There are two words commonly used in South Africa which I really, really can't stand. The one is the word "comrade". The other one is the word "bokkie".
"Bokkie" is often used in insipid Afrikaans love songs by commercial singers (presumably becau...
I am writing a treatise about my dead cereal dispenser. I know that this may sound like a boring and irrelevant topic, but according to my sources in the ANC, all journalists, columnists and bloggers will, in the near future, be forced to write abou...
I am a science-fiction lover. If this statement does not interest you, read no further; this blog post will mean nothing to you. (It might mean nothing to you anyway, but we’ll get to that later.)
Science fiction is a bit like quiche; people eit...
Why do bad things happen to middle-class people? This is a question which has fascinated philosophers for centuries, or at least since the Masterbond scandal. Aren't middle-class people supposed to be insulated against the harsher realities of life? ...
According to the annual Minority Rights Group report published a few days ago, "religious intolerance is the new racism". What that means, in a nutshell, is that people are no longer hating other people on the grounds of the colour of their skin, but...
There is no such thing as unbiased media, as the thing with my mother-in-law proved. Well, actually, it's not strictly necessary to draw my mother-in-law into this debate: anyone who had the misfortune of watching Sky News after the Germany vs Englan...
When I woke up on the morning of June the 11th, I had a strange premonition, an indefinable feeling of exhilaration and dread.
I glanced at the date on my Blackberry screen and I knew: this date means something important, but what? Where had I se...
The realisation hit me around one o'clock in the morning, as we were jiving to the crazy guitar notes of a hastily assembled jam outfit called "The Albert Frost Trio" in the packed auditorium of the so-called "Club Al Capone" at the KKNK festival las...
Dear Mr Ebrahim Patel,
I heard that you and some of your colleagues are planning a major rethink of our economical system. This is great news! I would like to take part in the Big Economic Debate! Even though I know very little about economics (i...
"No, we haven't seen any lions yet."
The lady from the BBC radio station sat across from me in our lounge, fidgeting with her recording equipment. Her face was serious; perhaps she had not realised I was only joking?
They had driven from Cape ...
Koos Kombuis is an Afrikaans columnist, bilingual author and retired rock musician. In spite of his numerous attempts to settle down and conform, his career has been dogged by controversy ever since he was banned from performing his anti-apartheid songs on several university campuses in 1989.
Born André le Roux du Toit, he rejected his own French roots to change his name in 1990. His first English novel, the feminist allegory Paradise Redecorated (now mercifully out of print), was published shortly afterwards. During the last years of the reign of George W Bush, he almost scored an international hit with a controversial satire The Secret Diary of God, but fundamentalist Christians started an internet petition against it, and numerous bookstore owners in the US refused to stock the book. His latest publication, the autobiographical work Short Drive to Freedom has sparked fierce criticism and even legal threats from disgruntled people in the music industry. Since 2008, the Channel 24 MP3 Hit Parade has been dominated by various remakes of his famous Fokkol Song, which contains at least sixty-nine swear words, (excluding the word "Eskom"), a possible candidate for the Guinness Book of Records.
According to Koos, the happiest and most expressive time of his life was the five minutes he spent illegally in France somewhere around 1993, when he leopard-crawled from the Belgian side past a French border-post to have a crap in a corn field in the country of his forefathers before crawling back to Belgium to find toilet paper.
