Latest news with #BlackSouthAfrican
NDTV
3 days ago
- Sport
- NDTV
"Always Had That Dream Of Playing At Lord's": Temba Bavuma Ahead Of World Test Championship Final
South Africa Test captain Temba Bavuma offered a poignant reflection on his cricketing career ahead of the ICC World Test Championship final against Australia, as he prepares to lead his team at Lord's — the very ground he once imagined from the dusty streets of Langa. South Africa last faced Australia in a Test series in 2022-23, with the visitors losing out 0-2 Down Under. 'There was always some sort of allegiance with Lord's when we were growing up in Langa,' Bavuma told The Guardian. 'On the right-hand side of the street the tar wasn't done so nicely and we used to call it Karachi. The other side was the MCG. But my favourite section was clean and done up nicely, and we called it Lord's because it just looked better. As a kid of 10, I already had that dream of playing at Lord's.' Now 35 and the first Black cricketer to captain South Africa in Test cricket, Bavuma carries not only the hopes of his team but the weight of a remarkable personal journey - one shaped by inequality, opportunity and perseverance. From facing older boys in street cricket to navigating elite white institutions after earning a scholarship, Bavuma's early years were filled with challenges. 'It was tough integrating within the system, learning and understanding the (white) culture,' he said of his time at SACS. 'But I had to learn about discipline and etiquette. I also had to learn confidence. Can you imagine taking a child from the township into a system where, basically, everything is there? There were always doubts. Am I good enough to be here?' He remembers the contrast vividly — particularly when SACS played against Langa. 'My friends from Langa would have huge plates at lunch. We'd laugh about it but… the Langa boy would be wondering when is he going to get another opportunity to eat food like that?' Eventually, after moving to Johannesburg and joining St David's — which recently named its cricket ground after him — Bavuma became 'one of the boys,' confident and fluent in the environment. But cricket's highest format remained a long, hard climb. He became the first Black South African to score a Test century in 2016, but his second came only in 2023 — after taking over as Test captain. 'The added responsibility, getting pushed up the order, is something I thrived on,' Bavuma said. 'Most of all, I just understand my game and I don't try playing like anyone else.' Under Bavuma, South Africa had to win seven consecutive Tests to reach the final against Australia, starting on June 11, overcoming scheduling inequality, player unavailability and funding constraints.
Boston Globe
19-03-2025
- Entertainment
- Boston Globe
What connects us, what divides us?
Anthony Fennell is a 48-year-old Irish novelist and playwright, blocked, drinking too much. McCann shares his Irish heritage and vocation with Fennell, but the fictional writer is far less successful. Fennell is so depressed and directionless that when an editor sends him on this assignment to join the repair ship, he puts his stuff in storage before heading to South Africa. It's almost as if he doesn't want to return. Get Starting Point A guide through the most important stories of the morning, delivered Monday through Friday. Enter Email Sign Up Related : He's supposed to find a richer meaning in his story about the cables, their breakage and repair. He does have a gift for insight. Describing when this takes place, roughly now: 'it was a time of enormous greed and foolish longing and, in the end, unfathomable isolation.' In Cape Town, Fennell meets Conway, another Irishman, the charismatic head of mission — not the captain, exactly, but in charge of getting them to the break and leading the repair. It's a highly specialized and delicate operation, described in vivid detail. They must find the broken cable on the floor of the sea —it's just the size of a garden hose — then bring the ends to the surface and reconnect the glass tubing with extreme precision. Conway and his crew wait until a cable breaks then go to sea, sometimes being away for months, to reach and repair one or more breaks. Advertisement As his bosses want a reporter on board, Conway grudgingly welcomes Fennell, taking him to drink with his freediving buddies. He even introduces him to his partner Zanele, a beautiful Black South African actress. All these relationships are a little bit prickly. What isn't is Conway's relationship with his crew, a multinational group of men who universally admire him. Soon enough, a cable is broken, by a terrible flood in the Congo. 'A hypnotic flume. There was no taming it. Huge whirlpools studded the surface. Pirogues were sucked under. Giant barges were sent in a complicated dance,' McCann writes in one of his bravura descriptive sweeps. The ship will be away for about a month, with extremely limited communication — it has to carry its own satellite dish. Fennell is given a privileged spot, and spends his first few days there, violently seasick. When that passes, he meets and introduces us to the members of the crew and the operations. He finds clarity being free of drink — there's no alchool on board — and in the sublime beauty of the sea and sky. Related : He spends time with Conway, whose centeredness and leadership he admires. He's also taken with the ideal relationship he observed between Conway and Zanele — although he seeds it with retrospective doubt. Fennell is telling this story looking back from a few years in the future, and drops in several hints about an incident or incidents that will be significant. Without saying too much, one involves Zanele, who went to England to appear in a play. This is about midway into the journey, and Fennell begins to go a little off the rails. 'Maybe that's why sailors went mad at sea,' he says. 'Once you figured it out, there was nowhere to be. On a boat you were locked into its limits. We were yearning for more than the boat could give.' Although he started out saying he was 'eager to dwell in the story of a repair,' he begins dwelling instead on Zanele and Conway. He uses his more than his share of the internet connection to investigate Conway's hidden past and obsessively hunts down pictures of Zanele. It's so bad he has to be cut off. Advertisement Throughout the book I caught delightful allusions to James Joyce and Don Delillo, and an obvious one to Samuel Taylor Coleridge; I'm certain there are many more. I was unsettled, however, by Fennell's smart riff on 'Apocalypse Now' — it's a way of smuggling in Joseph Conrad's 'Heart of Darkness.' Both feature a man journeying up a river past hostile natives to a white man who's gone mad in the jungle and dies saying, 'The horror, the horror.' Chinua Achebe Related : That said, McCann seems to be trying to invert and undo the Conrad narrative. The Congo river, which in his book floods out, is what Conrad's Marlow traveled up. Fennell's journey doesn't start in London but begins in South Africa and moves north. It is January, hot in the southern hemisphere: 'I had to stop to mop my brow. I was already turned inside out, unbalanced.' As a reader I am torn. I wish it didn't need the Conrad skeleton at all. McCann has written a beautiful novel set in, and off the coast, of Africa — something few writers with his privilege and prestige have done. Advertisement When the repair ship's journey is over, Fennell stays ashore in Accra, Ghana, in a condo by the sea. He is trying to write, but also, waiting for an answer to the deeper questions driving him. He's still trying to figure out who Conway is, and what happens to him and Zanele next. 'Twist' is gorgeously written and sad and inspiring, a destination hard to imagine from the journey's start. TWIST By Colum McCann Random House, 256 pages, $28 Carolyn Kellogg is a writer and editor in Los Angeles.
Yahoo
15-03-2025
- Automotive
- Yahoo
Elon Musk Wanted the Cybertruck to Look Like 'the Future.' But It Reminds Us of One Particular Past.
Sign up for the Slatest to get the most insightful analysis, criticism, and advice out there, delivered to your inbox daily. In the 1980s, Irvin, a 12-year-old child in Soweto, in apartheid South Africa, drew a foreboding picture. Irvin sketched an angular, armored military vehicle: the Casspir, a ubiquitous sight in the nation's townships during the final decades of apartheid. The apartheid state deployed the Casspir to patrol and terrorize Black African communities in the name of keeping 'peace.' Irvin's drawing captured how, for Black people under apartheid, the hulking steel frame of the vehicle represented an intimidating and oppressive military intrusion into everyday life. Decades later, the Tesla Cybertruck, lately a prime target for protesters demonstrating their dislike of CEO Elon Musk, blurs the boundaries between the battlefield and the public street. When Tesla released the Cybertruck in 2023, its dramatic style polarized the public. Popular theories abounded about its unusual look. Many speculated that its inspiration had come from spaceships of science fiction. In discussing the car's aesthetic early on, Musk referenced cyberpunk and Blade Runner, a film that features sleek metallic vehicles, though with rounded silhouettes designed for aerodynamic speed. He's also used the phrase 'The future should look like the future'—a reference, his biographer Walter Isaacson said, to a question his son Saxon asked him once: 'Why doesn't the future look like the future?' Whether or not this was intentional, the Cybertruck's harsh, sharp edges remind us, instead, of something from the past: the larger armored personnel vehicles that patrolled streets throughout Musk's youth in apartheid South Africa. In the 1980s, the Casspir proliferated across the country, moving from the battlefield and onto the streets. Initially improvised as a way to circumvent international sanctions against the apartheid government, the Casspir mine-resistant ambush protected vehicle was invented and produced domestically. It was a rugged all-terrain vehicle intended to withstand gunfire and mine explosions. It could drive up to 60 mph and be modified to add artillery functions. Eventually, the Casspir was deployed to patrol townships, the residential neighborhoods where many Black South Africans lived. As violence and flames engulfed the streets of the nation, Black South African children like Irvin drew and wrote about the apartheid security forces and its tools—dogs and Casspirs—chasing and shooting at them in their schools, streets, and homes. By the 1990s, the Casspir had become an iconic global symbol of apartheid oppression. Musk would have likely seen the Casspir vehicles in the South Africa of his childhood. He was born in Pretoria, one of the nation's three capitals, during apartheid, in June 1971. When he was 5 years old, tens of thousands of Black South African children protested the government's policy to impose Afrikaans, the Dutch-based language of the apartheid state, in schools. In Soweto, where Irvin lived, the South African police fired bullets into a crowd of unarmed, protesting children, killing scores of them. This episode became known as the Soweto uprising. It was one of many massacres. Around 1985, when Musk was in his early teens, Oliver Tambo, the leader of the then-banned African National Congress, called for people to resist apartheid and 'make South Africa ungovernable.' The apartheid regime called a state of emergency and decided to conscript white South African men 18 years old and above to serve in the South African Defence Force to protect its white citizens. In this effort, the SADF invaded, attacked, and killed apartheid's 'enemies' at home and abroad in Angola, Botswana, Lesotho, Mozambique, and Namibia. Musk left South Africa in 1988, after graduating from the prestigious Pretoria Boys High School, and a year shy of being subject to military conscription. But South Africa is not the only place where military vehicles have roamed civilian streets. Over the past few decades, the U.S. military has been steadily off-loading military-grade equipment to U.S. police forces for use on domestic civilian populations. The Casspir, too, is part of this story. In addition to shielding and supporting the apartheid government until the late 1980s, the U.S. purchased and deployed Casspirs during the second Gulf War invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan, before manufacturing its own Casspir-inspired mine-resistant ambush protected vehicles. These vehicles are part of the military-equipment transfers, and they now patrol American streets. We saw them during the spectacular use of force against Black Lives Matter protesters in places like Ferguson, Missouri. American pop culture across the political spectrum is infused with romanticized frontier violence and militarism, from camo and Americana fashion styles to gun culture and the popularity of tradwife and prepper consumption. These trends ask us to imagine survival individualistically and not as a product of social movements or collective interdependence. Rather, they constrict the imagination, narrowly encouraging us to fortify literal and metaphorical walls, to consume our way into fantasy 21st-century homesteads, and to envision modern warfare finally coming to U.S. soil. The Cybertruck capitalizes on these fears. Its marketing, for example, explicitly taps into the current apocalyptic visions pervading both right- and left-wing political imaginaries—from climate disaster to nuclear, civil, and class warfare. Heralded as being 'built for any planet,' it showcases a Bioweapon Defense Mode and a 'built-in hospital grade HEPA filter' that 'helps provide protection from 99.97% of airborne particles.' One third-party Tesla modification company, aimed at civilian and government clients, sells Cybertruck upgrades so it can run on jet fuel, diesel, biodiesel, and electricity. The idea that a Cybertruck could become an artillery vehicle is not just hypothetical. Unsanctioned by Tesla, various users, ranging from a YouTuber to Chechen forces fighting for Russia in Ukraine, have modified a Cybertruck by mounting machine guns to its bed, turning it into a lightly armored weaponized machine. Government forces, such as the police in Southern California and Dubai, are using the Cybertruck as part of their fleets—although in those cases its usage is symbolic and not for patrol duties. (Irvine's vehicle will be part of its DARE program, for example.) To be clear, the Cybertruck is not designed for actual combat, but it allows consumers to play make-believe. For some, the vehicle's appeal lies in its vision of the world as an apocalyptic battlefield. During the Cybertruck's launch, Musk himself declared that 'sometimes you get these late-civilization vibes' and that the 'apocalypse can come along at any moment, and here at Tesla we have the best in apocalypse technology.' Its pseudo-futuristic vision is militaristic, stainless-steel fortified, masculinist, individualistic, and unforgiving. Indeed, some Americans' embrace of the Cybertruck is not entirely surprising. It builds on the nation's historical popular adoption of militarized personnel vehicles, such as the civilian consumption of Jeeps and Hummers. Jeeps came into civilian use after their deployment in World War II, and Hummers were the civilian adaptation of Humvees featured in American wars in the second half of the 20th century. Whether or not Musk or the Cybertruck's designers made a conscious decision to draw inspiration from the Casspir, the Cybertruck can be understood as part of this darker history of science-fictional, militarized vehicles, used in civilian life, that make a show of their own impenetrability—one captured, for example, by 12-year-old Irvin in apartheid South Africa. More broadly, these historical linkages force us to rethink and seriously question the militarization of our public spaces and culture and the attempts to normalize and monetize them. Whether through Casspirs or the Cybertruck, apartheid's militarized, cultural, and psychological legacy roams our streets.
The Guardian
09-03-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
Ernest Cole: Lost and Found review – the man who turned his camera on apartheid
Before anything else, this lyrical documentary homage by Raoul Peck (Oscar-nominated for I Am Not Your Negro) is about the work: the axis-shifting impact of Black South African photographer Ernest Cole's intimate insights into life in his home country under apartheid. His extraordinary 1967 book, House of Bondage, exposed the realities of South Africa's racial oppression to a wider world. This film, though, goes beyond the initial impact of Cole's photography to explore the personal cost of his work. Following the publication of the book, he was forced to live abroad, making America his home, but found himself increasingly unmoored and creatively disfranchised. There's also an element of mystery to Lost and Found. A question mark lingers over the fact that Cole's archive, long since believed lost, turned up in a Swedish bank vault. The narration, by LaKeith Stanfield, speaks on behalf of the photographer, who died in 1990. It's through his remarkable pictures of South Africa and Black America, however, that we really hear his voice. In UK and Irish cinemas
Voice of America
07-02-2025
- Politics
- Voice of America
South African president misleads on land confiscation law
U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio announced in a Feb. 5 post on X he will not be attending the late November G20 summit in South Africa due to the nation's 'doing very bad things,' including 'expropriating private property.' Rubio was referring to the Expropriation Act that South African President Cyril Ramaphosa signed into law on Jan. 24. The law has sparked controversy within the country and international criticism, including from U.S. President Donald Trump. Trump said on Feb. 2 that the law has led to South African authorities 'confiscating land and treating a certain class of people very badly.' Ramaphosa denied Trump's accusations, stating on Feb. 3 that his government 'has not confiscated any land,' and defending the newly adopted law: 'The recently adopted Expropriation Act is not a confiscation instrument, but a constitutionally mandated legal process that ensures public access to land in an equitable and just manner as guided by the constitution.' That is misleading. Though carefully worded, the Expropriation Act legalizes the South African government's confiscation of private property, including land, and repossession without compensation in some instances. The new law is a significant shift from the government's previous land reform based on the 'willing seller, willing buyer' principle, whereby the government would buy land and redistribute it to Black South African farmers. In contrast, the new law defines ''expropriation'' as a 'compulsory acquisition of property for a public purpose or in the public interest by an expropriating authority, or an organ of state upon request to an expropriating authority.'' The act defines ''Public interest'' as the government's 'commitment to land reform, and to reforms to bring about equitable access to all South Africa's natural resources in order to redress the results of past racial discriminatory laws or practices.' The new law will revisit 'the history of the acquisition and use of the property,' allowing the 'restitution of property or to equitable redress to those lost their properties after 19 June 1913 as a result of past racially discriminatory laws or practices is entitled.' For decades, the Native Land Act of 1913 blocked Black South Africans from purchasing or renting land in designated regions. Since the beginning of majority Black rule in 1994, South Africa has grappled with reversing apartheid-era laws and practices and increasing land ownership among Black farmers. Although white South Africans make up just over 7 percent of the population, they own more than 70 percent of all privately owned farmland in the country. The new law says that 'no one may be deprived of property except in terms of law of general application, and no law may permit arbitrary deprivation of property.' And as Ramaphosa stated, no land has been taken under the new law's provisions. At the same time, chapter two of the new law gives the government minister the power to acquire land for a variety of purposes, including infrastructure development, public services, and land reform. Furthermore, the South African government website's Land Reform page says, 'on Tuesday, 27 February 2018, the National Assembly adopted a motion to amend the Constitution so as to allow for the expropriation of land without compensation.' 'The government supports a land restitution and redistribution process which supports agricultural production and investment in the land,' the government website says.
