Latest news with #Thembu
IOL News
18-07-2025
- Entertainment
- IOL News
Madiba is born and ties the knot 80 years later
On this day in history, July 18 In this video grab, Nelson Mandela and his new bride, Graca Machel, leave the wedding venue shortly after their nuptials on this 80th birthday. 64AD The Great Fire of Rome begins. It destroys 70% of the city, but Nero never did fiddle while Rome burned, he did dilly-dally. 1914 Mohandas Gandhi, after successfully leading a passive resistance in this country, leaves Cape Town for India. 1915 The Second Battle of Isonzo, between the Austro-Hungarian and Italian armies, begins. There are 80 000 casualties. 1918 Rholihlahla Mandela is born into the Thembu royal family in Mvezo, Transkei. The world comes to know him as Nelson Mandela. 1925 Adolf Hitler publishes Mein Kampf. The first title was the more catchy Four and a Half Years Against Lies, Stupidity and Cowardice. 1926 Author and journalist Herman Charles Bosman (Herman Malan) shoots and kills his stepbrother, David Russell, during a quarrel. 1936 The Spanish Civil War begins. 1938 Douglas 'Wrong Way' Corrigan arrives in Ireland – he had left New York for California. 1976 Nadia Comăneci becomes the first person in Olympic Games history to score a perfect 10 in gymnastics. 1988 Terrorists kill 9 people on a cruise ship. 1992 A picture of Les Horribles Cernettes (The Horrible CERN Girls – an all-female parody pop group) is taken, it becomes the first photo posted to the World Wide Web. 1997 SA's diminutive 'Baby Jake' Matlala wins the IBA world junior flyweight boxing title. 1996 At the Battle of Mullaitivu, the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam capture a Sri Lankan Army base, killing over 1 200 soldiers. 1998 President Nelson Mandela marries Graça Machel on his 80th birthday. 1999 SA breaststroke swimmer Penny Heyns sets the first two of four world records in two days in southern California. 2018 Elon Musk apologises for calling a British cave diver in Thai rescue, 'pedo guy' after criticism and a fall in Tesla stock price. 2019 The children's songs, Baby Shark and Raining Tacos, are used by the City of West Palm Beach, Florida, to drive away homeless people from the waterfront (presumably everyone else as well). 2019 One of world's earliest mosques, 1 200 years old, is discovered in Israel's Negev Desert. DAILY NEWS
IOL News
27-06-2025
- Entertainment
- IOL News
Pan Africanist artist Simphiwe Dana will enthrall crowds with her 'magic' at the Baxter
Simphiwe Dana at the Playhouse Image: Hugh Mdlalose IF THE Durban leg of her delightful concert over a week ago is anything to go by, loyal fans of music sensation Simphiwe Dana are in for a magical time at the Baxter this weekend. On Friday and Saturday, Dana is in Cape Town to round up her three-city 20th anniversary as a professional musician, her debut album, Zandisile took South Africa by storm in 2004 and gave us some of the most loved and enduring songs ever to come from this land recently. From the time the lights hit the expansive stage of the Opera, the 1224-seater at the Playhouse, Dana made a grand entrance with her anthemic Nkwenkwezi. As fans whistled, ululated, and went absolutely crazy, it was evident the Pan Africanist diva and her forces were in for epic vocal and spiritual libations of joyous music and dazzling lights. Despite a disappointingly average turnout, Dana and her 24-member band led by Tshepo Tsotetsi stuck to the mandate and turned the night into an unforgettable and intimate celebration I would not have wanted to miss for the world. Special guests, Clermont township choir, Red Light Choir added a perfect choral flavour to the evening. 'I am here to thank the people for supporting me all these years,' she said a few hours before the show. The chatty award-winning composer and band leader was determined to let her audience feel her appreciation, a theme she kept going till her final song for the night. 'Sanibonani bantu baKwaZulu!' From her greetings as her band was warming up, and throughout the show, her rapport with her audience was unbreakable. The thunderous response to her question whether anyone of Mpondo and Thembu ancestry was in the house or not was yet another show of her deep love for her cultural roots and their socio-philosophical anchorage. Gifted not just with a golden and versatile voice, Dana draws from a rich traditional South African blues, jazz and Southern African choral source whose Pan Africanist timbre and textures continue to attain depth and harmony of voice. Watching her and hearing her sing can take one to the old rural Transkei hinterlands where girls not only listened to the music of the elders, but also were adept at playing instruments such as umrhubhe-mouth bow. Although unlike her predecessors among them Nofinishi Dywili, Mantombi Matotiyana and Madosini, she does not play umrhubhe, at times her blues vocal style gestures to the echoes of their revered multivocal overtone singing style known as umngqokolo. Inasmuch as she has had a wide range of musical influences including jazz, reggae, hip-hop, gospel, Afro soul and maskandi over the years, as a politically and culturally conscious artist, Dana refuses to imprison her spirited repertoire to narrow prisms of fixed time, space and breadth. Neither does she feel comfortable being compared to her role models among them, iconic Sophiatown divas such as Miriam Makeba, Dorothy Masuku, Sophie Mgcina and Thandi Klaasen, insisting what they accomplished under harsh conditions is simply unrepeatable. Since she came into the scene in 2004 with her album, Zandisile, Dana has been searching for healing, affirming her life and the lives of people who are special to her. In Tribute to maMjoli, she remembers her beloved and stunningly beautiful late mother, Noziphumo maMjoli Dana who died of a Covid-19-related illness in 2021.
Yahoo
29-01-2025
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
Northern Ballet: Three Short Ballets review – star-crossed lovers, a sunny party and a 20th-century classic
You cannot go wrong with a Romeo and Juliet story. This one isn't inspired by Shakespeare but South African writer RL Peteni's 1976 novel Hill of Fools, which has a similar set-up: two warring villages and two lovers caught in between. You can tell from the off this won't end well. Choreographed by Mthuthuzeli November, Fools is set in a South African township – a minimal but effective set has a street lamp, telegraph lines and a corrugated metal wall. The Thembu and Hlubi villagers, represented by a marginally different colour palette for their costumes, at first show a jovial, teasing rivalry. But the union of the central couple (Harris Beattie and Sarah Chun) is too much for the forceful ego of Antoni Cañellas Artigues, the self-styled protector of Chun's character. He eats up the stage with hungry leaps and bristling aggro. Beattie and Chun have you rooting for the loved-up couple, their dances playful and conversational until a kiss that is so intense it sends Chun's quivering leg all the way to the sky. Beattie's dancing is particularly dreamy as he pushes through the space with full-bodied richness, rather than balletic politeness. This might be November's best piece yet in terms of stagecraft. The final dramatic beats could be a little clearer and more powerful, but he shows great mastery in handling the busy crisscrossing of multiple bodies, weaving and dashing and dancing through the space, keeping the energy buzzing. The choreography, fused with influences from ballet, contemporary and South African dance, is full of pattern, rhythm and moreish momentum. Fools is the culmination of a triple bill. Elsewhere there's five minutes of fun from choreographer Kristen McNally in Victory Dance, a trio including guest dancer Joe Powell-Main, who uses a wheelchair, spinning, grinning and brimming with personality. It's jaunty, sunny and clean cut, like a party fuelled by (non-alcoholic) tropical fruit punch. Then there's a 20th-century classic, Rudi van Dantzig's Four Last Songs, set to Richard Strauss. A late 1970s piece, very much of its time: flowy, breezy, beautiful with long lyrical phrases as smooth as the sheen on the men's tights. Despite the presence of Death, we're not talking raw emotion here – it's all perfectly contained in finessed technique, faraway looks and pin-sharp arabesques. The dancers are impressive all round. At the Linbury theatre, Royal Opera House, London, until 31 January
The Guardian
29-01-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
Northern Ballet: Three Short Ballets review – star-crossed lovers, a sunny party and a 20th-century classic
You cannot go wrong with a Romeo and Juliet story. This one isn't inspired by Shakespeare but South African writer RL Peteni's 1976 novel Hill of Fools, which has a similar set-up: two warring villages and two lovers caught in between. You can tell from the off this won't end well. Choreographed by Mthuthuzeli November, Fools is set in a South African township – a minimal but effective set has a street lamp, telegraph lines and a corrugated metal wall. The Thembu and Hlubi villagers, represented by a marginally different colour palette for their costumes, at first show a jovial, teasing rivalry. But the union of the central couple (Harris Beattie and Sarah Chun) is too much for the forceful ego of Antoni Cañellas Artigues, the self-styled protector of Chun's character. He eats up the stage with hungry leaps and bristling aggro. Beattie and Chun have you rooting for the loved-up couple, their dances playful and conversational until a kiss that is so intense it sends Chun's quivering leg all the way to the sky. Beattie's dancing is particularly dreamy as he pushes through the space with full-bodied richness, rather than balletic politeness. This might be November's best piece yet in terms of stagecraft. The final dramatic beats could be a little clearer and more powerful, but he shows great mastery in handling the busy crisscrossing of multiple bodies, weaving and dashing and dancing through the space, keeping the energy buzzing. The choreography, fused with influences from ballet, contemporary and South African dance, is full of pattern, rhythm and moreish momentum. Fools is the culmination of a triple bill. Elsewhere there's five minutes of fun from choreographer Kristen McNally in Victory Dance, a trio including guest dancer Joe Powell-Main, who uses a wheelchair, spinning, grinning and brimming with personality. It's jaunty, sunny and clean cut, like a party fuelled by (non-alcoholic) tropical fruit punch. Then there's a 20th-century classic, Rudi van Dantzig's Four Last Songs, set to Richard Strauss. A late 1970s piece, very much of its time: flowy, breezy, beautiful with long lyrical phrases as smooth as the sheen on the men's tights. Despite the presence of Death, we're not talking raw emotion here – it's all perfectly contained in finessed technique, faraway looks and pin-sharp arabesques. The dancers are impressive all round. At the Linbury theatre, Royal Opera House, London, until 31 January
