See you in January 2012, God-willing.

ON our community calendar there’s what I call a series of “seasons”. And like spring, summer, autumn or winter, they have their moods. One such “season” is Muharram, which marks the beginning of the Islamic year. This is because it is a sacred month in which major events occurred, especially[…]

WE never came across Al-Shabab forces in Mogadishu, but reminders of their presence was everywhere – from the bullet-ridden pasta factory to the IDP camps dotted around the city. Fighters had only been forced out by AMISOM forces a month before, and there were still pockets of resistance. The crump[…]

THE three minute video on YouTube is often out of focus; it pixellates when there is lots of movement. But one thing is clear. Something fishy is afoot in a Cape Town refrigeration plant, where we are shown boxes on an assembly line. When the cameraman zooms in on a[…]

This piece was commissioned by Zig-Zag Magazine for its 35th annniversary edition. I can’t believe that Zig-Zag is 35 years old. That’s a lot of pages. Wasn’t it only yesterday that the mag was pasted up in a garage, and we shot pics in Kodachrome 64? I can still remember[…]

LIKE so many interested in the course of the Russell Tribunal on Palestine, I will be keenly watching the Cape Town leg, which is the third of its hearings on Palestine. With its brief to examine the superiority of international law in solving the Palestinian conflict, those eminent personalities standing[…]

THE Gilad Shalit deal, Shalit’s safe conduct home from Gaza after six years of incarceration in exchange for over 1,000 Palestinian prisoners held in Israeli jails is – without doubt – one of the more fascinating chapters of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict. But it has to be understood in context, something[…]

South African Hajj pilgrims might well be up in arms about the illegal sale of visas and the alleged corruption of certain tour operators, but historically, Hajj rip-offs are as old as the Hajj itself, a sacred Abrahamic ritual. Wherever people have journeyed to Mecca, carrying their precious silver, gold[…]

WHEN I first went to Makkah in the 1980’s I bought a ticket via Thomas Cook – no SAHUC, no agents, no problems. But then things were a lot simpler. The most direct air route to Jeddah was via Nairobi, where you hoped your transit would be brief. We were[…]