The Southern Times

SPORTS

Now Bafana Bafana Need Clive Barker

By Staff Reporter on 9th September 2016

By Thandisizwe Mgudlwa

Cape Town – The South African Football Association (SAFA) must now re-hire Clive Barker to coach Bafana Bafana.

This is no time for SAFA to try things out if Bafana Bafana are to qualify for the 2018 World Cup in Russia.

Having failed to qualify for the Africa Cup of Nations (AFCON) 2017, Bafana Bafana now need the best person that has ever coached them. And that person is Clive Barker.

After a successful spell as the head coach of the South Africa’s senior soccer men’s team since early 1994 till December 1997, a few months before defending his 1996 African Nations Cup glory on home-soil, Barker was unceremoniously axed after the team’s early exist in the Confederations Cup held in Saudi Arabia.

Bafana Bafana had qualified to play in the inter-continental tournament due to them being African Champions in 1996.

If Barker had stayed on, he would have been the first coach to coach Bafana Bafana to the 1998 Soccer Wold Cup in France. Barker had qualified South Africa to the world’s greatest show.

But what is now clear is that Bafana Bafana is far away from being No 1 in Africa and No 16 world, which they had achieved under Barker.

Also in 1996, under Barker, FIFA bestowed Bafana Bafana with an international award as the most improved team, a Best Mover of the Year.

All the other coaches have not achieved anything close to what Barker achieved.

Barker was a professional footballer in the 1960s, playing for Durban City and Durban United having made his debut at the age of 17. He had a trial with Leicester City, but a serious knee injury quickly ended his career.

“The Dog”, as he is nicknamed, became a manager in the 1970s, coaching numerous clubs in South Africa, including Durban City, Manning Rangers, AmaZulu (Zulu Royals) and Santos Cape Town. In the 1980s, he won championships with various teams.

During his club career, he won two league championships and two league cups. He was one of the first white managers in the South African league.

In 2013, Barker took Wits University to forth spot of South Africa’s highest league the PSL. He has won numerous awards/honours and other many accolades.

Today, Bafana Bafana is 23 years old and is ranked around No 17 in Africa and 72 in the world.  Clearly Barker was the best thing to have happened to Bafana Bafana and probably to South African soccer generally.

SAFA must do South Africa a huge favour and return Barker to coach Bafana Bafana.

Shakes Mashaba can be given another portfolio within the technical department. However, if Clive Barker had to come back he would need to be given the right to choose his assistance coach and technical support.

Soccer Laduma

Butler Available To Coach In South Africa

Jeff Butler Keen To Coach In South Africa

By Soccer Laduma - Sep 10, 2015 03:00 PM

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Former Kaizer Chiefs coach, Jeff Butler, has revealed to the Siya crew that he would welcome the opportunity to return to South Africa for a coaching job at one of the clubs.

Butler is an experienced and knowledgeable coach, having coached Chiefs and achieved success with the side.

The Englishman was also with Chiefs' youth development in the final years of his coaching career in South Africa.

“I’d be interested to come back and give a little bit back – something like academy clinics and working with the younger players. If there is anyone who wants some coach­ing… even a stop-gap for a couple of months’ work or in development etcetera… I’d be open to it.

“I would consider working with a first team, but I wouldn’t want to do that long term. I could do some work and help the other coaches out.

“Academy wise, I’d probably pre­fer to do that because that’s what I’ve been doing in England recently. I’ll have a look around in the PSL and see what comes up,” said Butler.

Butler is one of the coaches to have won the league title with Chiefs, among some of his achievements as a coach in South Africa.  

Daily Maverick

OPINIONISTA NIC MUIRHEAD

A view from outside: Is South Africa’s media transformed?

• NIC MUIRHEAD
 
• 08 MAR 2016 10:24 (SOUTH AFRICA)
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In the interests of full disclosure: I am a white South African journalist based in London. On a story like this — about transformation in South African media — the irony of my race does not escape me. Neither does the reality of my distance.

So I made sure I came home to investigate and report this story for my employer Al Jazeera English, and I made sure I spoke with a range of people who represent the diversity of modern South Africa.

Transformation was a promise, a hope for a more just future that was a key part of the ANC’s appeal back in 1994. Given the role that certain news organisations played in supporting the apartheid government, the need to transform the media was crucial.

Fast forward 22 years, and transformation in the media is still a work in progress. I thought Songezo Zibi of Business Day put it best when he told me: “Transformation as a concept has been enormously vulgarised. It is usually seen through the lens of racism or anti-racism… But I think it’s more than that. Transformation for me means alignment with the values of a new nonracial society.”

Zibi sets a high bar for meaningful transformation in the media — and he is right to do so. But, despite the concerted efforts of many to transform news organisations, the result has been what the editor of City Press, Ferial Haffajee, labelled “cappuccino” change in her book What If There Were No Whites in South Africa. The metaphor paints a pretty clear picture of what South Africa’s private sector looks like, where we find that the workforce has been mixed to a good brown at the bottom, but there is still a thick white layer of foam on top, with a few chocolate sprinkles.

Haffajee says that in the private sector, “the grooves worn by our past have not changed sufficiently.” I visited a number of South African newsrooms for this report, and saw some very diverse workplaces, but when you get to upper management and ownership, those old grooves Haffajee refers to become more visible.

Just take a look at the four big media companies that control most of South Africa’s newspapers — Caxton, Independent Media, Times Media Group and Media 24. The composition of their ownership is telling. Media 24 for instance owns about 90 newspapers, including six out of the big 10, according to itswebsite. The company claims to have about 47% black ownership, which may seem like a significant figure, but the 2011 census tells us that South Africa is about 80% black. So 47% black ownership does not reflect the racial breakdown of the country. Black ownership at Caxton is just under 19%. Times Media Group’s ownership is 41% black. So Independent Media is the only company with significant black ownership, and that only happened in 2013 with a government-backed takeover, although critics say that the move was more political than transformative.

The question is: what impact is “the cappuccino” having on actual media output? Phelisa Nkomo, Chairperson of the Media Development and Diversity Agency, told me she does see an impact cascading into the quality of content. Too much output in South African mainstream media does not interrogate the institutionalised racism and the monopolistic nature of the South African economy, which she claims is still disproportionally controlled by white South Africans.

Karima Brown, Group Editorial Executive of Independent Media, argues that the content still displays the same old biases, particularly on economic coverage. For instance, the same white pundits are regularly tapped for comment as if they are the repositories of objective economic truth in South Africa.

To say that they are selected primarily because of their race is a bit of a leap in my opinion but I do think that the independent media reflect a narrow band of opinion that tends to serve corporate interests. This is a pervasive issue in the media, not just in South Africa, but it is compounded by our chequered history and the fact that not much has changed for a lot of South Africans.

According to Oxfam, inequality is greater today in South Africa than at the end of apartheid and you don’t have to look hard to see that it still divides along racial lines. Many black South Africans still live in poverty and many white South Africans still have a disproportionate hold on the economy, which is why corporate interests are still seen by many as synonymous with white interests. And when the bottom dollar of big business gets priority over the livelihood of many South Africans, you can see why they don’t see the media as transformed.

We can’t discuss transformation without talking about the most influential news outlet in the country, the SABC. At first glance, the state-owned broadcaster looks like a success story — transforming from a bilingual state outlet that excluded many more viewers than it attracted, to a broadcasting network that speaks to the country in all 11 of South Africa’s official languages; an institution that is proudly diverse across the board, especially in its news division.

But there are a growing number of critics who say transformation at the SABC has merely been a guise for the ANC to insert pro-government executives into the channel who ensure that the ruling party gets favourable coverage. The examples abound — from snubbing the opposition by refusing to cover live the DA’s Annual Congress last year; the reported “happy news” quota that was demanded of SABC journalists by chief operating officer Hlaudi Motsoeneng just before the 2014 elections — stories that would get the ANC re-elected; and just this week, the official order that all SABC radio talk shows were to stop taking calls from the public until after the local elections because too many callers were criticising the government and its leadership.

The SABC calls itself a public broadcaster, but doesn’t seem able or interested in actually producing public-interest broadcasting that takes on all the establishment interests in the country. I tried to arrange interviews with the group acting CEO Jimi Matthews and the SABC’s spokesperson, Kaizer Kganyago, but neither got back to me.

Media works best when it reflects society but in South Africa what we see too often in the coverage is a battle for power and privilege. Some use the media to entrench their power and others use it to preserve their privilege. If transformation means alignment with the values of a new nonracial society, then the media in South Africa have ways to go. DM

National Teachers Union (NATU)

The birth and life of the National Teachers Union Towards the Centenary

The National Teachers’ Union (NATU) walked a lonely, long and winding but dignified road from 1918 through the segregation of the 1920’s, the missionary era, the Bantu Education era with its notorious school board system, the Black Education era with its students and class boycotts, the pre-liberation era with its defiance for authority and People’s Education slogans to the present political dispensation with its curriculum experimentation, casualisation of teaching and permanent downsizing of education institutions personnel.

NATU is an organisation of the future which provided and till continues to provide a support system for professionally-oriented educators.
The entire life of NATU from the era of Reverend Xaba to that of S.L. Ngcobo has been the perpetual struggle towards the quality of teaching and learning on the one hand and towards the enhancement of the status of the teaching profession in general on the other.
It is the organisation’s hope that one day teachers will work with dignity.

The year 2014 marked the celebration of the union’s 96 th anniversary as the event looked back at the formation of three stalwart organisations in 1918 which would eventually give birth to NATU.
Imbued with the loved of and care for their teaching profession, there was a dire need to unite teachers in the then Natal Province, now known as KwaZulu-Natal, into one compact body so as to speak unison in their struggle against the injustices suffered by the teachers in South Africa both under the British and the Afrikaans regimes.

The mission statement of NATU goes thus:
“Teach the children of the nation like never before” and in so doing “bring joy back into the classroom.”
This statement reaffirms NATU’s commitment to their primary task of not only defending the rights of children to learn but also that of safeguarding, adhering and dedicating herself to working selflessly for the rights of teachers to teach.
Furthermore, this statement calls for joy to be brought back into the classroom by the teachers.
Again implicit in this mission statement is the fact that teachers must experience joy themselves first for them to be able to impart it to the learners in class.
This important feature sets NATU apart from other trade unions.

NATU’s six principles:
·         Self-reliance and self-development
·         Freedom of association and right to organise
·         Professional approach to teaching inspired by children’s rights to learn.
·         Political and religious non-alignment.
·         Autonomy and independence.
·         Enhancement of all aspects of the working life of educators.

NATU boasts and celebrates its 13 presidents:
·         Reverend JH Xaba – 1918 – 1926
·         Professor ZK Mathews – 1926 – 1929
·         Mr AW Dlamini – 1929 – 1930
·         Mr R Guma – 1931 – 1938
·         Dr DGS Mthimkhulu – 1939 – 1953
·         Mr MT Moerane – 1953 – 1956
·         Mr PO Sikhakhane – 1956 – 1958
·         Mr AJ Mwelase – 1958 – 1968
·         Mr GT Hadebe – 1969 – 1970
·         Mr TB Shandu – 1971 – 1979
·         Professor AJ Thembela – 1979 -1996
·         Dr MMA Shezi – 1996 – 2000
·         Mr SL Ngcobo – 2000 – present
 
SOURCE: https://natu.org.za/

SAfm

AM Live on SAfm, 23 Jan A 14-year-old boy paralyzed after assault by school principal

AM Live on SAfm — SAfm

 

  Download  1.7 MB

 

A 14-year-old boy from Mhluzi township in Middelburg in Mpumalanga is now paralyzed after allegedly being assaulted by his school principal for stealing R150. 

 

Siphamandla Choma can't walk or do anything for himself as he is now wheelchair bound. 

 

The Grade 4 learner has not been at school since the incident happened last year. 

 

He told SABC News that Manyano Primary School principal allegedly assaulted him and his friend because he believed they had stolen the money which belonged to a teacher at the school. 

 

Our reporter Abongile Dumako has the details while Mpumalanga department of Education, Jasper Zwane tell us more about why the principal is still in school going about his daily business.

 

Source: SAfm

Mail & Guardian

Arts and Culture

​Thandi Klaasen: Defying tragedy to do it her way

Percy Mabandu 20 Jan 2017 00:00

Back in the day: Thandi Klaasen in 1955 ‘doing a little modelling for Drum’. Photo: Drum photographer © Baileys Archives

As hi-fi sets across the country’s townships began issuing their ritual jazz doses on Sunday, news came fluttering in that the song stylist Thandi Klaasen of Sophiatown fame was gone. The 86-year-old had succumbed to pancreatic cancer and a series of strokes. She had been bedridden and without her voice at an Ekurhuleni hospital for months.

As the government made its official announcement, her daughter, Lorraine Klaasen, had also taken to Facebook to confirm the dreaded news: “Today is the day my Mom left us. She passed away this morning peacefully.”

As news cameras and well-wishers descended on their Alberton home, Lorraine would sum up her mother’s life with a simple but loaded phrase: “She lived a life of tragedies. To be able to die peacefully, she did everything her way.”

Tragedy entered the story of Klaasen’s life very early. Being born in 1931, into a South Africa making its transition from colonialism to apartheid, meant that she was going to deal with an existence of struggle.

Born in Sophiatown, to a father who scratched out a living as a shoemaker and a mother who was a domestic worker, launched the singer into the world as a girl of the lower working class who was black in a racist country.

She discovered her capacity and love of singing in her family church as a young girl. It’s a talent that was made all the more promising by the fact of her beauty and the possibilities provided by the unfolding cultural renaissance taking shape in Sophiatown at the time. The scene was alive.
The Drum writers were articulating a literary equivalent to the music. Stars such as Louisa Emmanuel, Thoko Thomo and her group the Lo Six, as well as “blues queen” Emily Kwenane, were paving the way for young black singers like Klaasen.

Sis Peggy’s shebeen and Back of the Moon, with their tragicomic mix of binge drinkers and police raids, provided perennial drinking holes. This is the era of the Harlem Swingers, the Manhattan Brothers and similar male-led bands.

Klaasen was unimpressed with the almost exclusive dominance enjoyed by these “boy bands”. In a kind of feminist intervention, she formed all-female vocal quartet the Quad Sisters. They were a hit. In 1952 their song Carolina Wam was all the rage. It confirmed her as a legitimate star. In fact, Klaasen’s group paved the way for the young Miriam Makeba and her girl group, the Skylarks.

Klaasen’s rising star saw her work with Alfred Herbert’s African Jazz and Variety on a number of shows. In 1961 she would form part of the London cast of King Kong, the iconic musical theatre production that was a lifeline to many pioneers of South African music.

Devised by Todd Matshikiza and Harry Bloom, the production launched many of the era’s stars as international performers, including Makeba and Dolly Rathebe.

In 1977, tragedy struck. The pretty star was attacked with acid. The popular explanation was that “a rival hired thugs to assault the singer”. The assault put her in hospital for about a year and gave her the lifelong scars on her face.

It was a violent incident that could have ended her public life as an entertainer. It didn’t. Klaasen’s resilient spirit carried her through. She recovered and kept on singing.

This kind of violence would have been part of her life from the start. To be a singer in Sophiatown, for instance, meant that, more often than not, the young Klaasen would perform for gangs and thugs as her primary patrons at shebeens, clubs and halls.

It’s a point that was often made by Klaasen’s late friend, Makeba. She spoke of how the gang leaders often wanted to claim the prettiest girl in the house for themselves. As performing stars, they had to be good-looking and were hence on the gangsters’ radar. So, as young beauties, they had to live with the violence of unwanted male attention, advances that they turned down at the risk of physical harm.

The thug-infested culture is central to understanding Klaasen’s mystique. The fast talking, the performative machismo and the no-nonsense tough-girl bravado are all Sophiatown pantsula grammar. They informed even her styling and treatment of songs. The staccato rolled off her tongue like the rhythm of a tsotsi’s knife stab. She even used the pinkie-finger gesture for emphasis.

The importance of Sophiatown to Klaasen’s artistic and personal identity is legendary. The then government’s decision to pass the Natives Resettlement Act of 1954, which rezoned Sophiatown as a whites-only area, gave rise to a pain she testified to every time she went on stage. She shared the nostalgia with former president Nelson Mandela, who declared her his favourite singer. Klaasen was often called on to perform at his parties.

Her song Sophiatown is perhaps the greatest musical ode to that era and place. The earlier versions of the song find Klaasen in fine form. The velvet-smooth contralto, the easy swing and the finger-snapping syncopation are carried by the real melancholy of the song. The story of broken lives and homes snuffed out by a brutal state is sung with acute sensitivity.

But Klaasen also had a deep capacity for humour, which she deployed with impish licence in her music. In a recent interview, lifelong friend Abigail Kubeka waxed lyrical about Klaasen’s devil-may-care approach to performance. “Thandie would at times not even bother to learn the words to a song. She would just scat and invent her own lyrics.”

But part of the tragedy of Klaasen’s life is that she went on singing even past her capacity to do so. There’s a video clip of her singing at an African Musicians Against HIV/Aids event in Botshabelo, Bloemfontein. She did an a cappella take on My Way, the pop song made popular and jazzed up by Frank Sinatra.

Already in her 80s, Klaasen struggles to carry the song as she would have in her glorious youth. The notes begin with promising intensity and a defiant will to win; however, as her voice lilts with the melody, age and a worn body fail her.

It’s a scene that has played out many times before in the lives of greats in the winter of their years, like Miles Davis’s flopping trumpet lines in his late 80s or latter-day Billie Holiday as she succumbed to drug use and years of hard living.

Klaasen stands with a mic in hand in a visibly hot and humid tent in dusty Botshabelo. Her grey wig blankets a face that is resisting wrinkles thanks to an identity-marking scar. “I did it … and I’ll keep doing it my way,” she sings.

The famous graceful contralto is no more. Her scatting lacks the vitality of the pantsula verve that made her a name. She gasps, throws in some tsotsitaal to survive the song she sang so many times before with ease. The crowd claps in sympathetic cheer, knowing little of her inner struggle.

A few months afterwards, Klaasen would be hospitalised, suffer a stroke and then die.
The music, the memories and the accolades, like the Order of the Baobab in gold that she received in 2006, are all that remains.

IOL

Luthuli’s daughter calls for probe into his death

POLITICS / 27 November 2016, 11:41am

LUNGANI ZUNGU

Picture: BONGANI MBATHA

Durban - Albertina Luthuli, eldest daughter of Chief Albert Luthuli, Africa’s first Nobel Peace Prize laureate has called for a fresh probe of her father’s death.

Luthuli, former ANC president, died in 1967. It was documented that he died when he was struck by a train in Groutville, where he lived.

But his daughter disputes this. On the brink of tears, she, said: “The report of my father’s death is completely misleading because it’s just not factual. It says that my father was hit by a train because he could not hear. This is just not true. It makes no sense of the whole thing that he couldn’t hear the train.”

And while she admitted her father had an eye operation, Luthuli said it was not true that he could not see the train.

She said her father was “extremely” vigilant.

“Ubaba was so careful about safety that he would spend more time attending to safety to the extent that my mother would start complaining.”

She said there was evidence he could hear and see.

“Now we have had some people who have come up with all things which are untrue.”

Luthuli was speaking at the Chief Albert Luthuli Memorial Lecture on Saturday at the University of KwaZulu-Natal, Westville campus.

She said her father died during the “darkness of apartheid” and the investigation was not fair. “The district surgeon who conducted the post-mortem was part of the system so there was no way he could go against them.”

Luthuli, who is also part of the ANC veterans who are calling for President Jacob Zuma to step down, said the family believed there was a conspiracy to get rid of her father, at the time.

“Because he had become a nuisance to the regime. It’s recorded that they tried many ways of putting him out while he was alive so that he should not have a voice in the affairs of the country, but they failed.”

Despite this, Luthuli said high-ranking individuals, including senator Robert Kennedy, were able to visit her father in Groutville.

“Now there was a powerful person and they could not stop him. As far as I’m concerned he (Luthuli) was buried alive because he was not allowed to go anywhere.”

She said there were “intense attempts” by the apartheid government to silence her father while he was alive.

“When they got the opportunity to do that, there was nothing that could stop them.”

Luthuli had previously asked local authorities to reopen investigations into the case.

A mission-educated teacher, Luthuli was one of a few tribal chiefs to be elected by his followers in 1936, parting with hereditary tradition.

He was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1960 for his efforts to overthrow apartheid, for which he was repeatedly banned in the 1950s and eventually jailed in 1960.

Among those present on Saturday were Public Protector Busisiwe Mkhwebane, Minister in the Presidency, Jeff Radebe and Wally Serote, an ANC stalwart.

Sunday Tribune