The actor takes on a sage-like essence, by being so attuned to the moment that the breakage is soothed and manoeuvred into an unforeseen bend on a road that was otherwise without obstacle. This actor guides the enrapt audience further into the unfolding world, which presents itself to them for the first time.

I recently found myself at a crossroads with regard to the conversation around Black Lives Matter in South Africa’s cricket and rugby spaces. When Makhaya Ntini told his story, my immediate feeling was of empathy and sadness.

In this performance, Miss Ntuli invites us into the deep corridors of her inner self, to witness a personal story of love, displacement, otherness and internal yearning. Like many a sublime artist, the art itself cuts tenfold, dwarfing this narration.

It’s also true that, on the land we have lived on for thousands of years, we can wake up one day, to claims, by settlers, that, it, our land, was “empty land” all along.

Unfortunately, there are way too many Makhayas in our midst – broken souls that were created in the early days after the ‘demise’ of apartheid. Many of us are Nelson Mandela’s sacrificial lambs, who are barbecued daily in the name of reconciliation in South Africa.

A very young and determined migrant Ismail Dajee who landed up in South Africa around 1915, secured leasing space in Jeppe in 1931 at the time when non-whites could not own property and could only lease it due to the group areas act. Nevertheless, Mr Dajee tried breaking the continuity of a ‘whites only’ space and found a loop in a property in Jeppe, making it a shop and residence at the back.

The Ultimate Storytelling Contest is an open call for submissions, granting African Storytellers from across the continent to share their stories with not only the judges of the contest, but to integrate social media by posting a 3 minute video on their Facebook and Twitter timeliness with the hash tags, #UltimateStoryteller, #HSC and #HadithiyaAfrica.

It was with despair, to receive the dreadful news on Monday morning, 6th of July 2020 that South African Professor Ntongela Masilela, had transitioned to the ancestral realm. At the time of his death, it is noteworthy to read that the faculty directory of Pitzer College (an undergraduate liberal Arts and Sciences Institution), in the United States of America (USA) to date still depicts Masilela, as a Professor Emeritus of Creative Studies and World Literature, whose expertise namely included ‘Third World Literature’, ‘Commonwealth Literature’, ‘Central European Literature’, ‘African Literature’, ‘Latin American Literature’, ‘Literary Theory’, ‘Postmodernism’ and ‘Ancient Asian Literature’