Christa Kuljian was in studio with Sue Grant-Marshall for her Reading Matters show on Radio Today to discuss Sanctuary: How an Inner-city Church Spilled onto a Sidewalk, her book about the Central Methodist Church in Johannesburg’s role in providing shelter for refugees, especially during xenophobic violence.
Grant-Marshall commented that the book contains the stories of many different people. She asked how many refugees are still living there now. Kuljian explained that there are about 800 people that sleep there, mostly Zimbabweans but also a growing number of South Africans as winter sets in.
The interview with Kuljian starts at the 14 minute mark:
In April, advertising guru King ADZ launched his book The Stuff You Can’t Bottle: Advertising for the Global Youth Market in Amsterdam. After the launch, King ADZ was interviewed on the streetwear store Patta’s blog about how he helped orchestrate graffiti artist Blek Le Rat’s rise to fame, his favourite brands and the future of street style in the age of the internet:
On Friday 5th April Amsterdam was lucky enough to have advertising legend and street culture guru King ADZ give a presentation of his latest book: The Stuff You Can’t Bottle: Advertising for the Global Youth Market. Erik Kessels from the advertising agency KesselsKramer joined King ADZ giving insight into their practice and views on the contemporary youth market, advertising and street culture. If you didn’t make it down to the event on the day, don’t worry, I was lucky enough to get an interview with King ADZ, check it out below.
For the people reading this who don’t already know, can you give an introduction of who you are and what you do?
I am a writer, film-maker, and street middleman – which basically means I’m the conduit between brands and authentic street culture/talent.
Redi Tlhabi and Antony Altbeker were on 702 Talk Radio to discuss Altbeker acquiring the film rights for her memoir Endings and Beginnings. Tlhabi also spoke about how she had left her phone in the car on the night of the Sunday Times Literary Award shortlist announcements and so only found out the next morning when she woke up to a flurry of smses and tweets congratulating her on being shortlisted for the Sunday Times Alan Paton Award.
Altbeker, who recused himself from the judging panel for the Alan Paton Award after the longlisting process, said that the “story is phenomenal..it tells a South African story that I don’t think has been told before, that covers a lot of ground and does so with immediacy and real emotion and honesty. It’s a fantastic story and it’s exceptionally well written.”
When asked about her involvement in the film project, Tlhabi said she feels her job was to write the story and that she will be available to consult with Altbeker, but that movies and books are a different genre and she has no experience in the former. Althought she did joked about a documentary that she made on Thabo Mbeki, which was banned by the SABC, saying “that was the first and last time I went anywhere near that”, she continued to say that she doesn’t want control, or for her voice to overpower the story.
Noor-Jehan Yoro Badat from The Star interviewed Vanessa Goosen before the launch of her biography, Drug Muled, at Hyde Park Corner shopping centre. Goosen spoke about the depression that she experienced while imprisoned in Thailand and how she overcame it after a stranger approached her and reminded her to think about her daughter, Felicia, who was born in the prison and sent to live with Goosen’s friend in South Africa.
Goosen also discussed how difficult it was returning to South Africa after having been incarcerated for more than 16 years. She had to learn how to use a cellphone and get re-accustomed to wearing shoes and sleeping in a bed.
It’s been more than two years since Vanessa Goosen returned from Thailand. For 16 years, six months and 16 days the former Miss SA semi-finalist was incarcerated in Lard Yao women’s prison in Bangkok.
Goosen claimed to have been duped into carrying four engineering books, which were found to have compartments in the front and back hardcover and spine containing 1.7kg of heroin.
Babalwa Shota from City Press attended the launch and took some photographs of the event:
Exclusive Books in Hyde Park Corner Shopping Centre was a hive of activity this week when book lovers braved a nippy Joburg evening to attend the launch of a book penned by Joanne Joseph.
Drug Muled: 16 Years in a Thai Prison, about beauty queen turned drug mule Vanessa Goosen, has caused a buzz in publishing circles. And if the turnout at this launch is anything to go by, it will be on the bestseller list soon.
Charles Cilliers from City Press caught up with Zinaid Meeran, calling him the “most refreshing literary voice at the Time of The Writer festival.”
Meeran discusses how his latest book, Tanuki Ichiban, is an investigation and rejection of race and categorisation “in all its forms”. Cilliers describes the book as “great comic fantasy” and “a bit of a wild literary romp”.
In contrast to all the talk of Bikoism vs white liberalism, Zinaid Meeran was the most refreshing literary voice at the Time of The Writer festival.
He’s the author of two wildly imaginative novels.
The first, Saracen at the Gates, won him the 2009 European Literary Award, and the second, Tanuki Ichiban, the festival’s bookseller assured me, “is even weirder, but cool”.
Christa Kuljian first became interested in the Central Methodist Church’s work with refugees in Johannesburg following the xenophobic violence of 2008. In her book, Sanctuary: How an Inner-city Church Spilled onto a Sidewalk, she investigates this period in the church’s history, but also looks at its involvement in Johannesburg in the 1970s, ’80s and ’90s.
Kuljian spoke to Polity’s Shannon de Rhyhove about the book and her research:
Sue Grant-Marshall has written about Redi Tlhabi’s book, Endings and Beginnings, that tries to make sense of her childhood friendship with “gangster, murderer and rapist” Mabegzo.
Tlhabi grew up in Soweto and was protected by Mabegzo after another man threatened to rape her on her way home from school. For eight months Mabegzo walked her home and told her about his life.
In the book, Tlhabi’s investigates his life and their unusual friendship after he was killed on the street corner where they usually met:
The timing of Redi Tlhabi’s book about her Soweto childhood, her near rape and the violence that swirled around her growing years, is uncanny, coming as it does when SA seems to have reached a tipping point about violence against women. Yet it is pure synchronicity. The radio and TV host spent seven years writing Endings and Beginnings: A Story of Healing (Jacana). Indeed, Tlhabi was reluctant to let the book go, repeatedly repossessing it from her editor’s clutches.
In an insightful interview with International Socialism, a quarterly journal of socialist theory, Peter Alexander, co-author of Marikana: A View from the Mountain and a Case to Answer, looks at the Marikana massacre in terms of the history of the working class movement in South Africa.
Alexander discusses the class compromise sealed in 1994, “which legitimised capitalism in South Africa”. However, according to Alexander, we now see a shift in the balance of forces that the Labour Relations Act of 1994 tried to cement. Alexander speculates whether a new black trade union movement will emerge from the aftermath of Marikana, due to these shifting powers:
Peter, you are a historian of the working class movement in South Africa, so from the perspective of the history of that movement where would you place the Marikana strikes and what has developed since then?
The massacre is unique in its scale and character. In terms of the killings in a strike you have to go back to 1922 to find anything on a similar scale, and that was a much more even battle between capital and workers. 1 In terms of massacres more broadly, you have to go back to 1976 and the Soweto massacre to find anything that’s bigger than what’s happened in Marikana. There was a massacre of about 40 people at Boipatong in 1992, but if you assume that this particular massacre included 44 people—that is 34 people on the day and ten in the preceding week—this is even bigger than that one. So this is a massacre on a very large scale and given that it has involved a democratic government rather than an apartheid government it is very significant politically.
Marikana: A view from the mountain and a case to answer by Peter Alexander, Thapelo Lekgowa, Botsang Mmope, Luke Sinwell, Bongani Xezwi
EAN: 9781431407330 Find this book with BOOK Finder!
The Mail & Guardian‘s Charles Leonard interviewed Roger Lucey about his autobiography, Back in From the Anger.
Lucey discusses the process of working through his memories to write the book and spoke about how he is now friends with Paul Erasmus, the apartheid security policeman who sabotaged his career. He spoke about how it’s necessary to put what happened to him in perspective with what was done to others during apartheid:
Named after one of his songs, journalist, teacher, filmmaker, activist and musician Roger Lucey’s just-published autobiography Back in from the Anger (Jacana Media) has you by the lapels even before you open it. You simply cannot look away from the powerful red cover. It features a photograph of a young, bearded, long-haired Lucey giving you a battle-weary thousand yard stare. He also looks disturbingly like Charles Manson.
“We thought it [the cover] was in your face,” Lucey tells me in a recent interview in Johannesburg. They still used it “but in America they went, ‘whoa!’ ” His publisher had to design a different cover for the United States edition.
Kendal explained how she came to write a crime novel, after her two previous books were in the medical fiction genre, and revealed which crime writers she enjoys reading. She also discussed why she had chosen to set the book on a golf estate, saying that she intended to use it as a way to reflect South Africa’s inequalities using a gated community as a microcosm:
Rosamund Kendal’s new novel, The Murder of Norman Ware, (reviewed on this page) is a crime novel with a difference — and has a KZN setting for its quirky, dark and often creepy action. Books Editor MARGARET VON KLEMPERER asked Kendal a few questions about it.
The Murder of Norman Ware is different from your previous novels — what made you turn to the crime genre from medical fiction?
Christa Kuljian was in studio with Sue Grant-Marshall for her Reading Matters show on Radio Today to discuss Sanctuary: How an Inner-city Church Spilled onto a Sidewalk, her book about the Central Methodist Church in Johannesburg’s role in providing shelter for refugees, especially during xenophobic violence.
Download this eBook at LittleWhiteBakkie.com
Download this eBook at LittleWhiteBakkie.com
