By Anita Dangazele

• Pamela Mabini was murdered in her driveway after spending years protecting others from violence and fighting for justice in Gqeberha.

• She gave up a corporate career to help abandoned children and disabled people, showing her commitment to uplifting her community.

One of Gqeberha’s most fearless voices against crime was silenced last Friday when gunmen shot her dead in her own driveway.

Pamela Mabini, 46, who spent years helping victims of violence and abuse, was killed while sitting in her white Chevrolet SS Lumina bakkie outside her home in Kwazakhele township.

For nearly a decade, Mabini was the first person to show up whenever tragedy struck in Nelson Mandela Bay. 

Police are yet to arrest her killers.

She became the voice for those who couldn’t speak for themselves, standing up against criminals who terrorised her community.

The community leader shot to prominence in 2017 when she exposed televangelist Timothy Omotoso’s alleged crimes. 

Using her own money, she helped young women who said they were abused, making sure their stories reached the public through TV shows like Cutting Edge and Special Assignment.

Known for her bravery, Mabini never hesitated to challenge those in power. Last year, she confronted then police minister Bheki Cele, daring him to walk through her neighbourhood without bodyguards to experience the daily fear residents lived with.

“It is a sad day indeed for the community of Gqeberha, not only because of Pamela’s passing but also due to the violent nature of how her life was taken,” said Tony Duba, chair of chairpersons of portfolio committees in the Eastern Cape provincial legislature. 

“I remember the last time I saw her. We met at the bail hearing of the accused in Dr Noqekwa’s murder case.”

President Cyril Ramaphosa praised Mabini’s tireless work. “Pam Mabini stood up for women who experienced gender-based violence and made it her mission to ensure the police and our courts brought perpetrators to justice,” he said.

Mabini’s dedication to helping others led her to leave her corporate job in 2014 to start the Maro Foundation. 

The organisation became a sanctuary for abandoned children and disabled people who had nowhere else to turn.

Her niece Liyana Mabini shared memories of her aunt’s generous spirit. “She was an incredible woman who touched the lives of everyone she met with her kindness, compassion and generosity, and she inspired us all to be better people,” she said.

Police are still hunting for Mabini’s killers. Captain Sandra Janse van Rensburg told Scrolla.Africa on Sunday that no arrests had been made. 

“We are still working on this case. At the moment, nobody has been arrested,” she said.

Dubai has called for swift action. 

“We call on the police to activate a team to track and arrest Pamela’s killers,” Duba said.

President Ramaphosa urged citizens to help catch the killers: “I call on anyone who has information about any criminal activity – including these current cases – to play your role in making SA safer by sharing information with the police or community police forums.”

Pictured above: Slain community activist Pamela Mabini.

Image source: Pamela Maro Mabini/Facebook

By Lucky Vince Pienaar

Loved and lost: Breyten Breytenbach. 16 September 1939 to 24 November 2024

To some, he will be remembered as an activist, to others he will live on eternally in the South African history books as a great writer and poet.

Breytenbach will be remembered as an activist who went to jail in defiance of the apartheid laws, a vocal and energetic opponent of a regime that divided a nation based on colour.

The poet and author went into self-imposed exile and spent most of his life abroad. He secretly came back to South Africa in 1975, but he was soon caught and imprisoned, spending seven years in jail between 1975 and 1982.

After his release,e he went to Paris, France where he became a French citizen and continued his activism.

Because of his history, he is often seen only as an activist, but he will be remembered as a brilliant poet and author.

His first published work, Die Ysterkoei Moet Sweet, appeared in 1964. He had married Yolande Ngo Thi Hoang Lien, from Vietnam in 1962, which already brandished him as an outcast for marrying what was classified as a “non-white” in apartheid South Africa.

In an article by author Anthony Akerman in Daily Maverick under the heading of Breyten Breytenbach — “Prisoner of consciousness, my hero”, the author describes meeting Breytenbach in Paris in the 1970s.

Akerman speaks of a man of humour and good humour.

“He seemed an impossibly romantic figure when he shook my hand and flashed me a broad smile,” Akerman writes.

“We drank café au lait and, in his soft-spoken and engaging manner, Breytenbach asked me about myself.”

Akerman accompanied Breytenbach to Orly Airport.

“I’m not sure what he did at Orly. Perhaps he was delivering or receiving clandestine communication for Okhela, a separate ideological wing of the ANC in exile that would fatefully take him back to South Africa and into prison sooner than I could have imagined,” wrote Akerman.

He said Breytenbach was the first person in exile that he ever met.

“When I asked him if he’d ever go home, he replied: ‘We all go home in the end.’ ”

And now, at 85, Breyten Breytenbach, born on September 16, 1939, in Bonnievale, Western Cape, has passed away in Paris with his wife Yolande by his side.

Leon Breytenbach, the poet’s nephew, confirmed that the writer’s death was “very sudden”.

“He passed away peacefully in Paris (France) at the age of 85 – with his wife Yolande by his side,” Breytenbach’s family said in a statement.

Pictured above: Breyten Breytenbach.

Source: @rfi_literature

By Vince Pienaar

From the day he entered politics until his death on Tuesday, James Selfe managed to avoid petty politics and focus on important issues that mattered to the nation.

In an obituary in Business Day, his friend and colleague Ryan Coetzee wrote: “The authenticity of his attachment to liberal ideals explains how the left never provoked in him a shift to the right, and the right never compelled him to move left.”

Selfe was born in 1955 in Pretoria. At the age of 10, he attended Bishop’s boarding school, where “the casual brutality of the place toughened and wounded him in equal measure but nurtured in him an interest in politics”.

He joined the Progressive Party in 1973. He studied politics at the University of Cape Town and, in 1978, filled a vacancy in the party’s research department.

In 43 years in politics, he remained a member of what later became the Democratic Alliance, working in various positions and committing himself to reforms in the prison system and the well-being and rehabilitation of those who had broken the law.

He served as the shadow minister of correctional services in Parliament and was a member of Parliament’s portfolio committee on correctional services from 1994 until ill health forced him into retirement.

Selfe will be remembered for prosecuting the DA’s “lawfare” strategy, which focused on protecting individual rights and building a democratic state.

He was involved in the “Spy Tapes” case, which paved the way for the prosecution of Jacob Zuma on corruption charges and the setting aside of Menzi Simelane’s appointment as head of the National Prosecuting Authority.

Selfe is survived by his wife, Sheila, and three daughters.

He died on Tuesday at the age of 68 after losing his battle with a longstanding illness.

Pictured above: James Selfe. 

Image source: Herman Mashaba/X

By Everson Luhanga

Dingaan Bongane Thobela was a master in the square ring, where he achieved many successes and titles, but his greatest achievements lay outside the ropes. If there was a title for being a human being, he would have been a world champion.

The year of 1966, the year he was born, could not have been a worse time for a child to come into apartheid South Africa. He was ten at the time of the Youth Uprising of ’76 in Soweto, yet he never adopted the handy mantle of hatred, so easily accessible in the townships in those terrible times.

Instead he became a boxer. A talented fighter who won three world titles, including the WBC Super Middleweight title, which he won in 2000, aged 36.  

Yet, it’s no surprise that the tributes that are streaming in, speak about the man as much as the record.

Jan Bergman, also a world champion, spoke about his sparring partner.

“In old times when I turned pro, he helped me a lot. He was a strong person,” he told Sifiso Ramara of the SABC.

The famous Brian Mitchell said: “Dingaan was legendary. He was a great guy outside the ring as well. When I retired, Dingaan was still fighting. I took him to some fights in America and we became good friends.”

‘The Rose of Soweto’ had been unwell recently.

His childhood friend Eddie Mutungutungu confirmed the 57-year-old World Champion was found dead at his home in Mayfair, Johannesburg after several attempts to contact him were unsuccessful.

“He was strangely unavailable on his mobile, and his family, accompanied by police, managed to gain access to his home and found he had passed on,” Mutungutungu told Sowetan.

Thobela couldn’t attend the Boxing SA symposium at the Arena Holdings offices in Parktown last Friday due to ill health.

Just two weeks ago, Joseph Makaringe – the former SA welterweight champion – passed away after a short illness.

Pictured above: The late, great Dingaan Thobela.

Source: Lucky Morajane

By Zukile Majova
Political Editor

LOVED AND LOST: Prince Mangosuthu Buthelezi (27 August 1928 – 9 September 2023).

South Africans are split down the middle on how to mourn the death of Inkatha Freedom Party founder Mangosuthu Buthelezi.

Considering that Buthelezi was a central figure in the violence in KwaZulu-Natal of the 80s and 90s in which over 20,000 black people, mostly civilians, were killed, why then is the nation confused about the role of a dangerous warlord and last defender of apartheid?

Over the course of his life, Buthelezi did unspeakable things, including driving the so-called black-on-black violence that nearly undermined Nelson Mandela’s effort to negotiate a democratic breakthrough in the run up to 1994.

His role as the last obstacle to the freedom and the liberation of South Africa remains a dark stain on his legacy.

The New York Times captures his role when it refers to him as a “Zulu nationalist who positioned himself as Nelson Mandela’s most powerful Black rival in South Africa’s tortuous transformation from a white segregationist society to a multiracial democracy in the 1990s”.

Firstly, the African people have a profound respect for the dead, informed by the understanding that the dead live on as ancestors and represent the living in the next life.

It is therefore unAfrican to speak ill of the dead. 

Born in the northern KwaZulu-Natal hinterlands of Emahlabathini some 95 years ago, Buthelezi never lost the common touch of his rural upbringing.

Secondly, Buthelezi died as an old man, a beacon of wisdom and a repository of Zulu culture, values and traditions.

He wrote his name onto the hearts of many Zulus and Africans when he led the Zulu nation in mourning the death of Zulu king Goodwill Zwelithini kaBhekuzulu.

No king of the 15 million strong Zulu nation had died in 70 years and such cultural traditions and cleansing ceremonies during the mourning period were lost to many, including modern scholars.

The burial of the king in the early hours of the morning by a select group of men only confused the now highly modernised nation. 

It was Buthelezi who also led the nation in mourning the Regent Queen Mantfombi who died a month after her husband’s death.

Buthelezi also managed what could have been an ugly battle for succession in the Zulu Royal Family and single-handedly helped King Misuzulu to ascend the throne.

And lastly, in a deeply religious country, Buthelezi was a man of the cloth as attested to by The Most Reverend Dr Thabo Makgoba, Archbishop of Cape Town and Metropolitan of the Anglican Church of Southern Africa.

“Apart from being a towering figure in the life of the Zulu nation and South Africa, Prince Buthelezi was a lay minister of our church who often represented his parish, the Diocese of Zululand and ACSA in church forums, and was a member of the Order of Simon of Cyrene. Funeral details will be announced later. May he rest in peace and rise in glory,” said Dr Makgoba.

By Anita Dangazele

LOVED AND LOST: Zahara (1987 – 2023)

The village girl, full of life, with a strong voice and a guitar, has taken her final bow. 

The 36-year-old Bulelwa Mkutukana known as Zahara, passed away on Monday evening after a short illness. Her husband, Mpho Xaba was by her side.

The multi-award-winning singer had been admitted to hospital due to liver complications just a few days after celebrating her 36th birthday two weeks ago. 

Zahara is the fifth child in a family of six children. She grew up in the village of Phumlani outside East London.

Like so many musicians, Zahara began her singing career in the school choir at the age of six. Her talent immediately apparent to anybody who heard her, she began performing as a solo act at her local primary school. By the age of nine, she was asked to join the school’s senior choir because of her powerful voice. 

Throughout her musical journey as a young artist, Zahara continued to be a fundamental part of the church choir, where she was taught by a member to play the piano. 

After high school, she started listening to musicians Tracy Chapman and India Arie who inspired her to play the guitar. Coming from a modest family, she could not afford to go to university and would use her free time to teach herself how to play the guitar.

A year later, her parents were able to raise enough money to send her to college. She began performing her songs in public spaces around East London, where she was spotted by record label executives DJ Sbu and TK Nciza of TS Records.

Zahara broke into the music industry in 2011 with the debut album titled Loliwe. The first issue of the album sold out in just 72 hours and reached double platinum status in less than a month. 

She won the hearts of many Mzansi music lovers, with her well-written songs with crafted narratives that touched souls.

Scores of music lovers on social media shared how many of the songs saw them through the toughest times of their lives.

One social media user wrote: “I was rejected by NSFAS during my first year at university. I sang this whole week about God phendula and after a few days I was funded by a service set without applying. We loved your music #RipZahara”

The Afro-soul singer has won 17 awards. She has recorded six albums which have done well with her last album Nqabayomzi peaking at number 1 on iTunes. 

Popularly known as Spinach, Zahara did not have an easy life. Her departure from TS Records was followed by a whirlwind period of depression and alcohol abuse. She almost lost her home in 2022 but her legion of fans came to her rescue and helped pay off her debt. 

In the end, she found love. She married the love of her life, Mpho Xaba, shortly before she passed on. 

Rest in Power “Spinach”. Your music will live on. 

Pictured above: Zahara. 

Image source: File

By Vince Pienaar

The idea that Raymond Ackerman was a kind and gentle man who only did good deeds is only partially true.

Those who did battle with him across the boardroom table soon realised that they were in a fight for survival. While he always fought within the rules, he certainly used every trick in the book to get what he wanted.

But Raymond Ackerman changed the face of retail in South Africa.

He grew up in the family business that to this day is known as Ackermans. But a family feud saw the young man walking out.

Having nothing to do, he turned his attention to a small group of four supermarkets in Cape Town known as Pick n Pay.

He bought the stores from Jack Goldin in 1967 and in a very short time his business was the yardstick for supermarket excellence, first in Cape Town, and then across the country.

Today, huge supermarkets are part of the landscape, but in 1975 when he built the first hypermarket in Brackenfell, Cape Town it was revolutionary.

When it was announced that he was going to build a monstrously huge hypermarket in Gauteng, many people — and people who should have known better — shook their heads and predicted doom.

Putting it in the middle of nowhere, somewhere between the Johannesburg airport and Boksburg on the East Rand, seemed a little crazy.

It was so crazy that it worked — and how! On opening day, 11 May 1975, the Boksburg Hyper did R1 million turnover. The first store ever to do so.

Always up for a fight, Ackerman was at the forefront of the fight against price-fixing.

The image of him dispensing “cut-price” fuel at the Boksburg Hypermarket made headlines around the country. He lost the battle, of course. The state did not tolerate resistance, but he certainly made his point.

The group’s venture into Australian retailing has never really come off the ground. Plagued by the politics of the time, the venture fell apart. Lately, Pick and Pay is still involved in Australia but not on the scale they had hoped for.

When Ackerman and his wife Wendy retired from the board in 2010, they involved themselves in philanthropic activities.

Retail is a tough environment, and Ackerman was as tough as they come. But he has left an indelible impression on the commercial history of the country.    

Ackerman is survived by his wife Wendy, children Gareth, Kathy, Suzanne and Jonathan, his 12 grandchildren and four great-grandchildren.

Pictured above: Raymond Ackerman

Image source: Twitter

By Vince Pienaar

LOVED AND LOST: Sixto Diaz Rodriguez: (July 10, 1942 – August 8, 2023)

Why did Sixto Rodriguez have such a profound effect on so many young South Africans?

It is not as if he wrote and sang wildly revolutionary songs – we had Die Gereformeerde Blues Band who thumbed their noses at the authorities around the country to do that for us – but he touched a chord.

Seeing the Cold Fact album with its weird cover showing a picture of a man with a hat and dark glasses sitting cross-legged inside a coloured ball, it was like looking at an incredibly precious, somehow scary, object.

Listening to the album was like experiencing something mystical – something other-worldly.

“Sugar Man, won’t you hurry? Cause I’m tired of these scenes.”

The voice comes through the two stereo speakers of a home system, which are less than half the strength of the average sound system on a modern Golf GTi.

But it’s spellbinding. 

The voice, blues-based if a label is required, is no more than ordinary in range but huge in depth. It instantly speaks of a life less than easy. Deep down hard.

And what does it mean? 
Sugar man, you’re the answer
That makes my questions disappear
Sugar man cause I’m weary
Of those double games I hear
What is he talking about?
Silver magic ships you carry
Jumpers, coke, sweet Mary Jane.

Was the song really about searching for a drug dealer, and were jumpers, coke and sweet Mary Jane really slang references to drugs? 

The album Cold Fact came out in 1970, and to say that it tanked in the USA is an understatement. It sank deeper than the Titanic. But then there was some serious competition. 

Janis Joplin was top of her game, singing “Piece of My Heart” all over the States. The Woodstock album had just been released, leaving room for almost nothing else. Jimi Hendrix would soon usurp Eric Clapton’s hallowed if irreverent title of “God” in England. 

And, let’s face it, Cold Fact wasn’t really much more than ordinary. Except in South Africa and Australia. Here the album, suffering and flourishing under the dubious label of achieving “cult status”, was at every single party in Hillbrow, where it was somehow always on the top of the heap of LPs lying next to the record player. 

The SABC in its wisdom had demanded that the “Sugar Man” track be scratched out (literally) and having a copy with that track intact was worth more than gold.

The movie, Searching for Sugar Man, has many moments that bring tears to the eyes. The South African concert featuring a man looking substantially older than his years, performing somehow with a sense of amazement, will do that for you. 

More than that, though, in is that scene in the movie when he seems amazed when his South African pursuers finally locate him and tell him that they have come to fetch him to do a show in South Africa.

“Who, me?” the man who makes a living working with his hands on a construction site seems to say. 

If you haven’t yet, watch the movie, okay? But bring tissues. Come to think of it, if you’ve seen it already, now’s the right time to watch it again. And don’t forget the tissues.

Cheers, Mister Sixto Diaz Rodriguez. You did really good, Sugar Man.

Pictured above: Sixto Diaz Rodriguez

Image source: Twitter

By Zukile Majova
Political Editor

(18 December 1963 – 5 June 2023)

Tributes are pouring in following the death of ANC MP Tina Joemat-Pettersson at the age of 59. She was found deceased at her home.

At the time of her death Joemat-Pettersson was the chairperson of Parliament’s Portfolio Committee on Policing.

A member of the ANC national executive committee, she was held in high esteem by ANC members who nominated her from the floor to contest the position of first deputy secretary-general at the party’s election conference in December 2022.

She lost the contest to Nomvula Mokonyane.

Having evolved from a supporter of Jacob Zuma, she read the winds of change and presented herself as a supporter of President Cyril Ramaphosa.

This saved her political career, with the party’s Integrity Commission clearing her from a charge of bringing the party into disrepute.

This stemmed from a 2019 finding by former public protector Thuli Madonsela who found that, when she was minister of agriculture, forestry, and fisheries (2009 – 2014), Joemat-Pettersson spent over R150,000 to fly her two children and their nanny home from an overseas trip in 2010. 

ANC secretary-general Fikile Mbalula said: “Neither the Zondo Commission, public protector nor the courts have made adverse findings against her. On the strength of this, it was resolved that she is a member in good standing.”

With South Africa already battling a power shortage crisis, Joemat-Pettersson was appointed minister of energy (2014 – 2017) in Zuma’s cabinet.

In that portfolio more trouble followed after the Strategic Fuel Fund (SFF), which reports to the Central Energy Fund, an entity in the Department of Energy, sold 10.3-million barrels of South Africa’s oil reserves for less than the market rate. 

At the time Joemat-Pettersson claimed this had not been a sale but a rotation. The cover-up was exposed in the Western Cape High Court where it was found the SFF sold oil reserves worth over R7 billion to 10 oil traders for R5 billion.

Also during her term as energy minister, the Western Cape High Court intervened to block Joemat-Pettersson’s 9.6 GW of nuclear energy deal with Russia which she had pushed through without it being debated in parliament.

Controversy followed her right to the very end after suspended public protector Busisiwe Mkhwebane’s husband David Skosana opened a case with the Hawks targeting Richard Dyantyi, the chairperson of the parliamentary committee, and ANC MPs Joemat-Pettersson and Pemmy Majodina.

Skosana accused Joemat-Pettersson of trying to extort R600 000 from his family in exchange for the MPs to drop the ongoing probe into Mkhwebane’s fitness to hold office.

The ANC said it was deeply saddened by her death while FF-plus leader Dr Pieter Groenewald said she was not hostile to the views of the opposition as chairperson of the portfolio committee.

ANC spokesperson Mahlengi Bhengu said funeral arrangements would be announced in due course.

Pictured above: Tina Joemat-Pettersson

Picture source: Twitter

By Staff writer

Loved and Lost: Tina Turner (1939-2023)

She was born Anna Mae Bullock, a poor black girl from the rural backwater of Nutbush in Tennessee, USA.

But there was no hiding her talent and in the early ‘60s she teamed up with the man who was to become her husband, Ike Turner, to make loud, raucous and beautiful hits like River Deep, Mountain High — possibly the greatest rock song of all time.

To capture the full impact of one of the most dynamic rockers to grace the stage, this is how the rock writer Nik Cohn in his epic rock and roll history Awopbopaloobop Alopbamboom described a Tina Turner performance at a London club in the ‘60s. 

“She’s a great big woman with long black hair right down her back and a beautiful snarling animal face and a truly cosmic arse. Not pretty but sexual as hell.

“All this time, Ike Turner, her husband, plays guitar behind her and looks mean, a neat little man with a goatee and sad cynical eyes.

“I was standing right under the stage.

“So, Tina started whirling and pounding and screaming, melting by the minute, and suddenly she came thundering down on me like an avalanche, backside first, all that flesh shaking and leaping in my face.

“And I reared back in self-defence, all the front rows did, and then someone fell over and we all immediately collapsed in a heap, struggling and cursing, thrashing about like fish in a bucket.

“When I looked back up again, Tina was still shaking above us, her butt was still exploding, and she looked down on us in triumph.

“So sassy, so smug and evil. She’d used her arse as a bowling ball, us as skittles, and she’d scored a strike.

“Smart woman: her flesh dissolving and her hair all flying and her big man-eater teeth flashing. She ate us all for breakfast.”

Tina and Ike were a chart-topping pair through the ‘60s and early ‘70s. But she broke with him in a highly publicised case of spousal abuse. 

In her 2018 autobiography Turner described Ike’s attempts to control her, economically and psychologically before she was eventually able to leave him.

After the divorce in 1978 she was left with nothing but the rights to her stage name.

Several low years were to follow before she came roaring back to become one of the defining stars of the 1980s, with the album Private Dancer and a number of triumphant world tours.

She retired from touring in 2009.

On Wednesday after a long illness, the Queen of Rock ‘n Roll passed away peacefully at her home in Switzerland. “With her, the world loses a music legend and role model,” her family said in a statement.

And that’s an understatement.