The Illuminati Own Up

In an earth-shattering exclusive, representatives of shadowy global power-broking elite The Illuminati have spoken out about their top-secret power cult.

In a no-holds-barred interview, 49th-degree freemason the reverend monsignor Adolf Pius XVI Bush has taken responsiblity for every pogrom since the Renaissance, both World Wars, the sub-prime mortgage crisis and the whole sordid, funny-handshake, old-buddy-old-pal cronyism that has prevented most people from becoming millionaires and chairmen of their kids' PTA.

Pius said that with people becoming more aware of esoteric cults and secret societies these days, most people already knew about the existence of their supposedly top-secret organisation, which has been the invisible all-seeing-eye, freemasony, black devil cult controlling our society since forever.

Their cover now pretty well blown by recent paranoid sensationalist movies like Conspiracy Theory, The Game and The Da Vinci Code, as well as by every second poncy, new-agey revisionist author and most people who've taken too many hallucinogens, the Illuminati have decided to own up.

"The fact that everybody knows that it's actually us who run society by holding satanic rituals and mind-controlling world leaders makes it rather pointless for the Illuminati to pretend we're a secret society," said a statement faxed to us with a picture of the pyramids, something in Latin and a drawing of Mitt Romney on it.

"With this in mind, the Illuminati have decided to scale down our social engineering activities and move into the formal sector. We will be opening the first of our chain of All-Seeing I-Cafes in August.

"Other forthcoming attractions from the new publicity-hungry Illuminati are the marketing of a handy home satanism kit and a virtual internet tour of the chamber of knowledge hidden below the hindquarters of the Sphynx, which we've known about for years but have only now decided to exploit commercially."

Signing off, Pope Adolf said, "In future, society will have to govern itself and organise its own wars, mind control, abductions and fourth-dimension channelling. We believe our absence will be sorely felt."

the Illuminati's business plans received a temporary setback when their lawyers received a civil claim for 200 000 000 tons of gold from South and Central America as compensation for the Spanish Conquest. Also pending is litigation from the Middle East arising from the Crusades and everywhere that ever got colonised by anyone ever.

'Amper se ek poes!'

By Haai van der Skyf

If you use the "poes" all the time and are continually shunned and made to feel guilty about it, there may be hope for you. Like don't feel too poes about it.

The People's Organisation for Endemic Swearwords (POES) has launched a campaign to destigmatise what is an inalienable part of our linguistic heritage and is hardly ever used to refer to women's genitals.

Poes can be used as a noun: "That oke's a bit of a poes. Always bumming smokes." or: I've got three bucks left for the rest of the month. I'm gonna see my poes financially." As an intransitive verb: "Was it raining? My broe, it was poesing down." Transitive verb: "I walked into the edge of the couch and poesed myself a swak shot on the shin. Eina poes." A bit of an ejaculation usage at the end there too.

As an adjective: "Bust drunken driving? Poes one." As an adverb: "Wear a jersey. It's poes cold outside." or: "Don't touch the stove. It's poes hot." And so on.

The irrational stigmatisation of certain words in our language is just another example of prescriptivist, Received Pronunciation, funny-handshake, Oxford don, BBC English elitism. It makes about as much sense as a genocide campaign against a plant.

So help reclaim power over the lexicon from the grassroots. Say poes. Join POES. Hell, be a poes.

Only joking about that last one, though. It's never nice to be a poes.

First published in Skyf! magazine

The 11 worst people to catch you wanking

11 Your mom
10 The housekeeper
9 Your boss
8 A potential girlfriend
7 An actual girlfriend
6 Your girlfriend's dad, in the pantry at a family braaivleis
5 The police
4 A woman with an afro in the taxi next to you at the traffic lights corner Bompas and Oxford, whom you bump into sometimes at Kitcheners.
3 Gareth Cliff
2 Deborah Patta
1 Chuck Norris

Ah! Zanexhoba!

"Ah! Zanexhoba!"

"Zanexhoba!" The crowd of guests respond! Hail to the king! Hail Zanexhoba! Here present, at home in his kingdom! The land of amaMpondomise.

The king himself sits serene on the podium, calmly resplendent in his embroidered robes of raw cotton, a crown of animal skin upon his head. He wears a pair of dark glasses and wields a scepter of polished, blonde wood.

We are here to pay tribute to Bhuti Magida on the occasion of the opening of his homestead. We have crossed the Maluti mountains, crossed the frozen Barclay Pass to get here, but eminent guests have come from across the region.

Indeed, nine kings are present. Ah, Zanokhanyo! Ah, Zwelixolile! Ah, Zanomvuso! Ah, Dalubuhle! Ah, Gwebindlala! Ah, Zwelobusi! Ah, Bhatobele!

The Qadi clan convenes to pay tribute to their brother. The speeches begin at noon. The imbongi praises the noble bloodline of maQadi. The kings are introduced by their praise singers, and they in turn outline the values of the community, which are in turn manifest in the building of this house, by Magida, who grew up just over the hill, on the south side of the sharp pinnacle of Tsolo mountain.

"I have worked as a traditional healer since 1974," screams a lady speaker in yellow traditional dress. "In Eliot! I have never stood back for a man."

Family, community and mutual support are emphasized, as the temperature in the marqee rises. Outside, in the kraal, men chop the limbs of a freshly slaughtered cow, and cleave the flesh from the bones with their Okapi knives. The meat is salted and boiled in enormous metal pots. Or blackened over naked flames. Soutvleis. In the rondawel behind the homestead, women prepare umqombothi.

A cultural group of barebreasted virgins sings the songs of affirmation, dancing and whistling to the beat of the cowhide drum. Doe-doef, doe-doef, doe-doef, doe-doef.

As Dr Luyenge prepares to take the stage, there's a commotion outside. The speeches are suspended as Mr Magida's gift is presented. A bull, specially dressed for the occasion, and donated from his parents' kraal as umgido, a gift to mark the ceremony.

Led into the marqee by the nose, the bull is wearing a duvet cover, a dress and a scarf. Two oranges are impaled on its horns. A bouquet of yellow flowers is perched daintily on its head.

As the speeches stop, the guests crowd forward to get a glimpse of the gift. The band breaks into song and the people dance around Magida's gift. The lady from Eliot dances forward and flicks the bull with her scarf.

Wide-eyed children crowd around the bull's hindquarters. A forest of hands surrounds the animal, brandishing cameraphones.

The bull remains stoic. A man in a wig holds the bull by a rope. Soon there will be dancing and umqombothi. The band will play. There will be horse races. More speeches, and singing throughout, as the sun sets behind the Maluti mountains, here at the homestead of Buthi Magida of AmaQadi in the land of amaMpondomise.

7FT Soundsystem meets Fletcher!

Our old mate Fletcher out of African Dope is back with more dub deeper than a submarine in philosophy class. It's a collab with 7ft soundsystem and you can download it. Just click "Download", mos. Our favourite is this one featuring samples of George W Bush talking kak. The blurb tunes this:


"two of africa’s heavyweight dub champions take a once in a life-time adventure into the deepest realms of dub. follow these two cape town audio-nauts on their thrilling escapade of spliffs and blips, as they journey from the subsonic worlds to the land of psychedelic space echoes. fasten your sub and enjoy the ride.


But we tune this: we rate Fletcher the greatest producer in South Africa, ever since he came out with that iconic, Sama-winning dnb classic Acid Made Me Do It in the Nineties, with collaborator Roach as Krushed & Sorted in the Nineties we've known it. As a live DJ he'll blow your mind, and his original materital is some next-level, proper stuff that sees him playing worldwide on the breaks n bass beats scene. He's worked with Waddie Jones when he was still Waddie Jones, produced comp albums featuring the entire Cape Town ragga community, built African Dope into a globally respected label, but kept the fans guessing every step of the way.


7FT Soundsystem are another Cape Town-based production crew on a dub, reggae electronic pluck . They put out the magnificently named God Shuffles His Beat album in 2009. They describe their sound as "liquid, electronic reggae".


This track is off a release on a label called BomBaada. For more info, purchases and further downloads, click it. 


Here's another Fletcher classic...

Oh no! It's a guy on a buffalo!

Guess what? I'm on a buffalo! Whether you're a bear or an Indian, better watch what you're doin' don't mess with the guy on a buffalo!

Borderline short! Ha!

I had a recent exchange with a few ladies outside Kitcheners Bar in Braamfontein. In between grooving to Kid Fonque and waiting for Blk Jks to start already, we began comparing heights. Anele believed she was the tallest person in our group. I had to disabuse her of that notion in the time-honoured way. We took off our shoes and stood back to back.

As I thought. I am a good ten centimetres tallers than Anele. But it was Nomfundo's parting shot that really got to me: "Okay, you're taller than Anele. But as far as white boys go, you're borderline short."


Borderline short! I'm 1,76m tall! Shortness does not sit well with the male human. If I'm short, then Usher's short. Then Brad Pitt is short. Flippin' Zac Efron is short!

I mean, I know I'm not tall! My height has never been one of my distinguishing features. But my  shortness has never been either! 

I was gonna clear this up quick-quick. First thing the next morning I was on the multipipe, googling stuff. According to the South African Department of Health survey of 1998, the height of the average South African male is 1,69m. For women, it's 1,59m. So that puts me, and my girl Anele safely in the realm of "quite tall for a South African. Fact is, though, South Africans are a rather short nation.

According to this one table I found, average male heights are greater than ours in most countries in the world. The odd exceptions are to be found in Asia and South America. But we're truly overshadowed by countries like The Netherlands, where men average 1,837m in height. Dutch women come in at 1,667m. Germans are similarly tall, Norwegians too, and Czechs as well, but the region with the tallest people on earth is the Dinaric Alps in the former Yugoslavia. Here men average 1,856m in height. That's 6'1" – on average! Their women (1,71m) are taller than our men!

Other tall populations are the Nilotic people of Sudan and Polynesian populations in Tonga and Samoa. These genetic trends can be attributed to centuries of taller, more muscular warriors  having their pick the breeding-age females, or being favoured with the attentions of the females who were themselves the offspring of older warrior kings.

The chief determinant of human height is genetics, but environmental effects like nutrition and local health care for mothers and children also play a role. The amount that genetics affects height varies according to population groups. Among white people, height has an 80% heritability. In developing countries the heritability is less. In China and West Africa, height heritability is around 65%. In the words of molecular biologist Dr Chao-Qiang Lai in The Scientific American, "When a given environment maximizes the genetic potential of a population for a given trait, this population tends to have a higher heritability for that trait, and vice versa."

So for instance, the Nilotic populations, which in the Fifties were found to be taller, are today relatively less so. Dinka males in the Fifties measured an average of 1,83m in a study by Roberts and Bainbridge  But a study of Sudanese refugees published in 1995 found them to average 1,759m in height. That's the same as me. And according to the ladies of Kitcheners, I'm not even tall!

But I'm a white South African of colonial descent. Interestingly, when my British descendents arrived in SA during the 1800s, the average height of an English man was below 1,68m. A century and a half later, SA white male average heights in the 1998 survey were 1,77m. In the UK they were 1,744m. So, given the same genetic heritage, white people have grown taller in South African than have those who remained in Britain. Probably due to all that braaiing.

And yes. It turns out I am of slightly below average height for my population group. If you want to be picky about it. Borderline short for a whiteboy. A lot of good all that research did me.

Two pieces of cake

So this blackface cake controversy. When I heard, via the always aware @sa_poptart (aka Charl Blignault) on Twitter that the initial pic of the Swedish culture minster Lena Adelsohn Liljeroth cutting the cake was part of an installation art performance, my opinion of it changed. 

When I first saw the image, I desperately wanted to know the back story, the context. The very flagrance of it, the fact that all the viewers were so blatantly enjoying themselves, without a hint of guilt, implied there was more to it. Surely nobody could be so racist without any sign of hate, or at the very least guilt?

Blackface is code for the most blatant stereotyping of black people. Casting them as black-faced, fat-lipped minstrels, good only for the entertainment of the master. Black people are hereby reduced to charicatures, their generalised talents and attributes put on display for the enjoyment and physical inspection of the white man.

Blackface minstrel shows were the early, clumsy and insensitive attempts by white artists to appropriate African-American culture. They were also a racist form of poking fun and snearing at a culture they felt severely threatened by. In fact the Jim Crow Laws, the American version of apartheid laws, were named after an early blackface minstrel song, Jump Jim Crow, from 1828.

So blackface is instrumental in the dehumanising of Africans and reducing them to stereotypes. As a white person I can only blindly grasp at the true meaning of this, but I do feel a sense of outrage and sadness when I see such images.

The artist responsible for the blackface cake installation, African-Swede Makode Linde, now says the point of the installation was to draw attention to a simliar stereotyping of women's oppression as African-based female circumcision, whereas in fact female oppression takes several forms and is present worldwide. He is making a comment against the simplifying of the racist problem, at a time when racism is practised in far more subtle ways.




His comments in his own words are one way to try to gain an understanding of his aims, but as a work of art, I believe it should stand alone, and its impact should be derived from the viewer's experience of it. For me commentary, even artists's second-language commentary, is superfluous. Even if the message might be confusing, mysterious, debatable or controversial, the fact that a piece induces people to think and invites discussion shows it has succeeded.




That that discussion has gone global illustrates the success of the artwork. Of course, in this dissemination of the piece, it is every time taken further out of its context. Everyone spreading the stills or video of the piece feels compelled to add editorialise about it – as indeed I have. Unfortunately, since it is performance art, we can never completely experience the piece exactly as it was delivered, in its original context. It's a bit like trying to review of a play or a hip-hop show based on some stills and a cellphone video taken by someone in the audience.

The controversy says as much about social media as it does about art media. We are really talking about two pieces. One a provocative, live-art performance piece to mark the 75th World Art Day at Sweden's Moderna Museet, the other a viral, interpretation of it, morphing and snowballing across cyberspace, taking on the attitudes of almost everyone who forwards it and becoming a focal point for all of our ideas about racism, art and the Swedish culture ministry.

As Linde points out, a lot of the responses have been shallow, amounting to "This is racist and your art is shit". Blackface was certainly racist in 1828, it was racist in 1900, and it was racist in 1978, when minstrel shows finally went out of fashion. But is it still racist today, when it is used generally satirically, and in this case by a black artist, to comment on subtle racism and the ongoing typecasting of Africans?

Your opinion on that is your own, but if you feel moved to express it, then the piece and the attendant social-media hype around it will have achieved something.

How to meet a woman

The below is some advice I found on a thread on the Reddit sex feed. The excellent advice was posted by an older guy named Prolapsed Pinealin response to some poor dude calling himself  libidothrowaway73, who is still a virgin at 23. He is considering just posting on a hook-up site to get that big V off his back.  

23, m, virgin, I don't think I'm that bad looking, but if I lost a little more weight I'd be just fine in the dating world, but I haven't really had any luck. I'd prefer to lose it to someone I can feel comfortable with, but if I can't get anywhere near the end of the year I'll probably hit up a site like Fling/AFF/craigslist and just get it over with so I start feeling a little more comfortable with sex in general.
ProlapsedPineal

Son, if you're 23 I have some words of wisdom for you. I'm almost old enough to be your dad and my boy and I talk pretty regularly about how the world works so I hope you don't take offense to my tone, it's meant to be helpful.

You need very few things at your age to meet a wonderful woman, but it's a quest. Think of it that way. You're Link, or Luke, or some other hero of the story.

First you must unlock the mystery of self confidence. This is like pulling the sword out of the stone. Only the one true king can do it, but you just didn't know that was you the whole time because you were afraid to try.

Read. Good. Books. Not that PUA shit, things that actually make you a better person, not a manipulative jackass. I highly recommend Dale Carnegie's How to Win Friends and Influence People as well as a book called The Magic of Thinking Big. It's been a while, but I remember those as being very helpful to me in life.

Why? Because most people are not socialized well and they are taught to believe they deserve things they don't without effort. You need to know how to be comfortable talking to people. Be genuine. Learn how to not over share. Relax in your own skin. Be genuinely interested in what someone else has to say.

Now that you know how to communicate and you believe you can be awesome, start being awesome.

If you have problems with having a conversation with a woman, maybe you're just fucking boring. Fix that. Change your life. Have some hobbies and passions. Work out for God's sake, make your body look good. Do you like being with attractive women? Well, make yourself attractive. Even if your face is a mess, if you take care of yourself it tells someone else "this is a guy that takes care of himself". It will help you.

Now that you're a good communicator, have healthy self esteem, and have become more physically active we need to talk about your career.

I've had a strong six figure job and a self esteem that was shit and couldn't get a date. I've also been a struggling artist and had to almost literally fight dates off. The big difference was passion. It was all what was going on in my head. If you hate your job reconsider it, maybe you're in survival mode for money but whatever it is you choose to do, you choose it, and you make it something you can be enthusiastic about.

Mind, body, and soul is important, but the impressions are very, very important. Dress well for fucks sake. Everyone in a first world country can clean up. Have at least one outfit that makes you feel good. Polish your shoes, or at least clean your sneakers if that's your thing.

If you're a punk with a mohawk then there's a different but similar thing going on, it boils down to making yourself feel good about you first. If you feel good about yourself you will emanate something that is attractive. You'll be more confident, and that will lead to....

Talk to women in real life. I'm not saying that it's a catch all solution to your problem, but if your goal when talking to women online is to eventually meet them in real life, you could always cheat the system and practice talking to them in the real world too.

Consider this. If you setup an okcupid or whatever account you're saying hi to a woman who has probably been hit on 30 times in the past day. If you go to a nice club, with a haircut and clean clothes and approach a woman, she may have only been talked to by a few guys in the past hour.

The real world is where it's at. Use dating sites to practice having conversations, but its a sucker's game. Go get scared, screw up, grow some confidence, and meet people in the world.

I wish you the best young man, treat her respectfully and go make the old guard proud.

Edit:

If you're a virgin you're body is going to be so excited to have sex the first time you're going to be rubbish. You can't expect to be an expert at something you're just trying for the first time. Make sure you go down on her first. Don't watch porn to learn how to do this, read some of the great posts here about it. Have lots of foreplay. Practice kegel exercises. Be a repeat performer. You'll get the hang of it, but make her pleasure important to you.
ProlapsedPineal

Forensic police recapture lost words of blind author!

A novel by a blind writer! Wouldn’t you love to read something like that?

So would she! No, I’m not being insensitive, I’m about to tell you the heart-warming case of Trish Vickers.

The 58-year-old Ms Vickers, of Lyme Regis, Dorset, recently lost her sight, but bursting with creativity, she decided to write a novel. So she set about penning the book in longhand in an A4 notebook. She devised a complex system of elastic bands to stop her lines going over each other and launched into the tome, to be titled Grannifer’s Legacy.

Tragically, they pen she chose to write her debut novel on, had no ink in it. So the first 26 pages were blank!

She proudly presented the first completed pages to her son Simon when he came to visit, and he had to break the news that her hours spent writing had been a waste of time.

All was lost! Trish could have tried to re-write her intro chapter, but she’d never be able to perfectly evoke the tone and phrase of her first efforts.

Enter the Dorset police department! Approached by the desperate Vickerses, they promised to do all they could to retrieve the lost information, by analysing the indentations left by the Trish’s pen on the black pages of the manuscript.

After five months of painstaking forensic analysis – all conducted as a community service during lunch breaks – the cops had recaptured every word of the lost 26 pages.

Read the original article from The Telegraph here. 

The novel's called Grannifer's Legacy, and now you know the story behind it. They had me at "blind author". 

The revolution will not make you look five pounds thinner!

Iconic poet, politician, musician and our current personal god, Gil Scott Heron died last year, shortly after being released from prison and putting out a couple of cool, spoken word/electro albums. But his best work was during the Seventies, and his best-known poem was The Revolution Will Not Be Televised. The poem-song is packed with cultural references, many peculiar to the time the piece was released. For a guide to some of these, go here.



In case you're still wondering what the poem means, or perhaps you've been pretending to understand it for so long that you forgot that you didn't understand it, here are some tips from a slightly bedraggled-looking Gil...



And simply because we're going through our Gil Scott-Heron phase, here's another bonus Gil poem about Whitey on the moon.

>

EE Cummings reads "Somewhere I have never travelled"

Words like these pretty much put modern lyricists and wordsmiths in their place. Bob Dylan rates him the greatest poet of the twentieth century. Which means a lot. To find out about the man, visit this place. For more of his poetry, try here.

Caine's Arcade!

This tale of an LA kid's cardboard arcade had me sobbing like a baby! Caine Monroy was killing time at his dad's spare parts shop in East LA, when he decided to set up his own games arcade using games he'd invented and made himself out of discarded cardboard boxes.

The arcade – a model of young ingenuity – as a bit of a flop. It attracted not one customer. That was until filmmaker Nirvan Mullick happened by. One doesn't want to spoil your fun. Just watch the video.

An update on this story is that the Caine's Arcade movie got almost two million views on YouTube. Now, according to the Huffington Post, classic pinball machine collector Molly Atkinson was so impressed with Caine's dedication she gave him a real pinball machine. Click the link for the story.

Biggie's first single

Juicy is rated by many as the greatest hip-hop song ever. It's a rags-to-riches rap that contrasts BIG's rough Brooklyn heritage with his sweet current situation. Remarkable that he had achieved that before releasing his first song. But anyway. It also includes some of the coldest lines: "It was all a dream. I used to read Word Up magazine!"; "Time to get paid, blow up like the World Trade."; "Call the crib, same number, same hood. It's all good."; "Now honeys play me close, like butter play toast."; and the slightly iffy "Birthdays was the worst days, now we sip champagne when we thirst-ay!"

Look out for Bad Boy records exec Puff Daddy rocking the cameos. Juicy came out in May 1994. The Notorious BIG was dead within three years.

In the embarrassing words of my ancestor...

I recently read a travel journal written by my great-grandfather on my mother's side, and published in 1906.

Cecil Rhodes: imperialist

I've been aware of the book for a few years now, but been unable to lay hands on it. Thanks to advances in online publishing, the document has been digitally captured, and I was able to download the thing on a site called scribd.com.

For years I thought I was going to have to special request the book on an inter-library loan, but these days you can find long-out-of-print books on any one of half a dozen sites. The book is Briton, Boer And Black: Ten Years Travelling, Trading and Prospecting In South Africa.

Having got all excited about finding this artefact from my family history, my excitement was soon replaced by trepidation. What was in this thing? The title is self-explanatory, it's a tale of derring-do,  gold-prospecting, swashbuckling battles, intrepid journeys and savvy business-dealings in some pretty remote outposts across South Africa.

But what about the politics! Great-gramps was a British imperialist in the heyday of colonial conquest of our subcontinent. One couldn't be sure, but it was likely he had participated in establishing a global empire by exploiting, double-crossing and exterminating indigenous populations worldwide. It was quite possible that 105 years of hindsight would do him no favours. So it was with some nerves that I loaded the document onto my iPad and opened page one.

Shakespeare, Dickens and Twain all showed the bigotry of their time in their work, so there was no reason my grandfather should be immune. Indeed he was not!

The book made harrowing reading for a white liberal who's always fancied himself an enlightened soul. Great gramps peppers his account with k-bombs, n-bombs and paternalism, before segueing incidentally into the most benighted racism one could imagine. At one point a group of BaSotho gun runners await their colleagues, "squatting, like so many baboons". Later on, in what was either present-day Zimbabwe or Zambia he encounters all manner of "savages". He remarks, almost anthropologically that the "blacks always beat about the bush, especially when they have something important to discuss." There's worse too.

The Boers don't escape my tribesman's gimlet eye either. They get off quite lightly though, being found "a very hospitable race, friendly to the English as individuals, especially if one can speak their language."

Disappointed as I was with the tone and the attitudes displayed, there was hope. As I say, the bigotry is almost incidental, unquestioned. In fact, the dealings of the protagonist with the other characters (almost all either black or Dutch) are almost uniformly positive. Even a spell he spends held captive by a tribe in darkest Matabeleland is a fairly polite experience.

We're hardly talking Mein Kampf here. The narrative is not a conscious justification of white supremacy. The right of the British to rule the world and look after its primitive inhabitants is simply taken as a given.

It's just bizarre how the penny never drops. He spends weeks lost in the desert, saved from certain death only by the ingenuity of his black companion, and the guy is paternalistically deemed "a decent sort of fellow". In fact almost all the adventuring is made possible only by the assistance of the locals, who consistently bail the Brits out just when all seems lost. In one case they're lent a new span of oxen when theirs have all died, another time, Mac is given a set of clothes once his kudu-skin suit starts falling off his body. His gun-running exploits see him smartly out-negotiated by a Basotho chief. And the book concludes with the abortive Jameson Raid ending in ignominious failure.

Mac, the protagonist, speaks Dutch and a couple of black languages, and he seems in the process of becoming Africanised, but throughout there is an unquestioning faith in colonialism.

Africa seems to be the white man's playground, as well as a place that must be managed on behalf of its wretched inhabitants.

So ultimately Briton, Boer And Black gives a decent insight into the colonial mindset. There's some brave adventuring as well. Lions are slain, Boer maidens are met, guns are run, deserts, forests and swamps are traversed.

The book was published in 1906 in London by T Sealey Clark, and one can sense that it was tailored to reinforce the attitudes of its intended market. Perhaps in the years following the Boer War, the climate was not quite right to cast aspersions on imperialism.

My discovery of my ancestor's book has helped me get to know a family member who died decades before I was born – warts and all. Mr Handley appears to have a written a couple of other books and those will be the target of my next trawl through the internet, even if I read them with one eye, flinching with embarrassment.

You should have a look too. Quiz your family elders and google the names of your ancestors. That's what I did, and I struck gold. The writings of one's elders give you a level of self-knowledge far deeper than any photographs or family trees.

It's not always pretty, but it does bring the evolution of our cultural values into relief and underline the distance that we've come. It's also an incentive to question the values we take for granted today.

There's no doubt that our current daily scribblings, our tweets, updates, blogs and posts will far outlive us. So it would probably pay to look deep and interrogate our personal values, lest we embarrass our descendants a hundred years from now.

Dude, my mom's gonna kill me!

Dude takes his flame war with the notorious Black Fraction to a new level of real by getting the family guns out of the gun safe, pouring a sneaky whiskey at the liquor cabinet and "bringing it" on Skype. The man is seriously his own worst enemy. "You ain't got no wife beaters, no hair gel..."

History's Greatest Man Perms

Phil Spector

Psycho music producer turned gun-wielding murderer. Apparently his records were good, but no one can actually point one out to you, and he famously cocked up the last Beatles album. A cautionary tale of what happens when you don't have enough people around telling you what a cock you are. And that your hair looks like metre-wide dandelion. Currently serving 19 years in jail for murder and perm crimes.

Snoop Dogg

An exemplary management of marijuana psychosis, always entertaining to watch, even if the hits have been rare. We can name Gin & Juice and Drop It Like It's Hot. Snoop's role as pimp daddy to the planet does authorise him to appear in public looking like this whenever he deems necessary.

Brian May

Guitar god of glory and awesomeness. Plays guitar with a coin. Founder and latter day torch-bearer of rock generals Queen. Commander of the Order of the British Empire. Holder of astrophysics degree. Perm icon of irredeemable impressiveness. Exemplifies one of the key tenets of perm wearing, which is that the perm should be worn without irony. Brian May is not making a tongue-in-cheek comment on his own ridiculousness. He is serious.

Rick James

This man helped perfect the twin arts of funk and perm-rocking. Also earns special mention for crack-smoking, where he makes international Top 5 of all time. Explored the outer limits of cocaine use, which apparently involves kidnapping people and torturing them. Personal theme song is funk anthem Super Freak, the authenticity of which is ensured by his lustrous perm as much as by aforementioned crack smoking and indiscriminate sex-having.

Rene Higuita

Perm icon and inventor of the Scorpion Kick! How can so much talent fit into one body! We know not. All we can do is stand back and marvel at the glory of El Loco, The Madman!

James Brown

Of course the best way to ensure your presence in any perm-crimes listing is to commit a crime while wearing a perm. Here we must mention Hardest Working Man In Show Business James Brown. Arrested here for domestic violence, one feels the alternate charge could have been "looking horrific in general". There is a certain swagger to being arrested in one's dressing gown, though.

Famous guys named Steve Jones

Steve Jones

Handsome X-factor USA judge and former Versace and Esquire model Steve Jones, recently fired from the show for being "irrelevant" and having a Welsh accent. A bit harsh, but then these are the same people who fired goddess of perfection Sheryl Cole for her accent.

Steve Jones

Guitarist, founder and songwriter for seminal British punk band the Sex Pistols. Later went on to host radio show Jonesy's Jukebox on LA radio station 103.1. Apparently amassed 14  criminal convictions as a child and was saved from a life of crime by starting the Pistols. Famously swore on live TV on Bill Grundy's TV show in 1976, helping to secure the Sex Pistols' initial notoriety. Also one of history's greatest perm wearers.

Steve Jones

A Welsh biologist who has done a lot of research into snails and what they can teach us about genetics and biodiversity. Well known for claiming that evolution has stopped because natural selection no longer occurs. Therefore humans are no longer evolving, but are becoming more useless. Find a lecture of his here. But try to have your tea first because it is long.

Steve Jones

And finally... This brought tears to my eyes. And I'm cynical old bastard. British 10 000-metre athlete Steve Jones digs deep on the last lap of this race, under pressure from his rival Jahangir, giving the lie to his supposed inability to kick in the home straight... Som inspirational I might make a #penismotivational about it.

Lost downtown: trying to look as black as possible

As a salaried employee, you can hide from reality for a while, pretend you're better than the rest of the workforce, kid yourself that the rules of society don't apply to you so much.

But the fact is, they do. And sooner or later, you're going to have to pop your own little culture bubble and get down with the people. Face facts that you're a South African citizen. You might have to go to court, you might just have to transfer ownership of your motor vehicle. Maybe you have to go to a police station to ask them to investigate something. Visit someone in hospital. We all get our chance to engage with the South African civil service. In my case, I had to go to the CCMA.

Why is another story, but the experience of physically going there is instructive. Arms of the government seldom locate their offices in Sandhurst. The CCMA ones are in  downtown Jozi, corner of Fox and Eloff, just down from the Carlton Centre.

Now, that's not exactly the ghetto, but you can walk there from there. I know, because that's exactly what I did. Suburban, paranoid ponce that I am, I planned my approach meticulously. Google Maps told me I should come in on the M2, take Joe Slovo and then the Anderson St offramp. I did that, then turned into Kruis street and took the first parking that I saw.

By my calculations I'm three blocks from the CCMA, and I don't want to get into a parking spiral. The walk to the offices goes without incident, if you don't count me nervously clinging to my iPhone like a comfort blanket, and checking the thing every ten metres.

Service at my destination is quick and efficient, and I emerge sooner than I expected, allowing me time to take some snaps of the architecture for my Instagram profile and do a bit of music shopping at Reliable. I get a Mutabaruka, DJ Sbu and Toots & The Maytals.

Then, all chuffed with myself I merrily march off to find my car and head back to the safety of Sandown. In completely the wrong direction.

Looking back at it now, I make a crucial wrong turn on Main. From there, already noticing that something's a bit off, I carry on, expecting to see something familiar. How I thought that I'll never know. I grew up in the suburbs of Port Elizabeth.

You also don't want to look like a lost tourist downtown. So you try look determined and march on. Now I'm in a suburb called Marshalltown, heading east. I'm still on Main Street, but Main Street's not actually that main, if you know what I mean. The high rises cast a gloomy shadow over a few crumbling inner-city blocks. On Frederick Street, some lots have been demolished and cleared completely, overgrown now with weeds. Loafers survey the passing parade. Now I know I'm lost, and by Christ I'm not feeling very main either.

I'm not the only white person in town, but I'm the only one I've seen.

A group of locals heads across the vacant lot on Delvers street towards some flats on the far side. I insinuate myself into the back of their group, so I don't look too isolated. I can feel the fear rising in my throat. I'm heading deeper into unknown territory. I'm going to have to head back too.

On Delvers I find a spaza shop and I dive inside to consult Google Maps. I'm four blocks east of my car. I buy two bananas – R1,50 each – and begin my return journey through the land of my own fear.

Gnawing on my bananas, clutching my little Reliable shopping bag, I try to affect nonchalance, try to look as much like a local as possible. I'm helped by my scruffy attire, my jeans a size too big and my road-runners' tan.

A week ago I ran a night race through these very streets. That was fun, novel, and you felt you had some special dispensation. Not so much this time.

I pass a bearded cardboard collector remonstrating with a couple of street hipsters while lying on the pavement. On Albert Street there's a panel beater's workshop, a place offering "Cash For Scrap" and a darkened shop called Amandla Distributors, which sells "a mixture of life products". A man in a beanie and a blue overall slumps broken on the kerb, head on his arms.

There's a pile of trash on the pavement where a couple of guys chill by a kip-kip stand. I march on towards Kruis, where if my calculations are correct... Yip there it is! Civilisation! Two traffic cops ticketing a parked car. On the same block, my Aveo is right where I left it.

In fact there is a pay-and-display system in place and I've not even noticed the parking attendant, so focused was I on my mission. I'm next in line for a ticket, though, so I hop on board and drive out of there, into Marshall street, then north onto Joe Slovo.

I'm sweating like a beast and rushing on adrenaline. Sheepishly embarrassed at having almost shat down my leg with fear at getting lost. At having been so far out of my environment in my own city.

I pop in the DJ Sbu and the beats kick in. I turn up the aircon to nurse away the chill of fear. The sun shines on my face and DJ Sbu soothes my terror with some beats. Sound Revival Vol. 1. That's my homie.

The ghost of her greatness

Photo: Nomfundo Engler

She enters stage left, a whirl of arms. Conducting the band from the outset. Directing the sound. More voice! More guitar! More band! Can you hear us? Can you hear me? Andy, can we turn me up? Over an uptempo wall of sound devoid of nuance and now seasoned with feedback. The stage manager scurries onstage, fiddles with her bodypack. House lights! Cape Town! South Africa! Make some noise! Are you ready to give it up for unity? Can you hear us?

Welcome to the Lauryn Hill show. It's a half-hour off midnight at the Cape Town International Jazz Festival, this is the headline act, and it's going to be a rough ride.

Things aren't helped by Ms Hill's reputation. If you believed everything you heard, she was going to be tardy, high, mad, unprofessional, rude and ultimately wack. So the audience are here ready for a train wreck, half a foot already out the door in case she does blow. They've already got their money's worth tonight. Hugh Masekela's Makeba tribute, Nouvelle Vague, Marcus Miller, Pharaohe Monch... Zahara could do no wrong before a bewitched fanbase utterly in thrall to her instant folk classics, the statuesque, preposterously sexy Lindiwe Suttle brought a touch of Lady Gaga-esque weirdness to the show... And reggae legends Third World are over on the Basil Manenberg Coetzee stage right now, if Lauryn's glitchy, edgy, shambles of a show tips you over your personal embarrassment threshold.

So the older, sophisticated jazz cats in the crowd are not invested in this set they way they might be for an exclusive Lauryn Hill show. Three songs in, and and those guys are gone. There's clearly been little in the way of soundcheck beforehand, and the band itself, while classy and talented, don't seem to know their singer that well. She's performing to them, as much to us, directing them to come in, play another four bars, take a solo... These guys are earning their bucks tonight. You can almost feel the stress coming off the stage.

We're on edge too. The die-hards who've stuck it out want her to pull it off. Come on, sister! There's still something there, you see. This isn't a fuck-up, it's a challenge! We can get through this! "Let's take a moment," she insists. Let's get this sound right. They never really do, though things improve.

But she is compelling viewing, this chaotic genius dervish of a woman. Stylishly dressed in flowing purple and orange dress, black leather biker jacket, chunky necklace and fedora, she also wields a dark handkerchief like a baton. It's really her! It's Lauryn Hill, five times Grammy winner, seller of 10 million albums, style icon, mother of six,  rapper, singer, actress, activist and one of the greatest artistic talents of all time.

But she's not at her best. As predicted, her voice is rough. Many melody lines she delivers miss both the top and the bottom notes, though her ragged mid-range retains that expressive, righteous, defiant anger. The rhyming is on point, timing still sharp, though the all-together-at-full-blast arrangement drowns her out.

The neo-soul assault segues into a minimalist R&B phase, some harder edged rap, a Marley tribute and a funk workout. At this point it becomes clear how much of a mountain Ms Hill is trying to climb. She's trying to be James Brown, Roberta Flack, Bob Marley and Chuck D in turn. Throw in some Phil Spector-style musical directing and she's got her plate full. Especially when she's leaving the stage for 30 seconds every two songs. Hard to do, harder to watch.

But just towards the end of her two-hour set, just after she fumbles her mic, drops it on the floor, then goes backstage again for a short spell, Lauryn Hill salvages something. There's redemption. I mean who, on god's green earth, can actually do a credible Bob Marley medley, if not Lauryn Hill! Her shattered voice, far from disintegrating, actually improves during the show. Apologising for the technical hassles, she promises to "make this last one count", and does a Doo Wop (That Thing), that kills. It doesn't hurt that we're all on her side, willing her to make it work, and she summons her reserves to nail the vocal performance like how we remember it.

Real artists challenge the audience and themselves, and Lauryn Hill is a challenging artist. This is not easy listening, nor easy to watch. It's uncomfortable, disappointing, infuriating, but compellingly human. The moments of greatness are rare and fleeting, but she's not phoning it in. In this performance, Lauryn Hill is fighting to summon the ghost of her greatness through the haze of distraction, jet lag, lack of rehearsal time and whatever else. And in those last three or four songs, we caught a glimpse of it.

And fuck it. She came, she played the songs we wanted to hear and she played for two hours. People must just be strong. This riding on the edge of a bullet is the currency in which Lauryn Hill trades. Taking the path less travelled, turning her back on success, self-sabotage, coming back from the brink of disaster, this is what she does. This is Lauryn Hill, and that's who we saw Saturday night.