A good week for William Kentridge

A good week for William Kentridge

When William Kentridge was a boy growing up in Joburg, his mother interrogated him about a new friend, Hugo. “What does his mother do?” she asked. “She’s a typist,” he replied of Nadine Gordimer. Kentridge’s appreciation of literature, among his many other talents, has improved vastly since then, to the extent that the International Booker Prize organisers last week invited the “multisensory” South African artist to be a judge for next year’s award. With submissions now open, Kentridge and four fellow judges have a lot of reading to get through over the next few months.

A bad week for Kgosientsho Ramokgopa

Pride, as Kgosientsho “Sputla” Ramokgopa has rediscovered, comes before a fall. Soon after the man with the gazillion-dollar watch was appointed as the first electricity minister, he began an ill-advised few weeks crowing how everything was coming together on the power front. Until it began falling apart again in stage 6 load-shedding. It’s hard not to feel some schadenfreude for the ANC and its lackeys who proclaimed that getting rid of André de Ruyter at Eskom would magically keep the lights from going out all the time.