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Features
LET THE BRAAI SEASON BEGIN
TO BRAAI, OR NOT TO BRAAI. In every South African respect, the answer is quite simply; to braai. Many a meal has been spent around the coals of a top quality South African flame grill. It is one of those unique occasions that can be shared with anyone at any location, in any weather conditions and always with full expectations. The expectation to share, and share alike, in a great South African tradition. R ...
UNITED WE STAND Rugby
The build-up to the Rugby World Cup final was a phenomenal experience, just observing and taking in what was going on with South Africans worldwide was inspiring. The internet gives us all access to the world and by surfing around on YouTube, Facebook, News24 and a bit of Google here and there, I was astonished at how South Africans stand together and support their country. It’s not based on the fact that w ...
SA FREEDOM DAY CELEBRATIONS
March rolls over and April blinks in the reality of 2009. South African’s start firing up the braai, cracking open a few castles and zone in for the pre-winter swims. Breathing out a relaxing sigh of relief and wrapped in the glory of the Super 14 Rugby, we braise ourselves for the unwritten Autumn Holiday Season.Yes, Holiday Season. April hosts an abundance of public holidays in 2009 and I mean week-day ho ...
SURVIVE THE CRUNCH
If I had £1 for every time I either heard the word ‘Credit Crunch’, then this so-called recession would be the furthest thing from my mind (cos I’ll be sipping pina coladas on my yacht somewhere in the Caribbean)
On average, economic recessions occur once every 7-10 years. And yet, with this ability to predict when the brown stuff will hit the fan, shouldn’t we be less surprised when we find the world in e ...
MARCH FOR YOUR RIGHT TO VOTE
YOU may have received messages or emails urging you to register for a special vote. As you are aware the special vote is presently only available to certain categories of people such as South Africans who are temporarily out of the country: · on holiday;· on a business trip;· on an educational visit;· attending a tertiary institution; or· participating in an international ...
SA GENERAL ELECTIONS 2009
SOUTH AFRICAN GENERAL ELECTIONS 2009
SA POLITICAL PARTIES in the 2009 Elections
The five year cycle is on its end again, and South Africans are looking to the upcoming elections with a new found fervour. The biggest talking point on the local front will be how big the influence of The Congress of the People (COPE), the breakaway party from the African National Congress (ANC) will have on the dominance the ...
ARE YOU DOING YOUR PART
You’ve just flown economy class from Johannesburg to Heathrow. Your new surroundings are so peculiar, but you’re excited. You descend an escalator and seconds later you feel a strange wind on your face as the Piccadilly train arrives. A quarter of an hour later you see London city for the first time. Your focus shifts to two young men who’ve just climbed on the train. You begin to wonder what part of the wo ...
SUMMER TRADITIONS Britain vs SA
Summer in Britain is a great time of year.
You can feel the festivity come alive in your blood as soon as the heat starts to creep past 30°C. Then, talk of concerts, picnics and ball games in the park starts to trickle from the lips of most friends and family you know. For a relatively short period of time, London morphs into a truly European city: a stalwart of civilisation beset by pleasing muggy heat, s ...
LEARN TO SPEAK SEFFRICAN
Learn to speak Seffrican!
Language.
Wikipedia defines language as ‘a system of visual, auditory or tactile symbols of communication and the rules used to manipulate them’. Let’s apply this to South Africa, where there are eleven official languages, incidentally making us the number two in the world for most languages spoken. A census conducted in 2001 named our top four:
• Zulu (23.8%) • Xhosa (17. ...
SOUTH AFRICAN Inventions and Innovations
South Africa throughout its bad and its good times has always produced top inventors, inventions, entrepreneurial geniuses, even an astronaut. It could be our unwillingness to give up, to face up in times of adversity. It could be some of the top schools we have, and the quality of education they serve up. It might even be a strange, cranial chemical reaction caused by the ingestion of biltong...
SA is a u ...
THE GREAT BILTONG Taste Test
Bil (‘rump’) tong (‘strip’ or ‘tongue’) - Dutch origin
Ah biltong...South African cultural icon and one of my best-tasting memories of old. There isn’t a South African alive who can’t recollect images of get-togethers, birthdays, and camping trips where biltong was passed around amongst family members and friends. Consider it in the same light as a sacred Red Indian peace pipe: everyone is expected to t ...
IT WAS ACCEPTABLE at the Time
GROWING UP IN SOUTH AFRICA
I, like many of you, was born in the 80s in sunny South Africa. Though my memories of this period grow dim I still enjoy the odd recollection. Like climbing into the back of my mom’s white Toyota after school, and struggling to look over her shoulder. Either I was just too short, or it was the popularity of shoulder pads during the period that had something to do with it. Infamou ...
ROCKTOBER Saffas who Rock our World
Expat South Africans live all over the world. They are found in the UK, Dubai, Australia, New Zealand, America, as well as South Korea, Japan and Malaysia. They engage in a multitude of professions, from lifting plaster board on London construction sites to working on the interior design of Porsches. They’re commended for being friendly, loyal and hard-working people.
In this issue we’re going to interview ...
MORE THAN JUST A GAME
More Than Just A Game: Football VS Apartheid is a book detailing the lives of political prisoners who were involved in playing soccer on Robben Island. They played completely by the book, followed FIFA guidelines and even gained an honourary induction into FIFA, awarded by Sepp Blatter personally in 2007. Stellio Coutsides sat down with Marvin Close, Chuck Korr and Anthony Suze to find out more.
Anthony, c ...
ADRENALINE JUNKIES SA Takes on the World
Adrenalin is a hormone that causes all kinds of craziness in humankind. It’s a neurotransmitter that initiates the ‘fight or flight’ syndrome, and is closely associated with exciting or stressful situations. It’s a common occurrence in South Africans, especially when you consider our country’s crime, hectic roads and our people’s propensity to get angry if a bowl of biltong gets spilt. But there is a way to ...
A GLOBAL CHRISTMAS DELIGHT
Christmas is truly a global celebration! Although the traditions and foods associated with it vary with climate, culture, country—even calendar—the spirit of the day transcends all such differences. From November onwards, it is impossible to forget that Christmas is coming. Coloured lights decorate many town centres and shops, along with shiny decorations, and artificial snow painted on shop windows. This m ...
MISSION CHRISTMAS WHILE ABROAD
A friend from Amsterdam looks forward to spending time with a South African friend that’s coming over for Christmas, drinking lots of wine to stay warm, ice skating – seeing as this is her first cold Christmas – and just soaking up as much of the Dutch culture over this time as possible.
In Dubai, Jean-Pierre can hardly wait for the office Christmas party. And as this will also be his first Dubai Christmas ...
NEW YEARS RESOLUTIONS
Every year as the sounds of Auld Lang Syne dies out in the midnight hour; the ensuing silence is almost immediately filled with the sound of resolutions being made, and almost without fail, ultimately shattered. From promising to quit smoking, paying of debt, shopping less to the more bizarre resolutions like gaining some weight (didn’t your Mom always tell you that you were skinny?), working less (all work ...
SAFFAS STAND PROUD IN 09
2008 was beyond doubt a tumultuous year for South Africa, from falling stocks and crashing markets, to the resignation of our President, Thabo Mbeki. The Xenophobic riots drew worldwide media attention, and once again our reputation as a forgiving nation and newly-built democracy was tainted.
We should, however, not dwell on our misfortunes as a nation, and instead look forward to the year ahead, which ...
LONELY HEARTS CLUB
It’s the day highly anticipated by those in love, and much dreaded by those who are single. Yes, you guessed it -Valentine’s Day is upon us once again. The day has such an immense hype in the month’s preceding it that singles very often become depressed at the thought of not having a partner to buy them candies, chocolates and flowers. Sometimes the sense of isolation becomes so strong, that many singles te ...
