Originally from Papendorp and now residing in Doringbaai, chairperson of Coastal Links Western Cape Andre Cloete has been a fisher for over 20 years. He said that mining has left destruction in his community and all along the West Coast with no rehabilitation when mining companies finish their activity. He says it’s not just the physical environment but also the community that is suffering.

“One of the main things is that they [mining companies] leave the physical environment in a state and they don’t invest in the communities. They provide jobs only for a certain time, a few months, it’s all contractual and not permanent… People don’t thrive or prosper from these jobs while they [mining companies] on the other hand reap the benefits. You can see it.

“For the past five years, if we look at snoek, you don’t get as much as you normally do because of all these explorations happening now… Even with crayfish in Elands Bay, it’s crayfish season now and there’s no lobster during the day. We have to work at night because you don’t get anything during the day… Normally you get tons of fish and lobster in Elands Bay, now it’s only during the night because there’s less disturbance during the night,” Cloete said.

Cloete said there is no medical clinic in Papendorp, with community members having to travel to either Lutzville or Dorongbaai for treatment, yet mining companies were making billions from the minerals extracted from these communities.

This is the story of one of the contributors of a report, showing the impact of the historical reaping of minerals from poverty-stricken communities on the West Coast for billions over time.

“The Sand Worth Billions: How mining companies are reshaping South Africa’s West Coast” was authored by Carsten Pedersen from the Transnational Institute. The initial research and work of the report was conducted by Masifundise Development Trust, Cloete, as well as a few other Coastal Links leaders from the West Coast.

Pedersen said that minerals worth billions of dollars have been extracted for decades, yet extreme poverty and food insecurity have continued to pervade the region.

Pedersen said there is no fair distribution of the wealth of these mineral resources — it goes into the pockets of a few and a lot of it is sent outside the country.

The report finds that mineral extraction in South Africa and other parts of the world continues to produce major social and environmental destruction. The mining of mineral sands is no exception and the report shows that continued extensification of mining on the West Coast will add to the existing social, environmental and climate crisis.

In the report, Pedersen looked at Tronox Holdings which operates Namakwa Sands (Tronox Mineral Sands) in Saldanha and Matzikama, and KwaZulu-Natal Sands in Empangeni. Pedersen noted that these operations were less visible on the radar because they did more “clean business” and good PR work, so you don’t see the same injustice. But when he looked at the scale and size of the company, Pedersen this was the one they needed to pay attention to.

(Graphic: Transnational Institute)

What are the minerals in the sands and why are they so valuable?

“Every person living on the West Coast of South Africa knows that the sands there are the source of life. People walk the sands, launch their boats from beaches, catch fish from near a seabed made of sand, harvest plants (wild and cultivated) and raise domestic animals on the sandy stretches of coastal lands, and they have done so for centuries.

“They also know the sands have been a source of profit-making for the last century and a half and that their sands are again up for grabs. But why is this sand so interesting from a capitalist point of view? What does it contain and what is it used for?” Pedersen asked in his report.

South Africa’s minister of International Relations and Cooperation, Naledi Pandor, said in the Financial Times:“ South Africa is a significant supplier of critical minerals to the US. If we lose Agoa membership, it could have negative ramifications for the US. In the global fight against climate change, demand for critical minerals has become a significant factor. In 2021, the US imported nearly 100% of its chromium from South Africa, as well as over 25% of its manganese, titanium, and platinum. We also supply of 12 of the 50 mineral products identified by the US Geological Survey as critical for US interests.”

A large amount of the minerals Pandor refers to here come from the West Coast, but what exactly are the minerals being extracted from the sands?

Pedersen said the sand on the West Coast is rich in zircon, ilmenite and rutile, the so-called heavy minerals. Rutile is the most valuable as it is a mineral containing 95% titanium, used for aircraft, architectural products, industrial processes, sporting equipment and numerous other applications.

“The US is just one of the countries that need titanium for all these different industries. The Financial Times articles state that 25% of titanium comes from South Africa for US imports. In South Africa, 60% of Tronox’s titanium comes from the West Coast and 40% comes from the East Coast. Tronox is the biggest producer of titanium in South Africa, so it is the biggest player, ” Pedersen said.

“This is why the minister was putting forward that South Africa had to maintain good trade relations — and this was only titanium, there are many more [minerals] at play.”

Pedersen explained that heavy earthmoving equipment (excavators and trucks) were used to excavate and transport the sand from the mining sites to the primary and secondary concentration plants. This concentration process takes place at or near the mining site before the concentrate is transported by truck to a mineral separation plant where it is further separated into zircon, ilmenite and rutile.

Sand mining extraction northwest of Papendorp, near the Oilifants River. (Photo: Transnational Institute)

These three minerals (zircon, ilmenite and rutile) are then further processed and transported as industrial feedstock to Saldanha before being exported to overseas markets.

Pederson said zircon, a hard mineral that comes in various colours and is found as grains in sand,  is used either directly as a strong metallic element in ceramics or processed into zirconium chemicals and zirconium metal.

“South Africa’s share of world zircon production was 25% in 2020 and the vast majority (97%) of zirconium chemicals and metals produced worldwide originate in mineral sands.

“Tronox alone accounted for 60% of that production of which approximately 40% is derived from the West Coast sands and the remainder from KwaZulu-Natal and its Australian mines. Zircon is a strong and heat-resistant mineral that is applicable in a wide range of products. The majority is used in ceramics, whereas the zirconium metal and chemicals are used in the production of solar panels, TV screens, jet engines, hydrogen fuel cells, nuclear reactor cooling systems, vehicle components and more,” he said.

The Sand Worth Billions report analysis reveals that the sands are a source of minerals used to manufacture a wide range of end-products that most people all over the world depend on to meet their daily material needs, such as housing, food and transportation. The minerals feed into multi-billion dollar industries and the South African sands are too valuable for mining corporations to leave untouched.

Communities left high and dry

Pedersen continued, “Corporations will continue exploration and extraction of heavy mineral sands provided they can control the cost of production and that risks, such as political instability and rising energy costs, are considered manageable.

“This also means competition for the coastal lands and the sea, between local communities and mining companies, will continue and possibly lead to further tensions,” he said.

This report will be one ingredient for Masifundise Development Trust’s Fisher People’s Tribunal in August this year, to strengthen the voices of fisherfolk and the information will also be disseminated to affected communities.

Pedersen said, “We need to get a broader and better understanding of how the mining industry works… We have to look beyond the side of extraction because this is what most people working on mining issues look at. They are not looking at the value chain and what happens to the minerals, where they go, who profits from them, and where the profit is made. They also don’t look at who the people behind the mining companies are, the shareholders etc. These companies depend on investments and capital to expand their business and if they don’t get that capital then they won’t expand, that’s what history tells us.”

Pedersen said that sand mining was a billion-dollar industry and only a tiny proportion of the profits stayed in South Africa.

“They take the minerals, ship them offshore to some other Tronox subsidiaries that process these raw materials into other commodities like titanium powder which is then sold from other countries. This means the profit from this activity is not a profit made in South Africa,” he said.

A view of MSP Koekenaap (Tronox mine) in the Namakwa Sands of South Africa. (Photo: Transnational Institute)

Slow violence on the West Coast

A speak-out event was hosted by Masifundise in April 2024 where the report’s author Carsten Pedersen, Andre Cloete, and South African lead organiser of WoMin African Alliance Alexandria Hotz, detailed the report’s contents and “the slow violence of mining of the West Coast”.

During the discussion, Pedersen said ‘slow violence’ was not something that could be tracked over six months or one year. It represents the ongoing extraction of wealth and the simultaneous degradation of the environment that contributed to the erosion of livelihoods of people in coastal areas.

“When areas are grabbed by mining companies, these same areas and their resources are not available for the local population… for their livelihoods, food production, and the local economy.”

He said the resources along the coast should be utilised and developed in a way that benefits the people in the area.

“Once the territories are grabbed, they are no longer available and accessible for local communities. This closes down the opportunities for [local] economic development. There’s no sharing of all that wealth. In Lutzville, poverty has increased, crime rates have increased, and it’s not safe to walk in the streets. This is all part of the slow violence, and the result of the lack of sharing of wealth — which is, to a large extent, the responsibility of the mining companies and government,” Pederson said.

Hotz from WoMin added that these operations have an impact on the ecosystems, and ocean, then further impact the livelihoods of small-scale fishers already dependent on the ocean

In an interview with Daily Maverick, Hotz said there were multiple forms of this slow violence and there was a gendered experience to it. But she said the first experience was that people being separated from their land as indigenous people was a form of violence that unfortunately South Africans were all too familiar with.

“Because we have been in processes of dispossession, from colonialism, under apartheid, and now we are seeing new forms of land grabbing — which is violent, through mining applications and how the DMRP and other departments give away communities land without consultation or consent from communities.

“What that means is it creates a separation of communities from the land, from access to resources, the deepening of inequality and poverty in our communities and the reliance on grants because no work is coming to communities, the livelihoods have changed, they’re no longer able to fish or to grow food or rear cattle, etc,” she said.

Hotz said that women had a particular burden as they care for families mostly — from looking after fathers, sons and husbands who become ill working in mines, to holding households together and providing food, etc.

“There’s a whole cycle of violence. Last year in August in Concordia, a small town in the Northern Cape, women led a protest to defend communal land from being mined on and 29 community members were arrested,” she said.

There were also leaders of movements being assassinated for defending land, such as land activist and chairperson of the Amadiba Crisis Committee (ACC)  Sikhosiphi “Bazooka” Rhadebe, who was murdered in 2016.

Tronox and respecting its host communities

When approached for a response to specific questions by Daily Maverick, Tronox referred to their 2022 Sustainability Report. Under the framework “Respecting Our Communities”, the report describes that Tronox works in respectful partnership with indigenous communities to protect their heritage and cultural values as they manage operations located on traditional lands in Australia and South Africa.

They also claim to seek out opportunities to contribute to the local economy by supporting indigenous-owned businesses, and to protect the native lands these communities call home.

(Graphic: Transnational Institute)

They say they engage in long-term relationships with traditional owner groups across all operations to determine the best ways to preserve and protect cultural heritage values and bring respectful economic development to their communities.

The report states, “Tronox operates alongside indigenous communities in South Africa, and is committed to the objectives set out in the National Development Plan, which aims to eliminate poverty and reduce inequality by 2030. Through our Social and Labor Plans (SLPs), we have made valuable contributions towards supporting local Black-owned businesses in these communities,

“In 2022, Tronox invested R14-million (more than $817,000) in local business beneficiaries, which included 13 black-owned businesses. Seven of these were black women-owned businesses in industries like construction that align with our goals of championing greater gender diversity in traditionally male-dominated industries.”

In addition to economic development support, the report states that Tronox supports the host communities where they operate through Local Economic Development (LED) projects that include “building schools and homes, supporting STEM programmes, improving access to water and indoor plumbing, and even bringing the first veterinary clinic to one community”.

However, members of the communities along the West Coast, such as Cloete, and organisations supporting these communities, like Masifundise and WoMin, said that the ongoing extraction of minerals by these mining companies causes long-lasting social and environmental destruction.

Cloete said this was particularly the case when it comes to jobs mining companies provide, as they often only last for a few months with no sustainable economic upliftment for the locals in the communities. DM

Share

Does low-cost carrier FlySafair have an unfair advantage over its competitors, which might have paved the way for it to capture 60% of the South African aviation market?

The answer — from the vantage point of FlySafair’s competitors — is a resounding yes.

FlySafair has managed to run a slick business over the past decade, operating in an aviation market in which margins and profits are shrinking like economy-class legroom.

Even investment doyen Warren Buffett is not prepared to pour money into airline stocks because the travel industry remains in a precarious position, guzzles capital and is intensely regulated and competitive (airfare price wars have been seen in South Africa).

However, market forces have also led to FlySafair morphing into a big airline. At least 11 airlines have been permanently grounded in South Africa since FlySafair started flying in October 2014. More recently, the Covid-19 pandemic was the final nail in the coffin for SA Express, Mango Airlines, Kulula and British Airways in southern Africa. South African Airways emerged as a smaller airline after its operations were rehabilitated under business rescue.

Read more in Daily Maverick: SAA clings to hope that its private sector investment plan will fly

As these market changes unfolded, FlySafair has mopped up the flight capacity left open by the collapse of its competitors, allowing it to increase its market share. However, its competitors believe that FlySafair’s growth is also attributable to an unfair market advantage, which has made it difficult for them to compete with the airline on an equal footing.

Now, FlySafair is under investigation for being predominantly owned (allegedly) by foreign players, which could be in breach of licensing conditions and SA aviation laws. 

Aviation companies Airlink and Global Airways (which co-owns the domestic airline Lift) have approached the International Air Services Council and the Air Services Licensing Council, urging the local aviation authority to probe FlySafair’s ownership structure and determine whether it complies with legislation. A company called Safair Operations is believed to be the parent company of FlySafair.

Competitors’ arguments

The central complaint by Airlink and Global Airways, set for hearing on 10 May, is that foreign investors/shareholders predominantly own Safair, thus breaching the Air Services Licensing Act and the International Air Services Act.

The Air Services Licensing Act requires that holders of aviation licences in South Africa have a minimum of 75% local shareholding. In other words, airlines that fly locally are required to be owned by individuals who are “residents” of the country. The 75% requirement also extends to voting rights over how airlines are managed. 

The Act was passed by the government to ensure that SA shareholders and investors become custodians of airlines and interests in the aviation industry. The International Air Services Act requires airlines based in the country and flying overseas to have a “substantial” local shareholding. The airline industry has interpreted this to be a minimum of 51%.

Airlink and Global Airways argue that Safair no longer complies with the Air Services Licensing Act because the airline’s voting rights (and by extension, its shareholding structure) are not held by individuals based in South Africa. 

Daily Maverick understands that Airlink and Global Airways have detailed the shareholding and voting rights structure of Safair Operations to the International Air Services Council, which they say is as follows: 25% is held by a company called Safair Holdings, 25.14% is held by B4i Safair, and 49.86% is held by a trust. 

Daily Maverick also understands that Safair Operations has admitted that 25% of the voting rights held by Safair Holdings are not held by residents of South Africa. Airlink and Global Airways believe that the 49.86% that is held by a trust is opaque. They told SA authorities that the voting rights and economic interests in the trust were not clear, and directors/associated parties of FlySafair are also trustees in the trust, which does not ensure independence. 

Airlink and Global Airways believe that the only applicable local ownership of Safair Operations is the 25.14% held by B4i Safair, which falls below the 75% local ownership requirement. 

The storm over the ownership of FlySafair/Safair goes back to 2013 when competitors Comair and Skywise dragged it to court. At the time, Safair applied for a licence to run a commercial passenger airline. Comair and Skywise argued that Safair’s Ireland-based owner, ASL Aviation Holdings, did not comply with South African laws about the need to have a local shareholding.

Safair was then forced to change its ownership structure to have local ownership. In doing so, ASL Aviation Holdings created the South Africa-based Safair Investment Trust in which a large shareholding in Safair was controlled by South Africans, including its employees, who were awarded 25% of the company’s shares. This paved the way for Safair’s aviation licence to be granted and for it to be allowed to operate. 

In March 2019, the trust was cancelled when ASL Aviation Holdings bought it and acquired its shares. In its financial statements, ASL made the following disclosure: 

“Through the acquisition of Safair Investment Trust, ASL acquired additional share capital in Safair Operations and increased its shareholding from 25% to 74.86%. On this date, the group gained control of Safair Operations, ceased accounting for it as an associate, and commenced accounting for Safair Operations as a subsidiary.”

The requested remedy 

Airlink and Global Airways have asked the local authority to intervene to force Safair Operations to remedy its shareholding structure to reflect more local owners/shareholders. 

The local authority could cancel or suspend Safair’s aviation licence (effectively grounding flights operated by FlySafair) until its shareholding structure is fixed, impose fines or penalties against FlySafair, or give FlySafair more grace (no sanctions) and time to fix its shareholding structure by possibly selling shares in the company to locals. 

Airlink and Global Airways want the playing field to be levelled and for the law to equitably apply to all aviation players. They believe that being majority-owned by foreign shareholders gives FlySafair access to international capital that is used by the airline to fund its operations and growth, allowing it to remain competitive. 

An industry source told Daily Maverick that other SA airlines should also be allowed to open up their shareholding structure, considering that “international aviation giants such as Emirates and Qatar are keen to invest in local airlines. 

“Global investors are prepared to unleash capital into local airlines. However, laws currently prohibit them from doing so. Then the laws should be changed to allow us to attract foreign investors,” the source said. 

Kirby Gordon, the chief marketing officer at Safair, said the company believed it was compliant with all ownership-related laws and had been transparent about its ownership structure.

“How our company is constituted is transparent, and the details lie before all parties at the moment. The challenge at hand is for the councils to reaffirm that the structure complies with the regulations that they have before them. I say ‘reaffirm’ because our structure has always, by regulation, been disclosed,” said Gordon, without disclosing Safair’s actual ownership structure or its submissions to the International Air Services Council in response to the complaint by Airlink and Global Airways.

“For the last 10 years, we’ve built an airline doing good, honest business and offering the best possible value to our customers. We want to continue to do so. While we believe that we are compliant with all requirements, we’re also happy to make any adjustments needed to bring all parties comfort so that we can get back to the business of offering a world-class air travel solution,” he said. DM

Share

Twenty-four hours after a multi-storey, partially built block of flats collapsed on Monday, 48 people remained unaccounted for while six are confirmed dead.

The building was due for completion and occupation on 1 August before the tragedy occurred on 6 May 2024 around 2.30pm. Seventy-five people were employed on the site.

Emergency teams and various services were at the scene in Victoria Street on Tuesday in a frantic attempt to recover the artisans who remained entombed. At least 23 workers have been rescued so far.

The South African Police Services (SAPS) cordoned off the precinct and declared it a crime scene, while engineers, forensics and other experts attempted to piece together what led to the shocking implosion.

Rescuers carry a person on a stretcher as they race to save construction workers trapped under a building that collapsed in George. (Photo: Reuters / Esa Alexander)

History of Erf 15098

While many are seeking answers as to who might be responsible for the tragedy, it will take months to determine what exactly went wrong and who will be held to account.

What we do know or what is in the public realm is the history of the development of what was to be simply called “75 Victoria”, as records were filed with the George Municipality. These are part of municipal records accessible to the public.

The erf as attached to proposals submitted to the George Municipality in November 2020. (Image: Supplied)

The January 2021 plan from the rezoning application as approved by the municipality. (Image: Supplied)

In August 2020, the owner of a 1,228m²plot of land, Erf 15098, located on Victoria Street, sold the property for R2.07-million in a private sale to a company, Pacific Breeze Trading 91, registered with the Companies and Intellectual Property Commission as being in the business of “general trading in all aspects”.

The deal was finalised on 4 November 2020, according to the Deeds Office. Directors of the company are Anton Booysen, Carel Swanepoel and Annette Swanepoel. Pacific Breeze was registered in 2005.

In November 2020, the George Municipality held a “pre-consultation” meeting with an official, Ilane Huyser, and town planner Jan Vrolijk, as the “pre-applicant” for rezoning and deviations for the planned development.

Records show that applications were made by the owner, through Vrolijk, who was given power of attorney by Swanepoel, for changes to the original plans. These included an extra level, turning an original three-storey plan into a four-storey block, as well as adding basement parking.

Earlier, in September 2020, a Land Use Planning Pre-Application Consultation Form had been completed and was re-submitted at the November meeting with the municipality.

Discussions then were about rezoning as well as various deviations, including building line relaxations, height, coverage, floor space and parking requirements.

Pacific Breeze proposed including basement parking, that the building be increased from four to five storeys to include ground-floor parking, over and above the basement parking.

The building would be 14.45m tall and a roof garden (2.72m high) was proposed, which would raise the height to 17.17m.

The proposal also contained 66 parking bays with a ratio of 1.25 per unit and 0.25 per visitor, which would be housed in the basement. There were also proposals for the adjustment of building lines.

Approval

On 1 January 2021, Vrolijk was informed by Clinton Petersen, senior manager of town planning in the George Municipality, that the application for various changes had been approved.

Reasons included that “the subject properties are located within walking distance from public transport facilities (“bus stops”) and supports the efficiency of public transport systems and transport-orientated developments”.

In addition, the development “would provide for much-needed housing opportunities”, it “supports densification in strategic areas” and it would not have an adverse impact on adjacent neighbours.

“The development can thus be deemed compatible with the spatial planning policies and guidelines for the area.”

Petersen then set out the conditions of his directorate and stated that because of the changes, “development charges” totalling R1,533,848.06 would have to be paid to the municipality by the developer. The plans, Petersen added, would still have to be submitted for approval.

In March 2021, Vrolijk, on behalf of Pacific Breeze, applied for the development’s number of floors to be increased from “four to five”.

The same month, a local conveyancer certified that the title deeds contained “no conditions restricting the contemplated land use in terms of the Land Development Application”.

Apartments were originally pre-advertised for R 1.7-million for a two-bedroomed unit by one agent in the area, with the beginning of construction earmarked for 1 April 2023, completion on 31 March, with 1 May 2024 as the occupation date.

The development, it was later announced, would be completed by July 2024 with occupation in August.

Legal contractor

George Mayor Leon van Wyk told the George Herald on Tuesday that the developer on the project was the Neo Trend Group Ice Project, which had submitted plans in December 2022, which had been approved in July 2023.

Theuns Kruger, director of the contracting firm, Liatel Developments, said the company would offer full cooperation with SAPS and was assisting with ongoing rescue efforts.

On the website for the Mussel Creek development, Kruger describes himself as a “practising attorney with vast experience in commercial and construction law”.

He adds that he has practised for his own trust account for the past 14 years and that his company was formed in 2009 “with the purpose to be a vehicle to assist and consult on various property and commercial developments”.

This included “various legal aspects associated with management, but also includes assistance with the administration and financial associated with construction and developments”.

The Western Cape government has since appointed an engineering firm V3 to investigate what led to the collapse of the building. DM

Share

The State intends to use evidence gathered through the interception of cellphone communications — “pinging” — to prove that former debt collector Zane Kilian and alleged underworld figure Nafiz Modack conspired to carry out an array of crimes.

The issue became a bone of contention on Tuesday when Hawks Captain Edward du Plessis was prevented from testifying about pinging by advocate Bash Sibda, appearing for Modack. Sibda said Du Plessis was not an expert on pinging. The matter was set down for argument on Wednesday. But before the proceedings began in the Western Cape High Court on Wednesday, the prosecution and legal representatives for Modack and his 14 co-accused met Judge Robert Henney in his chambers.

The State’s case is that the pinging that co-accused Zane Kilian allegedly carried out on Modack’s orders resulted in the assassination of the Anti-Gang Unit’s Lieutenant Colonel Charl Kinnear on 18 September 2020 and the attempted murder of lawyer William Booth on 9 April 2020.

Read more in Daily Maverick: Nafiz Modack conspired with Zane Kilian to murder prominent Cape lawyer, claims State amid slew of charges 

The 15 accused collectively face 124 charges including murder, attempted murder, corruption, gangsterism, extortion, the illegal interception of communications, money laundering and contravening the Prevention of Organised Crime Act.

Accused along with Modack and Kilian are Ziyaad Poole, Moegamat Brown, Riyaat Gesant, Fagmeed Kelly, Mario Petersen, Jacque Cronje, Petrus Visser, Janick Adonis, Amaal Jantjies, former Anti-Gang Unit sergeant Ashley Tabisher, Yaseen Modack, Mogamat Mukudam and Ricardo Morgan.

Pivotal to Judge Henney’s ruling paving the way for Du Plessis to lead pinging evidence for the State, was Kilian’s affidavit at his third bail application where he admitted that he carried out pinging as part of his business as a debt collector; that he obtained the software and user code to carry out pinging from Bradley Goldblatt; and that he pinged certain people on the instructions of Modack.

“The pinging system connects a person’s cellphone to the nearest tower. It did not provide the addresses of those being tracked. The fact that Kilian intended to ping Modack is undisputed,” Judge Henney said.

Read more in Daily Maverick: Zane Kilian admits to tracking Charl Kinnear’s phone but denies being part of murder plot

Judge Henney said the State still needed to prove that Modack and Kilian used cellphone tracking to locate individuals to commit the crimes outlined in the indictment.

Prosecutor Greg Wolmarans told the court that in light of the new developments, the State would hold Du Plessis’ evidence in abeyance. He is expected to give evidence about pinging on Monday, 13 May.

The trial continues. DM

Share

The successful country restaurateur deserves a big round of applause, followed perhaps by a standing ovation; maybe a medal or two for good measure.

They are a multi-tasking master, who often has to deal with:

• Fickle clients;
• Seasonal holidaymakers who say they want to chill out but expect the latest, trendiest food delivered at top speed;
• Locals who crave novelty but by the third month are delivering amateur advice and by the fourth month have moved on to the next new thing;
• Unpredictable staff and the fact that the best ones generally leave for the big city;
• Erratic access to fresh ingredients, or suppliers who only come once there is a full load for your area;
• Local supermarkets that don’t stock the things you need, or do so at high prices;
• The freeze on income over winter;
• Clients who don’t put a value on your time and expertise;
• Copycat competitors;
• The blessings and curses of TripAdvisor and other social media;
• The need for constant marketing and ongoing innovation; and
• Power failures and water cut-offs at inopportune moments.

Most of all, cooking for a living in the platteland demands the ability to cope with manic amounts of work at times, interspersed with zero customers and stupefying boredom at others.

Potbrood (or bread baked in an outside oven) is a rare and irresistible treat in the Karoo. (Photo: Chris Marais)

Comfort food is king

Chef Camilla Comins and writer and photographer Russel Wasserfall have spent a long time in the food industry, published cookbooks and run restaurants in the Western Cape Winelands and for a few vivid years, in Prince Albert.

Here are some of their tips.

“It’s not all Jamie Oliver fame and glory. It’s very hard work, often involving burns, sore feet, aching backs and poor returns on investments of energy and capital.

“The trick is to keep the menu small and manageable. Telephone book menus are crippling to prepare and hold stock for. If you source locally and seasonally, you make friends in the town and manage food waste, which is one of the biggest killers in the restaurant game.

If you want to become a country chef, Russel Wasserfall says comfort food is king. (Photo: Chris Marais)

Camilla Comins, with long experience in the food industry, advises that aspiring country chefs develop good relationships with local suppliers and gear for seasonal produce. (Photo: Chris Marais)

“Copycatting is a real thing. People in small towns tend not to go out into the wider world for fresh insights and ideas. They pinch from nearby.

“You also need to know your customer. We moved to Prince Albert with a background in Stellenbosch restaurants. We understood seasonality of trade — or so we thought. But winter is hard-core at the edge of civilisation.

“People passing through are generally not looking for edgy, hip dining. If you’re lucky enough to have a trickle of foreign tourists, you can spruce up the offering, but they are fleeting customers. Give the people what they want. It’s simple: comfort food is king.

“Be aware that the reason many locals are living in the countryside is not because it’s quaint and beautiful — it’s because it’s cheaper. They seldom go out. They might do so for a special occasion like a partner’s birthday, but certainly not once a week.”

Study your prey

Simon Kerr has run restaurants in Curry’s Post in the Midlands, in Clarens, and most recently, The Phatt Chef Roadside Diner at the top of Oliviershoek Pass near Harrismith.

Here are a few of his trenchant observations about small towns in general, and running eateries in particular.

“Firstly, sitting watching a full tourist town buzzing over a long weekend does not mean it’s like this every day of the year. And just because you can braai and your wife can pour a decent G&T, it does not follow that you should be a professional restaurateur.

“If you’re thinking of moving to the platteland, don’t do it late one night in a restaurant you’ve fallen in love with, on a weekend away from Jo’burg — 16 Jagerbombs to the good! You will live to regret it once the hangover wears off.

“Rather spend time getting to know the locals over several months. Visit regularly and soon you’ll be taken for one yourself. It will ease your entry into the habitat.”

Simon Kerr has owned and run restaurants in Curry’s Post, Clarens and Oliviershoek in the Drakensberg. For sanity and insight, country chefs need to take regular trips to cities, he says. (Photo: Chris Marais)

When it comes to running a restaurant in a small town:

“One needs to keep marketing, innovating and changing with the times. That’s why frequent trips to the big city are a necessity, not just to regain your sanity and sense of humour but to keep up with trends and to buy supplies you can’t source locally.

“Also, it helps you to study your ‘prey’ in its natural habitat so you can better learn to understand its foibles.”

Social media, used correctly, can be a huge boon in terms of marketing, he adds. But apps like TripAdvisor can be treacherous.

“Most closet critics don’t have the courage to complain to the restaurant owner’s face. Also, they like to be seen as sarcastic and critical when they actually can’t tell a dead fish from a soggy poppadom.”

The spaza shop that could 

Lizzy Snoek, who used to be a domestic worker in Port Elizabeth, travelled through the Karoo on holiday in 1997 and explored the village of Steytlerville, in the shadow of the Baviaans Mountains.

She decided to move here. Her employer (and catering mentor) wondered whether Lizzy would make it in the Karoo. But she had no fear.

“I will survive. I am a child of the dust,” she replied.

In fact, Lizzy had grown up at nearby Mount Stewart, which consisted of a railway station, a trading store and a church.

Restaurateur Lizzy Snoek of Steytlerville is a woman who knows how to make a plan under pressure. (Photo: Chris Marais)

In Steytlerville, Lizzy found a house and established a spaza shop at the side of the building. But she dreamed of opening a restaurant and feeding people. She increased the size of her house, furnished a section with tables and chairs, and with encouragement from the local tourism association, began catering for the odd party of drive-through guests, mostly foreigners.

Word of her cooking and bubbly personality spread. A Japanese overlanding company discovered Lizzy and started bringing busloads of clients. Travel bloggers were charmed, and publicised her efforts.

Lizzy’s scariest catering moment was on a very quiet day when she decided since there was nothing going on she’d have a friend over to help colour her hair. It was just when her head was irrevocably wrapped in plastic that she heard the slam of a door.

In marched 18 hungry people, apologising as they entered.

“Well, they didn’t leave here hungry,” says Lizzy proudly. She threw on a doek, got them going with hot roosterkoek, butter and jam, and just ad-libbed from there.

The man-alone step-out breakfast

Thinking on your feet is a national sport out here in the platteland.

Sometime during 1999, a certain guest came to stay in Smithfield in the Free State. He or she breakfasted at The Colony restaurant owned by Kelvin and Eileen Young who had moved from England to Johannesburg and then to Smithfield in 1998.

As Murphy’s Law would have it, the Youngs had run out of many breakfast ingredients that very morning, so they improvised.

Years later, with no warning, guest after guest began ordering the Smithfield omelette, not an item on their breakfast menu. The couple were absolutely baffled until a guest showed them their entry in the Lonely Planet South Africa.

Then Kelvin remembered that they had once made an open, grilled cheesy omelette with random ingredients, and on presenting it to the lone guest, he’d announced jokingly that this was the very special ‘Smithfield Omelette’.

Running out of food in a place with few shops is an ever-present risk. Erika and Frans de Klerk, originally of Fochville in Gauteng, were expecting a quiet day at their restaurant shop in their newly adopted village of Vosburg in the Northern Cape.

In fact, Frans was banking on it. They had run out of provisions, and Erika had gone to shop at their nearest ‘city’ of De Aar.

Also, Frans, a financial journalist and advisor, had a live interview scheduled with Radio Namaqualand at 8.45am.

So his heart sank when a very hungry tourist came in for breakfast and refused to settle for coffee and a few rusks. In desperation, Frans said the first thing that came into his head:

“Okay. I will make you a Man-Alone Step-Out breakfast. But only if you keep absolutely quiet and you make sure no one else comes through that door.”

So he made his guest toast and scrambled eggs with cheese and tomato sauce on the side.

“He kept his word. I could talk about cyber currencies on the radio without being disturbed.”

Homemade pies for sale are always popular if well made. Remember that in a small town, word of mouth is the most effective form of marketing. (Poto: Chris Marais)

Karoo lamb

In 1999, Daily Maverick’s Tony Jackman and Diane Cassere bought two houses in Sutherland, in part because the properties were so irresistibly cheap. At the time, they were both journalists in Cape Town.

In 2002, they went to live and work in England. On their return in 2006, they decided to turn one dwelling into a restaurant (called Perlman House after the original owner, a Jewish smous) and to live in the other.

Read in Daily Maverick: The Big Move to the Deep Karoo and what happens next

“City people assume everything is cheaper in small towns. Not so. In a place like Sutherland, everything green has to be brought in and bread has to baked. There are no delis, Woolies or even a Pick n Pay in a place like that. The nearest shopping mall was 270km away in Worcester.”

But Tony did love the quality of the lamb and mutton he sourced from the surrounding farms. One abiding memory of their time in Sutherland is writing the daily specials on a blackboard.

Daily Maverick food writer Tony Jackman with ‘The Foodie’s Wife’ Di Cassere, outside their home, guesthouse and occasional pop-up restaurant in Cradock in the Karoo. (Photo: Chris Marais)

“One day I had this eerie feeling I was being watched. I turned around, and there was this sheep truck and all the sheep were looking at me. I put down the chalk and couldn’t write another word until the truck pulled off again.”

Later, they relocated to Cradock and in mid-2017, Tony launched his first book, foodStuff. He and Di love to entertain and sometimes host an occasional pop-up restaurant in their home.

Nearly two decades on, Tony often thinks back to his days in that little kitchen in Sutherland.

“There were so many who loved our speciality Karoo lamb pies and shanks. There was a coterie of locals who became good friends and supported Perlman House again and again. Oh and the boules. I miss the endless rounds of boules in our mates’ backyard.”

He notes wryly that he’s become a much better cook in recent years than he was then, because of the five recipes a week he’s turned out for Daily Maverick’s Thank God It’s Food over the past five years.

“If only I’d had this repertoire in the Sutherland days.” DM

This is an extract from Moving to the Platteland – Life in Small Town South Africa by Julienne du Toit and Chris Marais. For an insider’s view on semigration and small town life in South Africa, get Moving to the Platteland and Road Tripper Eastern Cape Karoo (illustrated in black and white) by Julienne du Toit and Chris Marais for only R520, including courier costs in South Africa. For more details, contact Julie at [email protected]

‘Moving to the Platteland: Life in Small Town South Africa’ by Chris Marais and Julienne du Toit.

‘Road Tripper: Eastern Cape Karoo’ by Chris Marais and Julienne du Toit.

Share

Earlier on Tuesday night ActionSA Chairperson Michael Beaumont confirmed that both Ngobeni and Gafane had been victims of hijacking and that they were missing.

Chairperson of ActionSA’s Youth Forum Hluphi Gafane (Photo: ActionSA)

“ActionSA Leadership is working closely with the families, vehicle tracking company and law enforcement agencies. Everything that can be done to expedite the safe return of our leaders is being done,” Beaumont said in an internal letter addressed to “Colleagues”. Beaumont on Tuesday night confirmed to Daily Maverick the validity of the letter.

Any information or sightings of the vehicle can be sent to Bafana at 069 945 3353

We are working closely with Funzi and Hluphi's families, the vehicle tracking company, and law enforcement agencies.

Please hold Funzi and Hluphi and their families in your thoughts and pray for… pic.twitter.com/ydx9MDGzpE

— ActionSA Gauteng (@ActionSA_GP) May 7, 2024

However, on Tuesday around 11pm Beaumont updated colleagues that both leaders had been found.

“I have been informed by SAPS that Funzi and Hluphi have been found in Benoni. They are being recovered now. We are also so grateful to learn that they are unharmed,” he said.

It is believed the Ngobeni and Gafane were travelling in a Toyota Hilux registration number LC-06TC GP when they were hijacked in Olievenhoutbosch in Centurion. Beaumont said the vehicle was still missing.

The hijacked vehicle that Ngobeni and Gafane were travelling in. (Photo: ActionSA)

“I ask that you hold Funzi and Hluphi, and their families, in your thoughts and pray for their safe return,” Beaumont appealed before they were found.

In a statement released before midnight, Beaumont confirmed that the two leaders were found at about 10.45pm after being hijacked at 7pm. The statement said the pair had been “held” by hijackers, “eventually being located in the Benoni area”.

Beaumont said they were unharmed but “undoubtedly shaken”.

He expressed his “profound gratitude to members of the SAPS who were incredibly responsive”.

He requested that Ngobeni and Gafane be given space to recover with their families before a more substantive briefing is provided on Wednesday. DM

Share

To view an image of our flag burning, no matter how it is depicted, inspires intense emotions. It hurts. Deeply, even if the burning process is reversed and the flag is seen as untouched at the end.

It provokes important questions, as in, why would someone want to do this, and could someone who would conceive of using such an advert for political gain really respect the idea, the concept, the aim, of South Africa at all?

President Cyril Ramaphosa suggested that it was “treasonous” to do this, while Minister of Sport, Arts and Culture Zizi Kodwa said he would take action because he had a duty to protect South Africa’s national flags and symbols.

There is some evidence that a majority agrees with him. But not everyone.

Read more in Daily Maverick: Elections 2024

Over the past few days, callers into SAfm have gone in many directions – this has not been a debate where you can guess the view from the name of the person speaking.

Qobi in Polokwane suggested the flag in flames represented the problems causing our country to burn, and that, “Who doesn’t know that all the things the DA says (are wrong with the country) are true?”

Teksio in Maluti-a-Phofung asked an important question, “Imagine if the EFF is the one who burnt the flag”.

Many others agreed with Kodwa that the flag should be protected.

Kodwa chose his words carefully, suggesting the action he would take would be to ask the Electoral Commission if this advert did cross the line. But he also appeared to advocate for some kind of legal protection for the flag.

Many countries in Europe, such as Spain, France and Germany all have laws punishing people for desecrating their flags. Britain does not, while in the US the issue of whether there should be a ban on burning that country’s flag has energised the right-wing since the Vietnam War.

Unfortunately, no matter the intentions of those who want legal protection for a flag, down this road lies absurdity.

Where does the offence to the flag start? With the burning of it? With burning an image of it? With using it in a satirical film? Using it in an advert? With Faf de Klerk’s underwear?

In Zimbabwe, when an activist took to displaying the flag as a sign of protest, displaying the flag was briefly made illegal.

And if burning our flag as a form of protest is wrong, would it be wrong for an American to burn their flag in protest against Donald Trump’s possible re-election?

All of this may spark hope in the DA that its advert provokes a series of debates that puts the ANC on the wrong side of the argument, that the party somehow oversteps.

No accident

The history of DA campaigns during previous elections shows that this advert is no accident.

As long ago as 2016, the leading opposition party released an advert that used the voice of Nelson Mandela. This caused outrage at the time, led by the ANC MP, Madiba’s grandson Mandla Madiba.

In 2021, just months after the violence that claimed at least 342 lives in KwaZulu-Natal and Gauteng, the party again courted controversy.

It put up posters in Phoenix, the centre of the violence, that told residents “The ANC calls you racists. The DA calls you heroes”.

As Daily Maverick pointed out at the time, the intention of the DA was to stoke controversy. And the way to do this was through increasing divisions, not reducing them.

Unfortunately, this is often the point of modern politics.

Perhaps the best public description of politics as it is practised in strategic terms by the DA has come from the former DA strategist, Gareth van Onselen.

As he put in Business Live while responding to the launch of Rise Mzansi, “A good sign of an impactful political party, in terms of current affairs, is when other parties are forced to respond to you. That is how you lead debate”.

In other words, an election can be won or lost not by what is actually said on the campaign trail, but by what the election is about.

Our elections in the past have often been dominated by racial identity. Given that our society is defined by racialised inequality, this should be expected.

If the DA believes this election, too, will be dominated by race, then it may well have wanted to start that debate on its terms. And this advert may be part of that.

It should not be forgotten how often politicians have deliberately tried to change the story in the past.

In 2011 then ANC Youth League Leader Julius Malema led a march from Johannesburg to the city then known as Pretoria. In the process, he almost forced our society to debate what he called “Economic Justice”.

It was an inspired move (even as he bailed in Midrand and re-appeared in Pretoria, and then left the country the next morning) in that it changed the story at a stroke. – and without anyone claiming to be offended.

But, much of his career has been defined by comments deemed offensive to many people. This was all deliberate, he stirred up debates. He was taken to court, to the SA Human Rights Commission, to other authorities. And this is one of the roots of his success.

Chair of the DA’s Federal Council Helen Zille has now confirmed this is the DA strategy, writing: “We want to go to war against those who are destroying the dream that once united our nation. We want to save our Flag. Controversy helps drive our message.”

This then is the major point, the aim of this is surely to drive turnout.

Tight election

And, as offensive as this advert may be, the situation ahead of this election could be so tight in some places that just a small percentage one way or another could make a difference.

Consider, for example, the situation in KwaZulu-Natal.

Polling there suggests that four parties could each get around 20% of the vote (the ANC, the IFP, MK and the DA). At the same time, in the suburbs of Ethekwini, residents have displayed intense anger at the quality of services they are receiving.

Whether these people turn out to vote for the DA could literally tip the balance between whether or not that party is in government in KZN after the elections.

This is designed to remind them that their country is burning. And, crucially, that it can be fixed.

The obvious message is that “only the DA” can fix it.

None of this means the DA’s actions here are moral. It is surely offensive and immoral to depict our flag as burning. And to be deliberately offensive, to deliberately cause people emotional pain is always going to be difficult to justify.

However, other parties too have indulged in immoral behaviour.

The EFF has continually baited people with racial divisions, PA leader Gayton McKenzie regularly professes his hatred for foreigners, others support an uninterrupted gusher of lies.

Even Ramaphosa has some history here.

In 2013 he was reported to have said, “If all South Africans don’t vote, we will regress. The Boers will come back to control us.”

More recently, he has suggested that people should vote for the ANC to protect their social grants. This is simply untrue as several other parties, including the EFF,  Action SA, the DA and others all propose protecting, or even increasing, social grants.

Higher Education Minister Blade Nzimande said in 2015 that the media is a “continuation of the apartheid regime” while “The DA will bring back apartheid”.

All of this shows that while the DA’s advert is offensive, it is also part of a particular type of politics. A politics that thrives on deliberate division and offence, and never more so than during an election.

Or, as Van Onselen put it in his description, “Nice guys tend to finish last … SA is a street fight”. DM

Share

On Wednesday afternoon, a change of strategy was announced in the efforts to rescue people from the rubble of the collapsed building in George, with a shift from the use of rescue equipment to large demolition machinery, including bigger concrete breakers. 

However, Colin Deiner, the chief director of Western Cape disaster management services, said this did not mean they were switching from a rescue operation to a body recovery focus.

Part of the debris after the building under construction collapsed in George. (Photo: Stamhoof Brendon Torob Adams / Facebook)

Between Tuesday afternoon and the early morning of Wednesday, eight people were rescued from the collapsed building, most of whom were alive. This reinforced the determination of rescue workers to continue their life-saving efforts.

Read more in Daily Maverick: ‘I want my boy out of there’ — agonising vigil for families of those trapped in George building rubble

However, by 7pm on Wednesday there had been no further recoveries of living people, although another body was removed from the rubble. Thirty-eight of the initial 75 workers were still missing, with rescue efforts nearing the 55-hour mark.

“This building has provided us with a whole range of challenges from a rescue perspective,” Deiner said.

“Although we went [in] at high risk to save lives over the past two days, what is also important is our own people’s safety. The stage we are in now is a long and difficult one because we have to look for … bodies in a structure of five storeys that [has] collapsed.” 

The building under constrution in George before it collapsed. (Photo: Stamhoof Brendon Torob Adams / Facebook)

On Tuesday, rescuers could communicate with some people beneath the rubble. Deiner said, “The responses we got [on Tuesday], we removed all those people. Most of them were alive right through the night. We had a very successful night in terms of removing people. But we don’t have any responses at the moment.”

Regarding the process of confirming the number of people in the building at the time of its collapse, Deiner explained that they had interviewed the contractor, supervisors and survivors. 

“We have been able to build a picture of who was there and pretty much what they were wearing. We have overlaid that with the engineers … and that was a great help when we were doing the rescues over the last two days.”  

Read more in Daily Maverick: What is known about Erf 15098, Victoria Street in George, the site of the deadly building collapse

Risky operation

Richard Walls, a professor of structural and fire engineering at Stellenbosch University, said the strategies for removing debris were being changed out of concern for the safety of the teams on-site.

“We have more than 3,000 tonnes of concrete there. We’ve got a structure that has collapsed, sitting precariously. You’ve got slabs at many angles being carried — and sometimes hung by the reinforcing steel in it — over to other parts of the structure,” he said.

“We’ve got large amounts of concrete that they’re trying to break through to get access to the voids where people may be trapped. The challenge that we’re having is just the sheer quantity of demolition that they’ve got to go through. With the tools available it’s been a slow process.”

A drone view of the scene where the building collapsed in George, trapping construction workers. (Photo: Reuters / Shafiek Tassiem

Walls said at one point during the day the slabs of concrete began moving again, with a large crack opening up where rescue teams were working.

“The teams are being pulled off that area and alternative strategies are being found to try to give access. The work will continue in various places, trying where we can to get in,” he said.

“This is far beyond just a search and rescue in terms of small equipment to get to people. With thousands of tonnes of concrete, large equipment is being brought in and we’re going to try to work systematically.”

The investigation

Western Cape MEC for Local Government and Environmental Affairs Anton Bredell said it was too early to give any updates about the investigation into the cause of the building collapse.

“We must give the engineers the space to determine the facts. We do have engineers on the site. We want an independent investigation and then the consequences will follow after that,” he said.

Chris Roos, a George advocate specialising in engineering and construction law. (Photo: Tamsin Metelerkamp)

Daily Maverick spoke to Chris Roos, a George advocate specialising in engineering and construction law, about what this type of investigation would entail. While his firm is not involved in investigating the Victoria Street building collapse, it has investigated other construction incidents.

“When these types of buildings collapse, the investigations typically take anything from 18 months to longer. If you take this project, it typically starts from a contract — the traditional contracts that will be used for these types of dwellings are what they call a JBCC [Joint Building Contracts Committee] contract and in that, there are very specific roles and duties and liabilities,” he said.

When conducting this type of investigation, Roos said they usually started with the architectural design, before moving on to the structural design and the functions of the structural engineer.

“From that point, we will then move over into the fabrication and manufacturing space to see what processes were followed — quality control, quality checks, verification, validation. And then, ultimately, we will move into the construction site itself and there, typically, there’s a lot of questions that need to be answered,” Roos said.

“We will look at things like attendance registers, site diaries, general workmanship [and] whether the necessary inspections were performed by the architect.”

Samples of the structure, such as the concrete used in construction, would usually be sent to laboratories for analysis.

Any liability on the part of the architect or engineer would depend on whether they had acted in line with their mandate and code of conduct, Roos said, though he added that these professionals were usually held to a “far higher level of accountability” than others.

He said it was possible that multiple parties involved in the project could be held accountable.

“There will be some form of an insurance claim against the contractor, potentially. There are potential claims that can flow through on to the architect, the engineer,” he said.

“These days, parties in building or engineering contracts can be held criminally liable. It all just depends on … the developer, ultimately the client, and then the families [of the workers] as well. A lot is going to depend on how the contractor conducted himself and whether he actually complied with the law in the execution of the works.” DM

Share

The words of the master

‘They’re afraid that if they stop suffering, they’ll have nothing.” 

If ever there was a sentence that unlocked the secrets of the Jewish genetic code, it occurred to me, this was the one.

Set to paper by Saul Bellow, the great American-Jewish Nobel literature laureate of the late 20th century, the sentence appeared to hold the key to the enigma of my people. Also, there was the timing — while I had once been a fan of Bellow, I hadn’t visited his work in more than a decade. Now, in mid-April of 2024, the words of the master had returned to my field (via a poignant late-night YouTube session) like the lifting of a veil. 

Just as my people were beginning to properly suffer again, just as we were delivering suffering to our enemies in ways suggestive of the Old Testament, Bellow had arrived on the scene with a truism for the ages.

And, like many enduring truisms, his words would spin out into a web of urgent yet impossible questions. 

What would Bellow, who died in 2005, have made of the recent actions of the government of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu? As a man who had written extensively on anti-Semitism in America, what would he have made of the alleged Jew-hatred that was then just beginning to erupt on Ivy League college campuses across the length and breadth of the United States? Would he have drawn a new and revelatory correlation between the two, seeing in the Israeli reaction to the Hamas atrocities of 7 October something that the rest of us had missed? 

These questions were essentially unanswerable, not just because Bellow had written in the post-war era, when Jews were still regarded by Gentiles as history’s ultimate victims, but because never in his lifetime had the so-called values of secular Judaism — social consciousness, equality before the law, liberal humanism — been so endangered by the blindness of the culture itself.

And yet, I was thinking, there was a profound clue in the observation that my people were wedded to their suffering. 

Take, for example, the message I received from an old and cherished friend on the morning of 15 April, when Daily Maverick had shut itself down for the day in solidarity with the plight of local journalism.

“DM being very dramatic,” he wrote. “Like a Polish mother.” 

My friend, of course, being Jewish, was sidestepping the common trope — that of the dramatic Jewish mother. More than that, though, since he had left South Africa for Israel almost 10 years before, since his psyche had by now been indelibly marked by the bomb shelters and the hostage traumas and the world’s growing condemnation, it was almost natural that he would take this opportunity to lash out. For the last few months, my friend had been making it increasingly clear that he viewed Daily Maverick’s coverage of the war as pro-Palestinian at best, anti-Semitic at worst. 

Still, while I was sympathetic to his lived experience, while a part of me acknowledged that he was much closer to the heat, there was something about it all that felt wholly unnatural — my friend’s brand-new cloak of rampant Jewish nationalism; his sense that diasporic Jews held an a priori superfluous voice; his inability to feel into the devastation that was being visited on Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank. 

Accordingly, I was ready with a knee-jerk response.

“Israel may want death to journalism. We don’t.” 

From there, needless to say, it was downhill all the way. My friend pointed out that he had “heard from enough people to warrant attention” that they’d cancelled their Maverick Insider contributions because of the “obvious bias and tone regarding the Middle East”. He added that if we really wanted to survive and thrive, we should get our leading South African-Muslim writer (name withheld) to “proactively hit the Muslim community and get cash from there”. He noted, in brackets, that this was only a “half-joke”. 

My comeback, a “yawn” emoji, opened the floodgates. 

“Kev, in our conversations over the past months, there were a few comments that triggered for me some of the ideas that you’re taking on. You questioned the fact of the existence of rape on 7/10 when Pandor amplified this idea. This was quickly put to bed, and the numbers and facts are staggering, but you seemed to actually consider this at the time — without taking up the offer to view the 47 minutes documenting it, to save you and your DM colleagues from the emotional pain (paraphrasing your response).”

My ears were ringing, I had begun to sweat, my adrenaline was up. 

For one thing, to the best of my memory, I had never questioned the clear and compelling evidence of deliberate and planned sexual violence on the part of Hamas on 7/10. For another, my friend seemed to be implying that I’d been swayed by the extremist and arguably bigoted views of South Africa’s international relations minister, Naledi Pandor. Then there was the famous 47-minute reel of raw footage from the day of the Hamas attack, which he had arranged for me to watch through his Israeli contacts in South Africa. 

It was an offer I had refused, not because of the envisaged “emotional pain”, but because I did not see how subjecting myself to the footage would in any way move the journalistic needle on Israel’s kill ratio of Palestinians — which, at that stage, was hovering somewhere between 10 and 25 for every dead Israeli, depending on the source.

Later, it would dawn on me that those 47 minutes — and, specifically, my friend’s insistence that I watch them — were the clearest exemplar yet of Bellow’s trenchant observation. 

For now, however, my friend had more schooling in store. 

“You call it genocide when I think you know that it’s not,” he continued, “that the Hamas numbers are inflated; that they are themselves complicit in many ways in the reality on the ground; that this is war, as shitty as it is. I’m not washing the IDF [Israel Defense Forces], it’s been chaos, I’m just looking at where you’re holding.” 

The thing was, I had also been looking pretty closely at where I may have been “holding”. Every day, in every conversation with members of my family, in every news report, in every accusation and counter-accusation. 

Was it genocide? Again, there was a gap between what my friend thought he’d heard and what I had actually said. There was indeed a chance, I’d ventured, after the rubble had been cleared, after the last shots had been fired and the last graves dug, that history would judge against us.

It wasn’t something I wanted to happen, I’d added, but if there was no plan to pull the settlers out of the West Bank, if the IDF invaded Rafah, if the famine in Gaza was allowed to continue unabated, our children would be carrying the can for many years to come.

In the entirety of my friend’s WhatsApp assault, however, it was the phrase “I think you know it’s not” that was the giveaway. He was suggesting, subtly yet unmistakably, that our people weren’t capable of such an atrocity. He was suggesting, because of our suffering, that we were somehow exempt.

But my friend wasn’t done. He wanted me to know, as an olive branch perhaps, that he forgave me for getting hoodwinked. 

“These comments, and the general views around this issue, make it feel to me that you’re very taken up by the views of the South African leadership and media. If so, I get it. Not simple to escape the zeitgeist of the zone. It’s just not the big mind Bloom I’ve known in the past. (There, now you can have some guilt from another Polish mother.)”

What sort of Jew are you? 

In 1976, Bellow received the Democratic Legacy Award from the Anti-Defamation League (ADL), the organisation’s highest honour. Back then, 38 years before it would be bestowed on former US president George W Bush, the award still stood for something — its prestige, which had been rooted in the ADL’s enduring battle to secure equal rights for the US’s Jews, was at the time commensurate with the organisation’s victories since its founding in 1913.

Bellow’s acceptance speech, published in his non-fiction collection There is Simply Too Much to Think About, opened with a meditation on what it meant to have a history that was “neither simple nor brief”, which led to an explanation of why, although he understood the impetus, he had never chosen the path of assimilation: “There are others, like myself, who suspect that if we dismiss the life that is waiting for us at birth, we will find ourselves in a void.” 

Then, before rejecting the assumption that the US — like too many Christian countries to count — was destined one day to turn on its Jews, he spoke about the inherent contradictions of the Jewish State.

“In Israel, I was often and sometimes impatiently asked what sort of Jew I was and how I defined myself and explained my existence. I said that I was an American, a Jew, a writer by trade. I was not insensitive to the Jewish question, I was painfully conscious of the Holocaust, I longed for peace and security in the Jewish State. I added, however, that I had lived in America all my life, that American English was my language, and that (in an oddly universalist way) I was attached to my country and the civilisation of which it was a part.”

I, for one, on first reading these words — and then rereading them in preparation for this essay — knew what was coming. And, I suspected, most diasporic Jews who had ever visited the Holy Land would have known too.

“But my Israeli questioners or examiners were not satisfied,” Bellow told his audience. “They were trying to make me justify myself. It was their conviction that the life of a Jew in what they called the Diaspora must inevitably be ‘inauthentic’. Only as a Jew in Israel, some of them told me, could I enter history again and prove the necessity and authenticity of my existence.” 

Bellow’s answer to his Israeli interlocutors, for me at least, would become the final word on the matter.

“I refused to agree with them that my life had been illusion and dust. I do not accept any interpretation of history that declares the deepest experience of any person to be superfluous. To me that smells of totalitarianism.” 

So there it was, set down in a speech almost 50 years ago, the signifier that would creep up on the Israeli body politic, which had always called itself — and, in April of 2024, still was calling itself — the only democracy in the Middle East. 

Totalitarianism. How could it be that the Jewish people, my people, who had suffered so unforgettably, so extremely, so ineradicably at the hands of the Nazis, would begin to draw the same set of fascist signifiers from the rest of the world? Was it simply anti-Semitism? Or, conceivably, was it time to turn the mirror on ourselves?

In her chapters The Nazi in the Mirror and The Unshakeable Ethnic Double, included in her book Doppelganger — published in September 2023, mere weeks before the Hamas attack — the Canadian-Jewish writer Naomi Klein offered what were perhaps the most thought-provoking and incisive answers to this distressing question. After 7/10 her publishers had agreed to make the chapters available free online, and Klein had agreed to frame them with a short introduction.

“These two chapters also get into the ongoing debates about how the Nazis were influenced by European colonial and racial segregation in the Americas,” she wrote, “and how a failure to reckon with those connections shaped and misshaped Israeli history, and contributed to exiling Palestinians into an unbearable purgatory. Israel-Palestine has been described by many as the ‘open wound’ of the modern world: never healed, never even bandaged. On October 7, 2023, that wound was ripped open in ways we cannot yet begin to comprehend.” 

For Klein, as alluded to above, there was a clear line that ran from the European colonial project in Africa, particularly the impulse of the Belgians to “exterminate all the brutes” in the Congo, to the genocide of the indigenous tribes in North America and then back again to Adolf Hitler in 20th-century Europe.

“Praising European settlers for having ‘gunned down the millions of redskins to a few hundred thousand’,” she observed, “Hitler claimed it was now Germany’s turn to engage in cleansings and mass relocations on its own frontier.”

This was an analysis, as Klein pointed out, that destabilised “pretty much all of the stories” that she had grown up with as a young Jew in post-war Canada; stories which taught that “the Holocaust was a singular event without precedent, so far outside the bounds of human history that it was essentially impossible to comprehend”. 

As a Jew who had grown up in apartheid-era South Africa, I could easily relate. At my Jewish high school in Johannesburg in the late 1980s, the Holocaust stood elevated and apart — the event that encompassed all of our sufferings, from the Babylonian exile to the Roman sacking of the Second Temple and beyond. It was the event that proved, categorically and without doubt, that the Gentiles wanted us dead, eradicated, erased forever from history; and that they always would. 

Accordingly, there was a specific way that the Holocaust was taught to us, which Klein — quoting a friend and colleague — had forcefully called “retraumatisation, not remembering”.

As she wrote in Doppelganger: “Looking back as the parent of a child older than we were then, I am struck by what wasn’t a part of these strangely mechanical retellings. There was space for the surface-level emotions: horror at the atrocities, rage at the Nazis, a desire for revenge. But not for the more complex and troubling emotions of shame or guilt, or for reflection on what duties the survivors of genocide may have to oppose genocidal logics in all of their forms.” 

If anything would, I was thinking, this would be the insight to earn Doppelganger the epithet of “prophetic” in the years to come. Because, from there, it was a short and obvious jump to the purgatory of the open wound.

“The reason for this frozen quality to our education,” Klein explained, “was that the Holocaust was a plot point in a larger, prewritten story we not only were being told but also were trapped inside: a phoenix-from-the-flames narrative that began in the gas chambers of Nazi-controlled Europe and ended on the hilltops around Jerusalem. Though there were certainly exceptions, for the most part, the goal of this teaching was not to turn us into people who would fight the next genocide wherever it occurred. The goal was to turn us into Zionists.” 

A new story 

In late April 2024, after weeks of wondering whether I had lost my friend for good — whether, as a diasporic Jew, I had got it all hopelessly and unforgivably wrong — I revisited the WhatsApp message exchange between us. Was there anything in there that I had yet to properly account for; anything that I simply could not know because I didn’t live in Israel? 

As it turned out, there was. While I was certain that I had never questioned the raw fact of the sexual violence on 7/10 — as my friend had angrily alleged — I had also not yet fully engaged with what had occurred on that day. This would be starkly reflected back at me by two items of impeccable and essential journalism: a deeply reported piece in the leftist Israeli newspaper Ha’aretz, headlined “The New York Times Investigated Hamas’ Sexual Assault on October 7. Then the Trouble Started,” and a documentary directed by former Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg, titled Screams Before Silence. 

On the professional level, the first item was significant because of what — to the best of my recall — I had actually said to my friend about the rapes. I had suggested that the infamously discredited New York Times investigation, “‘Screams Without Words: How Hamas Weaponised Sexual Violence on Oct. 7,” published in late December 2023, had done irreparable harm not only to all attempts at objective reporting on the war, but also to the evidence of systemic rape as released by the Israeli authorities and United Nations.

For Israelis, as the Ha’aretz report noted, that initial New York Times feature was crucial — it had landed at a moment when the international community was allegedly silent and hypocritical on the issue, and it had reset the narrative on the global stage, fortifying the IDF in its mission of pushing into Gaza and eliminating Hamas. By 28 February 2024, however, when The Intercept delivered what it hoped would be the final death blow to the Times story, all of the gains had been lost. The pro-Palestinian faction had by then flooded social media with the false assertion that no rapes had occurred at all — that it was all just a function of Israeli propaganda.

And so Ha’aretz, with admirable skill, had pulled off an analysis of how the Times had got the story both wrong and right. It was an object lesson in our loss of nuance, which was symbolic of how the war had collapsed our empathy range in general.

The Sandberg documentary, on the other hand, hit me on a personal level. Needless to say, as Mark Zuckerberg’s former second-in-command and a conservative Jew to boot, it was no surprise that Sandberg’s contribution would fail to make a global impact — even though her title was a direct reference to the Times story and another attempt to undo its damage. Still, after refusing my friend’s offer to watch the 47 minutes that had been compiled by the Israeli government, this was the next best (or perhaps worst) thing. 

Interweaving the footage of the Hamas operatives with intimate and harrowing interviews of Israeli survivors of 7/10, the film proved, conclusively, that the rapes weren’t just isolated incidents typical of any armed skirmish; they were rather part of a much broader pattern, demonstrative of the dehumanisation and terror that had always been core to the Hamas ideology. 

The Israeli survivors were not acting — months after the event, they were exhibiting signs of unimaginable trauma, having directly witnessed or overheard scenes that no human being should have to endure. From dismemberment to gang-rape to necrophilia, from hysterical screams for mercy to the silence after the bullet or knife, it was all too shockingly true.

“I don’t have words to explain what we saw,” said a member of the voluntary Israeli clean-up unit Zaka. “You couldn’t identify if it was a man or a woman. Everything was ripped.”

Unimaginable trauma, but also the articulation, in the present time, of thousands of years of Jewish suffering. The wound, in Klein’s terms, had indeed been ripped. The suffering on the other side of the fence, where Palestinians had been living for decades in what had long been described as the world’s largest open-air prison, had erupted inside the husk of Israel’s desensitised heart.

And the biggest tragedy of all was that it had been foreseen. 

Not just by Bellow and Klein, who had warned of the fascist tendencies in mature Israeli society, but by peerless Jewish philosophers such as Martin Buber and Hannah Arendt, who had escaped the Nazi apocalypse with lessons on how best to set the infant Jewish State on the most humane and enlightened course.

Then there was Leonard Cohen.

You Want It Darker, the title track from his final album, released in 2016, less than three weeks before his death, said it all. Whatever the other interpretations of the lyrics happened to be, for me, after 7/10 and the ensuing waves of slaughter and destruction that Israel would visit on Gaza and the West Bank, the track was the most prophetic yet.

“There’s a lover in the story/ But the story’s still the same/ There’s a lullaby for suffering/ And a paradox to blame/ But it’s written in the scriptures/ And it’s not some idol claim/ You want it darker/ We kill the flame.”

The same old story, the ancient tale of Jewish suffering, was about to play itself out in an inevitable and monstrous paradox, where the ultimate victims of history would begin to resemble the ultimate perpetrators. The banning of Al Jazeera, which the Israeli government ordered in early May, would soon come to symbolise the snuffing out of the light; the immutable fact, from the perspective of the Israeli establishment, that Jewish suffering was the only story that mattered. 

“They’re lining up the prisoners/ And the guards are taking aim/ I struggled with some demons/ They were middle class and tame/ I didn’t know I had permission/ To murder and to maim/ You want it darker…” 

The invasion of Rafah, which Netanyahu had vowed would go ahead “with or without” a deal on the hostages — and which the US administration had consistently opposed — was now a fait accompli, proof of Zionism’s murderous self-permissiveness, an augury of the endarkened isolation in store for the Jewish State.

And then, to make it clear that he was addressing the Jewish God, Cohen offered up the sacred announcement, in Hebrew, of the supplicant’s humble presence: “Hineni, hineni/ I’m ready, my Lord.”

Without our suffering, to return to Bellow, what did we have? Was there even a choice not to suffer? Would we continue to hand it all over to our God, assuring ourselves that in the face of the world’s condemnation we would be miraculously redeemed, or would we finally decide to interrogate our victimhood, in acknowledgement that it had been implicate all along? 

In short, would we begin to tell ourselves a new story? 

Bellow, for his part, had chosen. In his 1956 novella Seize the Day, in which the great Jewish writer had first grappled with the problem of his culture’s suffering, the protagonist would reach a sublime yet simple conclusion.

“You don’t know what you’ve got within you,” he would say. “A person either creates or he destroys. There is no neutrality.” DM

Share