/ 22 February 2016

Entertainment News: Hijack stories, Leo’s red-carpet race and tweeting an arrest

Actor Rapulana Seiphemo's accident may have been the result of a hijacking.
Actor Rapulana Seiphemo's accident may have been the result of a hijacking.

Speculation is rife that two of the passengers travelling in actor Rapulana Seiphemo’s car when it crashed in Johannesburg last Sunday night were hijackers, the Sunday Independent reported yesterday.

The accident left three people dead, including a passenger in Seiphemo’s car, and the actor critically injured. Seiphemo plays Tau Mogale in the SABC1 soapie Generations: The Legacy.

The newspaper reported that one of the passengers in Seiphemo’s car is currently under heavy police guard after attempting to escape from hospital, fuelling rumours that the two passengers, apparently strangers to the driver, were trying to hijack him.

The report said that the two men, apparently from Mamelodi, were apparently unknown to him. The police have so far refused to name them.

Meanwhile, the relatives of the two people travelling in the other vehicle who succumbed to their injuries want Seiphemo to be charged with murder on the grounds that he was allegedly speeding, the Sunday World reported.

These comments were made by Jody van Zyl, a survivor of the accident that killed his brother, Donovan van Zyl, and his brother-in-law, Jerry Coertze.

DiCaprio’s long-held Oscar hopes turned into a web game


Leonardo DiCaprio arriving at the BAFTA Awards. (Paul Hackett/ Reuters)

Leonardo DiCaprio’s ambitions to win an Oscar have become video game fodder in the form of Leo’s Red Carpet Rampage. The online game features a caricature of the actor racing across the red carpet and dodging obstacles in order to lay claim to the prized statue.

DiCaprio, who has been nominated five times (four times for best actor and once for best supporting actor), has become one of the talking points of the 88th Academy Awards, especially after the success of his film The Revenant at the British Academy of Film and Television Arts (Bafta) awards. This year’s Oscars ceremony will take place in Los Angeles on February 28.


A screenshot of the Leonardo DiCaprio web game Red Carpet Rampage.

The other lingering issues, DiCaprio’s thirst aside, are that the Oscars continue to be untransformed, with the only black actor who has the chance to make any speeches from the podium being the host, Chris Rock. There are no minorities nominated in any of the acting categories for the second straight year. The New York Times reported that last year, the number of black television viewers fell about 20% compared to the previous year’s figure.

Mockingbird author Harper Lee gets presidential nod


George W. Bush awarding the Presidential Medal of Freedom to Harper Lee in 2007. (Larry Downing/Reuters)

United States President Barack Obama is among those who have paid tribute to To Kill a Mockingbird novelist Harper Lee.

Lee, who passed away on Friday at the age of 89, was called a “country girl who just wanted to tell an honest story about life as she saw it” by the Obama family, in a statement.

“But what that one story did, more powerfully than one hundred speeches possibly could, was change the way we saw each other, and then the way we saw ourselves.”

Oprah Winfrey confessed that Lee was one of the interviews she had failed to get

Fellow auhor Stephen King celbrated her generosity tweeting:

Lee’s Go Set A Watchman was released in 2015.

Novelist live-tweets her #FeesMustFall arrest as it happens


Panashe Chigumadzi. (Facebook/Tseliso Monaheng)

Author Panashe Chigumadzi live-tweeted her arrest from the back of a police van on February 19, after the Ruth First fellow was arrested with seven other women at the University of the Witwatersrand.

According to reports, 20 people, 14 of whom were students, were arrested on the Wits campus and taken to Hillbrow police station in Johannesburg.

In the tweets Chigumadzi, who aligns herself with the #FeesMustFall movement, claimed they were arrested for “sitting on the side of the road” and were not being told what charges they faced.

“We were sitting outside Empire gate, talking, sharing some food when police told us to get into the van. They refused to tell us why @WitsFMF,” the author, whose debut novel Sweet Medicine was published last year, tweeted.

The 20 were released the same day after being arrested in connection “with unlawful activity on campus” and contravening a court order at Wits, EWN reported.

Siba’s Table presenter in the pink over new baby girl


Food Network celebrity chef Sibahle Mtongana. (Supplied)

Food Network celebrity chef Siba Mtongana and her husband, Brian, who is the head of design for Woolworths South Africa, welcomed their baby girl BuhlebeNkosi on February 17.

Mtongana posted a photo on social media of the couple in hospital, a day after she had given birth.

“Princess BuhlebeNkosi Mtongana, aka Buhle arrived yesterday morning. Thanks for your prayers P.S. A girl finally,” the Siba’s Table host tweeted.

She also explained that her daughter’s name. “Her name is based on our life testimony, which means the Goodness of the Lord. I’m doing well and the baby also fine! Thank you for keeping us in your thoughts and prayers.”

The couple also has two sons.