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/ 17 November 2006
A new generation of immigrants is finding its feet in South Africa. Niren Tolsi goes in search of the faces and places that are redefining Durban’s cultural scene.
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/ 27 October 2006
The eThekwini Municipality’s policy on informal business may need reviewing after the Durban High Court allowed photographer Khehla Vilakazi to continue snapping tourists on the city’s beaches to provide for his wife and five children. The case turns a particularly harsh spotlight on the city’s Public Realm Management Plan, introduced last year.
Artists Ralph Borland and Julian Jonker have taken 72 versions of Solomon Linda’s <i>Mbube</i> and created <i>Song of Solomon</i>, a sound installation that is part orchestration and part algorithm. Niren Tolsi reports.
Niren Tolsi speaks to Black Consciousness poet Mafika Gwala about times unremembered.
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/ 18 September 2006
Local craft production — piggybacking on a national agenda obsessed with tourism and identified as a potential poverty alleviation sector — has increased in recent years. As has consumption. From the pavements of Durban to Stockholm markets, Niren Tolsi traces the various lives (and prices) of a piece of beaded jewellery.
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/ 14 September 2006
Parking space outside the Eddels shoe factory in Pietermaritzburg is, like half-size-too-small pumps bought at an irresistible mark-down, inevitably tight. Which, for Richard Starmer, the company’s men’s merchandise director, is cause to grin: "At the time [of the 2001 management buy-out], one of our goals was that all the workers would one day have cars and we seem to be reaching that."
The government’s foot-dragging response to a Durban High Court order to provide anti-retroviral treatment to HIV-positive prisoners continued this week when it ignored a deadline to give the High Court proof of its treatment plan for inmates at Durban’s Westville Prison.
Durban musicians claim their form of hip-hop is more authentic than the rest, writes Niren Tolsi.
One of the few schools for black artists during apartheid, the Rorke’s Drift Art and Craft Centre is reinventing itself two years after its reopening, writes Niren Tolsi.
The disappearance of dozens of firearms issued to the Durban metro police department has blown wide open the haphazard management of arms and ammunition by municipal police services. State-issued firearms have been used in robberies and hijackings in Durban and surrounds, fuelling fears that criminals are buying guns from corrupt police officers.
<b>DVD OF THE WEEK</b>: Niren Tolsi reviews <i>Gorillaz Demon Days Live</i>, shot in November last year at the Manchester Opera House.
Violet Mthembu, who cares for three people every day, says that many of the sick and aged she looks after are either physically or economically incapable of collecting water from one of the stand pipes dotting the township — the only place where residents can access running water. "Some people have [prepaid] cards, but for others it’s too expensive, so we use our own cards," she says.
Students at the University of KwaZulu-Natal’s medical school believe they are racially victimised while staff counter that personality clashes and academic rigour are being misconstrued as racism. Over the past three years escalating racial tension at the Nelson R Mandela School of Medicine has seen black students alleging racial discrimination by Indian academics.
Little Louie Vega spoke to Niren Tolsi about being a master at work.
Xenophobia has emerged as a significant theme at the Durban International Film Festival, writes Niren Tolsi.
"The wonderful cultural mix in Durban definitely has an effect on my work, because there is no one style of dressing," said fashion designer Amanda Laird Cherry. "It’s so inspiring to walk down Grey Street and see people in punjabis and kurthas, men walking with skins in their belts, a traditional Shembe stick and a briefcase. You see this every day, and you can’t help but be inspired."
Treatment of HIV/Aids, including the provision of anti-retroviral drugs, will now be available to inmates of Durban’s Westville Prison after a Durban High Court ruling by Judge Thumba Pillay. Fifteen HIV-positive prisoners had taken the prison and the departments of health and correctional services to court to force them to fulfil their constitutional and legal obligation to provide treatment.
The 27th Durban International Film Festival will engage cinephiles on a range of issues and stories, writes Niren Tolsi.
The arrest of two men in connection with the murder of South African Communist Party member Mazwi Zulu in Durban’s troubled Umlazi township tends to contradict African National Congress claims that the violence is criminal rather than political. Nkosiyabo Ngubane and Sphiwe Nene were arrested at the home of Bhekisasa Xulu, the ANC councillor for Ward 80.
Nu Metro and SABC Africa have launched a small festival for big ideas, writes Niren Tolsi.
Fifteen inmates of Durban’s Westville prison have gone to court to force the prison to provide them with HIV/Aids treatment, including anti-retroviral (ARVs) drugs.
According to papers they have filed in the Durban High Court, 78 inmates of the Medium B prison have died of Aids-related diseases in the past year.
Mustafa Maluka’s gigantic portraits make us confront individuals from the outside. He spoke to Niren Tolsi.
Chatsworth, Durban, lunchtime: 16-year-old Colin Pillay staggers out of an alleged drug-dealer’s semi-detached council home, oblivious. An hour earlier, Pillay and his mother had turned up at the Chatsworth Youth Centre seeking a prescription for Subutex (buprenorphine, a schedule six drug) to combat his three-and-a-half-year "sugars" addiction.
That Nkandla is a depressed area where the people feel economically and politically marginalised is tangible. Nkandla town’s streets are filled with young people with nothing to do and any line of questioning regarding Jacob Zuma inevitably ends with the desperate hope that the situation in the area would improve if he were to become president.