Latest news with #Athol
News24
27-05-2025
- News24
When a date turns deadly: Police search for Joburg woman's suitor
Police are looking for a man named John who is driving a VW Polo. This after he picked up a Johannesburg woman for a date on Saturday. She was later found murdered and her body dumped. A date with a suitor turned deadly for a Johannesburg woman after she was found murdered and her body dumped. Now, police say they have launched a manhunt for the suspected murderer – a man who goes by the name of John and drives a white VW Polo – who allegedly killed the 30-year-old woman. Olorato M ongale went on a date with her alleged killer on Saturday. He picked her up from her residential complex, driving a white VW Polo. The vehicle was fitted with fake registration number plates: LT 57 JG GP. 'The man fetched Olorato at her residential complex in Athol, Johannesburg at around 15:00 on Sunday. He drove with the victim in the township of Alexandra, proceeded to Kew and between Alexandra and Lombardy West in Johannesburg, this man allegedly murdered Olorato and dumped her body,' said police spokesperson Brigadier Athlenda Mathe. #sapsHQ GBVF perpetrator #Alert: Police are searching for an African male who uses the name of John. He drives a white VW Polo with a cloned number plate: LT 57 JG GP. The man is wanted in connection with the alleged murder of a 30-year-old female. Olorato Mongale went on a date… — SA Police Service 🇿🇦 (@SAPoliceService) May 27, 2025 Some of Mongale's belongings, including a phone and a handbag, were found abandoned on 9th Road in Kew. 'Her body was found in less than two hours at around 16:50 in Lombardy West on Monday afternoon by the SAPS with the assistance of community members,' said Mathe. She added that Gauteng police are investigating the possibility that 'John' was with another male suspect when they allegedly murdered Olorato. Last week, police pounced on a man who was targeting women on Facebook using a fake profile and identity. The 24-year-old man is still in custody and has already appeared before the Bolobedu Magistrate's Court on a charge of kidnapping and rape. He allegedly lured a 28-year-old female to Limpopo under false pretences and raped her repeatedly. She was later rescued by police at a filling station in Giyani. 'While police investigating teams are on the ground on the Olorato Mongale case and several other GBVF cases, we are urging women to be extra vigilant and look out for this VW Polo,' said Mathe. Police also urged women to always report their whereabouts to friends and family when meeting new friends or going out on dates. 'Avoid meeting strangers in secluded areas and only [meet] in public spaces,' Mathe added.
IOL News
08-05-2025
- Politics
- IOL News
VAT 25: 'Who Killed Cock Robin?'
The VAT increase died because of the total hash of it made by a very inexperienced Minister of Finance. Some of our more bloodthirsty readers will remember the rather gruesome children's Nursery rhyme, Who killed Cock Robin? The amusing claims and counterclaims of some of the minor and very minor representatives of the people in Parliament about having killed the VAT increase reminded me recently of the carryings-on of his feathered friends, either lamenting or bragging about the death of Cock Robin. A bastardised version (by me and not by AI), of the nursery rhyme, published in 1744, might read as follows: 'Who killed Cock Robin?' 'I,' said Athol, the sparrow, 'I'm very good with my tiny little bow and arrow.' 'Who saw it die?'' 'Me, me, me,' said the puffer wearing his Trumpian cap, 'MakeSouthAfricaBlack (Like Me).' 'Who caught his blood?' Beasley the Dikkop, now renamed Thicknee, beamed. 'I knew immediately it was blood and told my leaders so they could claim the blood. 'Who'll make the shroud?' The Riser simpered, 'Oh, don't worry about that. I'll zap it in a Zibi can.' 'Who'll do the eulogy?' The Minah said, musingly, 'I will. Everybody has the right to believe it was this flock of ours that sent the VAT increase to paradise.' Readers will note that even well-meaning and busy birds can be wrong.
The Guardian
10-03-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
Athol Fugard was a dreamer, listener and master storyteller – on stage and at home
I feel that Athol Fugard and his wife, Paula Fourie, changed my life in the autumn of 2022 when I visited South Africa to spend time with them and their daughter Halle. We were supposed to be working on a book together, and we did; but our time became so much more than that. There were lunches in the house or the restaurant round the corner; walks in the woods; a braai that went on past midnight. Over coffee in the mornings I'd sit with Athol and we'd use an app on his phone to identify the calls of all the birds in the garden. Then he might tell me a story from his life – the awe he felt when he asked Yvonne Bryceland to smash a chair to bits during rehearsals for Antigone and she proceeded to do so for a full 30 minutes; the journey he made by sea at 18 from Cairo to Japan, when an illiterate Somalian sailor used to watch him every night as he wrote a novel by hand, sitting on a deck hatch; and the way that sailor never spoke to him again when he finished the novel, decided it was terrible, and threw it in the sea. Just once, he told me the story of a play he was planning. He spoke elegantly, carefully, slightly formally; I hardly dared breathe for fear he'd stop. He and I had shared certain extreme experiences, albeit more than half a century apart, which had been formative for both of us, and I think as a result we bonded quite strongly; over the course of my time with him we both cried together, taking one another's hands. And all the time he treated me like I was enough. To receive that from someone whose life had been so vast radically altered my perspective. His partner in creation and fun was Paula, perhaps the most formidably intelligent person I know. The project we were all working on together was, in part, an examination of Athol's flaws. They were relentlessly clear-eyed and analytical in all they did. But they were also two extremely romantic people, to the point where they'd decided to start a family together. Athol remained a dreamer, full of plans to the end. His most striking quality, though, was his endless gratitude, which I think was nurtured by his many years as a practising Buddhist. He felt very lucky to have lived an extraordinary life. I think that life contains an urgent lesson for us. His work is a model for how to resist a regime one detests while remaining committed to the country one loves – a pressing question for a great many people today. In his final public appearance, speaking to an online audience convened by the Society of Authors last year, he shared what I thought might be the key tenet of that project: 'Anger is a withering emotion. It is better to write out of love.' Barney Norris is a playwright and novelist
The Guardian
09-03-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
Janet Suzman on Athol Fugard: A writer of true integrity has gone
In a sense, Athol Fugard always remained a mystery. He was the sort of person in whose presence you felt a deep well of wisdoms hiding, wisdoms he would never divulge unless he trusted you, and how were you ever to earn that trust? But he once allowed me to cut his play Hello and Goodbye, because he couldn't be present during rehearsals – an act of generosity quite unprecedented in a writer. They usually hug close every word they have written. Invoking that generous permission many years later, I made a cut of another play of his – The Road to Mecca – only because it seemed a touch too prolix in this more shorthanded world. When I sent it to him, he said, with the frankness that Athol never softened with colleagues, that he wasn't up to reading it because he had so many loving memories of that play. Perhaps he'd leave permission with his literary executor to allow a cut to Mecca when he was dead. There was a laughing wryness in his tone, so I don't think he meant it for a second. Now he is dead, and a writer of true integrity has gone. He loved the actor who had played Miss Helen in Mecca, the great Yvonne Bryceland – his muse. He loved women; he wrote about the feral stoicism and optimism of the female animal with a warmth quite unusual in a writer – maybe excepting Ibsen. He understood fatalism, and loneliness, and had the ear of a poet for ordinary folk. In an earlier time, 1969, I remember sitting in his living room in Port Elizabeth, a group of young actors babbling, drinking, arguing, and one in particular, John Kani, already showing a mastery of English that makes him the best off-the-cuff speaker ever, accusing me roundly of white snobbery by not having learned his language, Xhosa; I had to agree I was the loser. John subsequently did all of Athol's great collaborative plays; and called Athol 'the Old Man'. Never were a white and a black man in greater harmony, bound by mutual respect and high-energy creativity, and during apartheid, the crucible of dissension. Their visions collided most fruitfully, and left South Africa with a remarkable legacy of theatre.
The Guardian
09-03-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
Athol Fugard caught the impact of apartheid's full-on attack on humanity
Athol was always there. There were other South African playwrights, of course, such as Pieter-Dirk Uys, who pilloried the absurdities of apartheid, and the prolific and commercially successful Gibson Kente or theatrical storytellers such as Gcina Mhlophe. But year after year, for as long as I can remember, Athol wrote the plays that, earlier and more consistently than anyone else, expressed in the public arena the suffering caused by apartheid's full-frontal attack on what it means to be a human being. We were never close but, over many decades, we'd run into each other from time to time in Cape Town or in London. Once, as we stood together in a crowded theatre foyer, he shared his view that all South Africans, everyone, whatever power they wielded or how much cash they'd piled up in their bank account, they were all – we were all – thoroughly fucked up ('opbefok' in his words) by apartheid. If you were born there you couldn't escape the damage living within racism did to your sensibility, to your soul. I think he was right about this and all his plays said it in one way or another. He was just 20 years older than me but I remember as a teenager my parents discussing a play of his they'd seen directed by his early close collaborator Barney Simon. Blood Knot, a play he came back to and revised late in his life, is about two brothers, Morris and Zachariah, raised by the same black mother but with different fathers. One of them is able to pass for white, the other is not. In those days it was amazing and thrilling to my parents and, at one remove, to me that anyone was courageous enough to speak in a theatre about the scandalous possibility that white and black people might be, in some fundamental way, the same. That the characters were brothers was the whole point. For Athol, I think, the horror and the pain that it was his life's task to express were principally caused by the ways in which apartheid insinuated itself into and poisoned the most intimate relationships – with friends, with lovers, even, as in this very early play, within one's closest family. It was, I think, his rage at this outrageous brutalisation of the most delicately experienced aspects of life that powered his best plays such as the wonderful, under-applauded Statements After an Arrest Under the Immorality Act. Statements was developed from improvisations between Athol and Yvonne Bryceland, his longstanding lead actor in Cape Town in the early 1970s. As an acting student, I helped paint the walls of the new theatre, The Space, that the photographer Brian Astbury created for Athol and for Yvonne, who was Brian's wife. On the upper floors many workshops took place in which Athol explored with actors his ideas for new plays, such as one about John Harris, the member of the African Resistance Movement who tried to strike a blow against apartheid by placing a bomb at a railway station; he was hanged for killing a woman and injuring many others. One workshop grew into Dimetos, performed eventually at the Royal Court with Paul Scofield. Athol was a compulsively bold and original writer but, by and large, a conventional director, a 'stager'. When I was writer-in-residence at the Royal Court in the mid-1990s I persuaded the artistic leadership to produce his Valley Song, not a masterpiece but, I thought, an effective play and, I argued, the Court had a tradition of loyalty to its writers that should apply in Athol's case. Under Athol's direction the play seemed even more ephemeral than, perhaps, it is. Even so, loyalty was owed because, two decades earlier, Athol had given the Court a tremendous success, Sizwe Banzi Is Dead. And Sizwe was also – life being full of paradoxes and surprises – directed by Athol with as much verve and style as any show I've ever seen. Written by Athol, John Kani and Winston Ntshona it is, as a play, as great as Sophocles and, as an example of directing panache, right up there with Tadeusz Kantor or Peter Brook. Receiving an award for her 1985 performance as a recluse sculptor in Athol's The Road to Mecca, Yvonne Bryceland held the trophy high and announced modestly 'I accept this on behalf of all the little people', but one wanted to shout out 'What the play says is that there are no little people'. I think that's what Athol wanted to tell the world through his whole writing life.
