation into the provincial Department of Sport, Arts, Culture and Recreation amid allegations of financial mismanagement, breach of regulations, fraud and corruption.

5. The spectacularly situated Tintswalo Atlantic Lodge in Hout Bay, which burnt down during the horrific fires across the Cape Peninsula last year, has reopened.

6. In Cape Town’s ever-hip Woodstock, with art galleries multiplying weekly, Southern Guild’s gorgeous space at 10 Lewin Street launched the first solo exhibition of Cape Town designer Porky Hefer’s larger-than-life works, Monstera Deliciosa.

7. This month a group from the Raw Foundation start a four-month trek from Cairo to Cape Town to collect and test plastic samples, and to find out where plastic garbage ends up and who is to blame. This is part of its Making Waves campaign to eliminate single-use plastics by 2030.

8. How many? Journalists love to mix up numbers, but the Rand Daily Mail‘s Ray Hartley actually got down to counting. In particular he focused on that well-publicised EFF march on Sandton on 27 October. Numerous members of the media declared there were 50,000 people in red T-shirts marching. Look at the picture below and guess what the real figure was.

The total according to Hartley’s calculations – and he explains his methodology in the article – are 5,689 marchers at the starting point in the city centre and 5,859 at the end in Sandton. “There you have it,” he adds.

9. Even though instances of babies being swapped at birth are apparently rare in South Africa, the BBC focused this week on the anguish of two mothers who gave birth five years ago at the Tambo Memorial Hospital, in Boksburg, and who later found out their babies were switched. But a court has ordered them to keep the wrong babies. After almost two years of uncertainty, the North Gauteng High Court in Pretoria ruled this week that the children should remain with the people who had raised them.

10. It is moulting season for South Africa’s penguins at Stony Point Nature Reserve, Betty’s Bay. Says CapeNature (aka Western Cape Nature Conservation Board): “This highly sensitive moulting phase is a natural annual occurrence which equips each penguin with the essentials required to survive in both the marine and terrestrial environment during their natural life.”