• Joseph Hanlon •

Joseph Hanlon is a journalist and author or editor of more than a dozen books, looking at how the international context can be changed to give people in the Global South more power over their own development strategies. His most recent book is Just Give Money to the Poor about cash transfers (child benefit, pension, etc) in South Africa, Namibia and elsewhere. He has been writing about Mozambique since 1978, and has written five books on Mozambique, most recently Do bicycles equal development in Mozambique? Dr Hanlon was Coordinator of the Commonwealth Independent Expert Study on Sanctions Against South Africa (1988-90) and wrote a well known book on apartheid South Africa's destabilization of its neighbours, Beggar Your Neighbours. He was policy officer for the Jubilee 2000 campaign to cancel the unpayable debt of poor countries. He is currently a visiting senior research fellow at the Open University, Milton Keynes, England; visiting senior fellow at the London School of Economics; and an honorary research fellow at the University of Manchester.

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Business Day, 9 April 2013

Writing nurtured in a promised land

Ride the Tortoise author Liesl Jobson was tempted to rework these 'versions of the sordid details' of her life, writes Penny Haw WHEN she was 14 years old, Liesl Jobson and her family moved from Cape Town to New Canaan, Connecticut, for 18 months. Several successful movies, including The Stepford Wives and Revolutionary Road, were made in New Canaan.

It was also where Jobson discovered her love and talent for writing. "While living there, I realised how much I liked to tell people what was happening to me in letters," she says. "I loved writing letters and I loved getting letters.

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Sunday Independent , 7 April 2013

Osler's wry wisdom reveals the wonder of everyday life

THE ZEN tradition in Buddhism is non-verbal; it aims for direct experience. But if anyone can perform the paradoxical feat of using words to get behind words, it is Antony Osler with his plain, anecdotal and lucid style.

His first book, Stoep Zen, was mostly "set" on his Karoo sheep farm-cum Zen retreat, Poplar Grove, and in nearby Colesberg. But it explored what Zen could teach us about drawing the sting and extracting the honey from living in the complex world of the new South Africa.

As a sheep farmer, human rights lawyer and Zen monk, Osler brought a unique, quietly compassionate perspective to bear on our often bitter, sad and angry but also wonderful country - or indeed any country, for which is not in some way bitter-sweet? Zen Dust (Jacana) is structured differently and very loosely around a journey through the dusty back roads from Kimberley to Poplar Grove, but is suffused with the same gentle wisdom.

Mercury, Good Life, 22 March 2013

 Afropolis

SINCE 2007, more than half the world's population has been living in cities. Millions live in metropolises such as New York, Tokyo or London, with their images of flashy high-rise buildings, but how are African metropolises perceived? To answer this question, an exhibition was mounted in Germany in late 2010 and 2011.

It was dubbed Afropolis, and the curators chose five African megacities: Cairo, Lagos, Nairobi, Kinshasa and Joburg. Numerous authors and artists have contributed to the book on an array of topics, from African cinema to Kenyan literature, and from Somali refugees living in Nairobi to the rejuvenation of inner cities.

Sunday Times, 17 March 2013

The troubador who went on a journey to find his own voice

Forty years after it was created, Gerard Sekoto's children's book is about to be published.

Wednesday will mark 20 years since the death of Gerard Sekoto, one ofthe father figures of contemporary art in South Africa. December will mark the centenary of his birth in Botshabelo, Mpumalanga.

The son of a missionary family, Sekoto was a self-taught artist and musician who trained as a teacher. He worked at Khaiso High School in Limpopo for a short time before leaving for Joburg in 1939 to pursue a full-time career as an artist. It was around this time that my late grandmother saw his work exhibited at the Gainsborough Galleries in the city and purchased a number of paintings that I grew up with, always knowing that they were special but not knowing much about the man who painted them.

Art South Africa, 1 March 2013

Dubin is a sociologist based in the USA, but spends much time here and has written a previous book on South African museum culture. In this new work he proceeds from a sociological definition of the culture wars concept given by American James Hunter — that they are conflicts over incompatible worldviews in a society, one tending to orthodoxy and one to progressivism.

These divergent currents manifest themselves in hot-button confrontations across a wide range of social issues, including, but not limited to, what we would normally consider under the rubric of 'culture' — issues of race and sexuality, religion, media freedom, national identity, and others.