GRAHAM Dick, the Snapshot category winner last year, wrote about a farmer, a sangoma and a rooster....

JAY Pillay, winner in 2000, wrote about his family’s home in Edendale before the Group Areas Act forced them to move. ...

HAROLD Strachan, winner in 2001, wrote about an unexpected stop for tea and cakes while he was an in-transit prisoner during apartheid....

PAUL Fleischack: 2010 Open category runner-up, wrote a tribute to a special cow....

TOD Collins: Snapshot winner 2007 — wrote about an encounter with a herder in the Drakensberg....

SOME of the papers my mum’s 99- year-old neighbour in Azalea Gardens asked her to sort out were ancient newspaper cuttings. “But this is an amazing story,” said my mum. “Are you still in contact with him?”...

THE waiter placed a delicious bunny chow in front of me and soon the Durban curry smell filled my nostrils and my mouth was filled with saliva. My stomach rumbled in anticipation of what was coming. The fresh white bread looked even more delicious when warm soup fell on the side of the bread like fr...

IN a simple bachelor flat six floors up in Claremont, Cape Town, a young professional policy analyst of Zulu extraction is working on his Masters thesis in housing. It is the first time I have seen him since he moved there from Pietermaritzburg almost a year earlier. We have just come from dinner, w...

THE early winter sunshine curled like smoke into the room where she stood hunched over the table. She moved the cropping angle one inch in, covering his ear. She pulled a face. She wasn’t happy with the crop but it was the only way to fit the photograph on the cover. At the rattle of teacups in the ...

AGATHA Lobokeng first came to me in Durban to do some ironing onApril 25, 1971. By February 1972 she was washing, ironing, cleaning, mending, shopping, cooking and also doing small sewing jobs for me at home. I was then working by day, studying for a degree part-time and I considered her an absolute...

IF my father was the benign titular head of our farm, Khele Langa was its benign dictator. He ruled with a firm belief in nepotism, hiring and firing his relations, promoting and demoting them, rewarding and punishing them, changing their responsibilities and negotiating their pay. It was apparent...

YOU may be 16 years old, but if the year is 1918 and your father is an autocrat, you obey without question. ...

AFTER a decade of being a temporary teacher, I was finally placed as a permanent­ qualified employee of the Department of Education at Grange Primary School in Pietermaritzburg South. It was a privilege to teach in an advantaged school with luxury facilities­, abundant resources and surplus staff. A...

MAN’S lust for gold probably goes back to the dawn of humankind, but the history of gold in Zululand dates back only as far as the 1800s. Towards the end of that century, the exploration for gold had reached fever pitch throughout South Africa, no doubt driven by discoveries of rich deposits and gold-bearing reefs near Barberton and Pilgrim’s Rest, and in particular by the discovery of the Great Reef at Langlaagte in the old Boer Republic in 1886.

IT’S 5.45 am on September 9, 1985. My telephone rings: “Please can you come to Pacsa as quickly as you can. The Special Branch wants to search Pacsa at six o’clock.” The secretary of the small religious NGO sounds distressed, and Peter Kerchhoff, the co- ordinator, is overseas. ...

IT was a humid January morning in 1976 when my father alighted from his bright-yellow VW Beetle and looked out across the hills at the rural, sun- baked valley of Kwandengezi for the first time. ...

THE traffic lights at the intersection of West and Boom streets seemed to be forever stuck on stop. Blazing ­Liquidambar trees mirrored perfectly on my farm bakkie’s bonnet. Mid- morning traffic was likewise pedestrian, just “going nowhere slowly”, a trickle of blurred legs crossing the ­zebra, kic...

DRIVING at the regulation five kilometres an hour, the funeral procession arrived at the cemetery. The family and priest climbed out of the hearse and approached the grave site in the final leg of what had been a sad and, at the same time, surreal journey....

SOME people who read this might know me by my real name, Niel, but to a selected few I am known as Fatboy. That’s right, Fatboy. Sometimes Fatty and if they are really kind just Bigboy. Now I never thought of myself as fat, maybe a little bit overweight in certain areas, but definitely not obese. ...

FROM the back of her cottage, Elena Jennings has a view across George’s much-loved Port Edward golf course. From the front, she has a panorama of the Indian Ocean which brought her here, in fulfilment of an old aunt’s palm reading that her destiny lay over two long ocean journeys....

I WAS having a long discussion with my five-year-old grandson, Justin. Shall we ride the two kilometres or the 10?...

THE Kamberg in the sixties was Wonderland. Hadedas yelled in the high wattle, sunbirds flashed in Sugarbush, white Ngunis royal grazed emerald slopes, and rainbow trout swam in the streams....

SURELY, if it happens that you board a taxi from Retief Street to Azalea, you will pass a place by the side of the road at kwaPata, where a little mound is the monument to Langashona....

I DECIDED during the State of Emergency that I would go to Europe to the First World, where everything was first class. As soon as I had the money, I would escape Natal for a while. Escape its racial tension, the stress of uncomfortable change, the poverty and the violence. I was going home, well ha...

THE late eighties were dark years in South Africa. The country was groaning under the weight of apartheid and its associated ills. We were growing suspicious of everyone and everything, knowing that change was coming; not knowing where it would take us. Yet there was hope. Hope of better things. Hop...

MY story is a story of nostalgia for dying customs and traditions. ...

NOBODY saw him arrive and later nobody could say they saw him go....

IT was a continuing spate of stock thefts that caused my grandfather to call upon the aid of a sangoma or witchdoctor. It was a few years after Granddad had returned from “seeing the Hun off” in German West Africa and then German East Africa, and in rural Natal policemen were thin on the ground, es...

THIS is as I remember it. I am sure that my memory has faltered somewhat over the years; that my story is a little inaccurate in the telling, but such is life. ...

I GET to meet many interesting people in my line of work. All have a story to tell if you have half an ear to listen....

MY celebration for passing my matric was quickly abolished by the fact that my parents could not afford to pay for my tertiary education. Being raised by grandmother alone is very difficult. My parents separated when I was five years old. My mother was unemployed and she didn’t spend much time with ...