logo
‘Legend of radio and TV broadcasting' — tributes pour in for Darren Scott

‘Legend of radio and TV broadcasting' — tributes pour in for Darren Scott

The Herald27-05-2025

Industry colleagues, friends and fans have taken to social media to pay tribute to radio presenter Darren Scott.
The Hot 102.7FM presenter, who suffered from melanoma, an aggressive form of skin cancer, for more than 38 years, died on Tuesday.
He is survived by his sons Mark and Matthew.
Tributes from colleagues are mounting on social media as people express their sadness about his passing.
Darren is remembered for the impact he made on the airwaves, having worked for stations including Radio Bop, 5FM, Jacaranda FM, East Coast Radio and Hot 102.7FM.
'We salute a South African radio legend who made a massive impact in shaping 5FM. Our heartfelt condolences to his family, friends and colleagues. Rest in power, Darren Scott,' read a statement shared by 5FM.
'Rest in peace #DarrenScott, legend of radio and television broadcasting. Gutted to hear this news but know Darren has been suffering for a long, long time. Was privileged to have worked closely with him on SuperSport broadcasts in the late 1990s and early 2000s. The ultimate professional with a real sense of humour and quick wit like no other. His love of broadcasting probably lay in radio, but his ease of presenting on television in shows such as # BootsAndAll and all the many #rugby and other sports encounters was second to none,' wrote performance coach and consultant Dave Nosworthy.

Orange background

Try Our AI Features

Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:

Comments

No comments yet...

Related Articles

South Africa to ramp up vaccinations as foot-and-mouth disease spreads
South Africa to ramp up vaccinations as foot-and-mouth disease spreads

The Herald

time17 hours ago

  • The Herald

South Africa to ramp up vaccinations as foot-and-mouth disease spreads

South Africa is building up vaccine stocks and expanding inoculations to fight a worsening foot-and-mouth disease (FMD) outbreak, the agriculture ministry said, as the country faces threats to beef supplies. FMD is a highly contagious viral infection of cloven-hoofed animals that may also affect other species. Flare-ups have been reported over the past several months in five provinces, with KwaZulu-Natal being the worst affected. This week Karan Beef, which operates the country's largest feedlot and one of the world's biggest, reported an outbreak at its facility in Heidelberg, about 50km southeast of Johannesburg. The quarantine imposed on the feedlot, which slaughters about 2,000 cattle daily, could affect beef supplies. The government has ordered more than 900,000 doses of FMD vaccines, with the first batch expected to arrive next week, the ministry said on Thursday. 'These plans are not only about responding to outbreaks but also about building permanent infrastructure to manage future risks,' it said.

The Mail & Guardian matters: Looking back in admiration
The Mail & Guardian matters: Looking back in admiration

Mail & Guardian

time21 hours ago

  • Mail & Guardian

The Mail & Guardian matters: Looking back in admiration

As a paid-up member of the print dinosaurs club, and having worked at the Mail & Guardian for almost 25 years, it is easy to claim ownership of deep affection and respect for this unique publication. It is definitely not because of the M&G's generous salary packages that I have worked here for so long. Back in the 1990s, and even after I rejoined the M&G in 2010, the newsroom was always occupied by a wildly diverse range of characters. Eccentric, passionate, committed, talented, courageous, argumentative, but all united by the desire to expose corruption, injustice and wrongdoing, to question authority, to analyse events as they unfolded, to tell the stories of South Africans and to write about the things that interested them. Being a member of the production team, these people could be immensely frustrating because meeting deadlines was not high on their list of priorities, but what they produced in the end was always worth the wait. I have worked in many newsrooms in South Africa, but it was at the M&G that I found a home. Most importantly, I found a place where I could be proud of the work that we did and my role in the newspaper that we produced. The characters that I write so fondly of here are a dying breed, or at least have moved on to more stable and profitable positions. But as we deal with the immense stress of the Section 189 retrenchment process and contemplate a different configuration of the M&G, I am constantly surprised and gratified by how big a role the M&G has played in the lives and careers of younger members of staff. Lesego Chepape, arts writer The Mail & Guardian gave me a chance, a platform to tell stories about where I come from. I would commute from Tembisa to the office every day — a journey that felt longer not because of the distance, but because of the weight I carried. Every morning, I stepped into spaces where stories of glossy suburbs were more familiar, while mine came from gravel roads and overcrowded taxis. I was scared. Sometimes embarrassed. What if they didn't see value in my township tales? But slowly, I leaned in. The lens began to zoom into the cracks on our pavements, the colours on our walls, the smoke rising from the kasi shisanyama. As an environment reporter, I showed the dumping sites we lived next to, the rivers that cried oil instead of water. Now, as an arts reporter, I show the brilliance of self-taught painters who use scrap wood as canvas. This platform matters to us — to my community. Through it, Tembisa has spoken to Stellenbosch, to Makhanda and to Soweto. I realised it's not just about reporting, it's about translating lived experience into stories that matter. Stories that shout. Stories that whisper home. That is what the Mail & Guardian has become. Aarti Bhana, news reporter One of the first questions they ask in journalism school is: 'What sort of journalism are you interested in and where do you see yourself working?' I was 22 at the time, and only one name came to mind: 'Mail & Guardian'. It's a progressive and informative newspaper, and it untangles the complexities of South Africa, past and present, and I wanted to be part of its legacy. It was on my vision board for the longest time and when I finally stepped into the Mail & Guardian newsroom as a journalist years later, I was reminded that dreams do come true. The publication has stood the test of time, consistently giving the public what it wants: news that empowers, educates and reflects the world to them. For me, it was never just about getting the job — it was about what I could contribute to the world through it. That's why the M&G matters, today and always.' Sheree Bega, environment reporter Twenty-five years ago, I was completing my BTech degree in journalism and there was only one newsroom I wanted to work in: the Mail & Guardian. As a young student, I devoured each edition of the paper every week and dreamt of being part of the M&G with its incredible team of investigative journalists, and its enduring legacy of fearless and independent journalism. Eager-eyed, I managed to secure an interview for the cadet school that the M&G ran back then, but while I was shortlisted, I never made it in. I was crushed. Still, I started freelancing for the M&G at the time and it was the first newspaper I ever had my byline in. I was so chuffed and still have that story, somewhere. The M&G is probably where my career in environmental journalism first started; I became a freelancer and was writing for the environmental supplements the M&G published back then. I still have all of those articles too. The M&G was a pioneer of environmental journalism in South Africa and has a strong and proud history of covering environmental issues. With its in-depth investigative reporting and analysis on environmental issues, it was a trailblazer in the field, establishing its environmental coverage early on, even amid challenges during the apartheid era. Over the years, world-class environmental journalists such as Eddie Koch, Fiona Macleod, Yolandi Groenewald and Sipho Kings have exposed corruption and held corporations — and the government — accountable for their disregard of the environment. The annual Greening the Future awards are a testament to how the M&G recognises and celebrates environmental efforts in the country. The M&G continues to provide extensive coverage of environmental issues with its focus on climate change, water resources, pollution and the crisis affecting the natural world. And, it says a lot that even now, during these horrible retrenchments facing us at the M&G, there is still a position for an environmental reporter.

Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o as town crier of Africa
Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o as town crier of Africa

Mail & Guardian

timea day ago

  • Mail & Guardian

Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o as town crier of Africa

Africa's writer NgugiwaThiong'o. Town crier of Africa. The title evokes Nigerian poet Christopher Okigbo's lines when he demonstrates that he is the sole witness to his homecoming and it applies to the late Kenyan scholar, novelist and public intellectual, Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o quite well. It characterises his resistance and stance, globally. Ngũgĩ is regarded as a member of the first generation of modern African writers who emerged just before and after African countries became independent. He was the youngest of them when he made his appearance in the literary public. For sure, he was one of those writers who were educated in colonial institutions. These writers were committed to social justice and human rights, as well as cultural roots. All the post-colonial writers were perfectly aware of what they borrowed or transferred from the West. It was not adopting the Western assumptions, it was a way of transforming them for a new literary public and culture. Ngũgĩ was widely noted for his campaign for writing in native languages to challenge Western denigration of African culture, which he believed was steeped in English. For him, language was not just a communication tool — it was a medium of alienation which held Africans back from their own culture. The seeds of his seminal work, Decolonising the Mind, were established at the first African writers' conference held at Makerere University, in Kampala, Uganda, in 1962. Writers from across Africa who chose to write in English gathered to discuss English as a medium of modern African literature. It ended up in division. The most ardent advocate of African literature in African languages was Nigerian literary critic Obi Wali, who dismissed writing in European languages, as Ngũgĩ subsequently did. Though this position garnered much attention, and sparked lively debate in the post-colonial world, it was hardly the main preoccupation of post-colonial writers, and also did not convince African writers of the time to recourse to their mother languages. Most post-colonial critics were obsessed with discourse and its effect on oppressed cultures. Because the discourse was not embedded in the language of natives, or simply languages, it was oriented by the language of power, and alienation was not all that bad — alienation might even open a new way of seeing your own culture differently. In time, Ngũgĩ's autochthonous approach almost faded into obscurity. Though the language debate dominated Ngũgĩ's intellectual and literary oeuvre, his tackling issues was no different from Chinua Achebe, Wole Soyinka, Gabriel Okara, Cheikh Hamidou Kane and others. One can read Achebe and Ngũgĩ in a deep conversation in terms of returning to their roots. For instance, Achebe's guiding approach is clearly seen in his debut novel, Weep Not, Child, which has a bearing on Things Fall Apart . Achebe and Ngũgĩ were afraid of being attached to Euro-modernist forms, which they believed would alienate them from their own society. Ngũgĩ strives to restore the dignity of his people, which was taken away by the 'colonial library'. In his novel, Petals of Blood , the narrator, raising issues of history, aptly argues: 'For there are many questions in our history which remain unanswered. Our present-day historians, following on similar theories yarned out by defenders of imperialism, insist we only arrived here yesterday.' For Ngũgĩ: 'The novelist is haunted by a sense of the past. His work is often an attempt to come to terms with 'the thing that has been', a struggle, as it were, to sensitively register his encounter with history, his people's history.' His preoccupation with the past led him to claim and reconstruct history through his work. His rendering of his past basically relies on three revolutionaries: Frantz Fanon, Vladimir Lenin and Walter Rodney, to whom he owes his critical approach. Ngũgĩ scholar James Ogude reads his works as 'writing from below', a Marxist approach initially employed by the Marxist English historian EP Thompson. The most precious gift he passed on to his nation is his latest book, The Perfect Nine: The Epic of Gĩkũyũ and Mũmbi , which ranks alongside the famous Malian epic Sundiata . I believe the epic will survive time and continue to honour the continent; it embodies all human suffering and dignity throughout the centuries, and the happiness of the time being and the time ever present and the time passed over present. Time never passed for Ngũgĩ, which always is invoked through memories that never age, as Harry Garuba reminds us. It is crystallised in moments that contain overlapping terrains and lived through everlasting mourning, chants and praises. Hence Ngũgĩ as a praise singer, a town crier of his nation that never stops chanting for Africa. Here is how the narrator of the epic's chants bear the hope of the future fostered through storytelling: 'Time flows on like an endless river, Time Yesterday into Time Today, Time Today into Time Tomorrow. Now is Now and it is not Now because Time does not stop. Yesterday is Yesterday and it is not Yesterday because Time did not stop. Tomorrow is Tomorrow and it is Tomorrow because Time will not stop.' His words are weaponised with the strength and resilience that were sustained to his last breath. The Perfect Nine, in which Ngũgĩ pays his strong tribute to his nation, placed him alongside the great African griots who never tired of carrying the burden of the history of their nations, holding the power of storytelling to resist the time of destruction. It is a masterpiece that hails from his nation, which he carefully treats as a pearl glistening in his eyes with relentless tears toward a world. Ahmet Sait Akçay is a literary critic and African Studies scholar, he is teaching at the Centre for African Studies, University of Cape Town.

DOWNLOAD THE APP

Get Started Now: Download the App

Ready to dive into the world of global news and events? Download our app today from your preferred app store and start exploring.
app-storeplay-store