Catching Stories, 3,9-Christmas Special
Catching Stories
If we are to replace consumption as the central meaning of Christmas, and of our lives, what should the new centre be? Dianne suggests that South Africa is in fact a good place to try and reach the heart of the Christmas mystery, because of the outsider status of the Holy Family. They were unwelcome migrants, travelling to Bethlehem on the bureaucratic whim of the Roman coloniser.
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Catching Stories, 3.9, Ruark Swanepoel
Catching Stories
Ruark Swanepoel is an engineer who works in Fochville. That is part of his life. The other part is cultivating and combining art and artists. His art company is called 4Ever Odd – @4everodd on Instagram. The October feed on his Instagram is particularly rich, as three of the artists he works have been producing drawings for inktober – take a look to get an idea of what odd art is.
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Catching Stories, 3.8- Part 2 Bishop Patricia Fresen
Catching Stories
The light of the ordination makes the patterns that inevitably led there, very clear. Patricia served the Church and her people as a Dominican teaching sister for 44 years. In this second podcast, the preparation is completed, and her ordination takes place.
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Catching Stories- 3.7- Bishop Patricia Fresen
Catching Stories
For Patricia, the easy route would have been to take a side step into a denomination which allows the ordination of women. But Patricia is Catholic in her DNA: this is the faith she knows, loves, believes in. It is the faith she grew up with and will die in. So she took the lonely road of Catholic ordination, which turned out to be a very hard road indeed.
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Catching Stories, 3.6: Tumelo Moleleki
Catching Stories
To say that Tumelo is an IT consultant who writes books in her spare time would be to vastly underrate the time, passion and energy that Tumelo puts into her books. Perhaps she has cracked the secret of a day that is longer than 24 hours? Because listening to Tumelo, you would think that she wrote and marketed books, full-time.
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Catching Stories, 3.5, Joy Phala
Catching Stories
Joy Phala is passionate about togetherness in the plant world. In this podcast she explains how established plants can send food and nutrients to plants that are not doing well, even when the ailing plant is a different species to the helping plant. She talks about communities of microbes exchanging essential elements with plant roots, and easily destroyed by chemical fertilisers.
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Catching Stories, 3.4, Neil Starr
Catching Stories
Neil grew up in Norwich in England, and lived for a few years in Aberystwyth in Wales. Johannesburg has been his home for most of his life. In this conversation Neil talks about his love for his adopted city and country. Neil is one of those refreshing people who, if you say anything about times in South Africa being bad, reminds you fiercely how much worse things were in the past. About the damage to individual lives and communities, that will take generations to repair. How the country went bankrupt
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Catchings Stories, 3.2, Dineo Tsamela
Catching Stories
Dineo describes herself as “a reformed debt-aholic” She chronicled her journey out of debt on her website. She writes articles on debt, savings and investment for a range of South African publications.
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Catching Stories, 3.2, Marie Aoun
Catching Stories
Marie Aoun is the founder of local organic perfume company Saint d’ici
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Catching Stories: 3.1, Nokulinda Mkhize
Catching Stories
“Communities need vessels for healing and love” says Nokulinda Mkhize-Horwood.. As a Sangoma she is able to do this healing work for her community, and help people to take their lives forward.
info_outline“Why?” and “How” are the questions that pepper this interview. Why start a new publishing house? Why call your book Red Cotton? How can people in Cote D’Ivoire respond so positively to poetry spoken in home languages from South Africa and Ghana?
The answers usually contain elements of feminism, or spirituality, or both, and are phrased in powerful, image-laden language. This is not surprising. Vangile is a poet. Her first collection was titled “undressing in front of the window” In the foreword, Don Mattera wrote: “Vangile’s quest – like so many critical and conscious young scribes, appears to want to jerk us into awareness of the hurt they are experiencing; the multitudinous social, political, economic and religious challenges they have to countenance”
But now Vangile is also one-third of impepho press, launching their third and fourth books at African Flavour Books https://www.inyourpocket.com/johannesburg/african-flavour-books_151504v where all their titles ( and lots of other books from South Africa and the rest of the continent) are available.
Impepho press is Pan African and inclusive. One of their dreams is a network across Africa, of writers and publishers working together, making their resources available to one another, learning and teaching and listening. The African diaspora will be part of this network, but not its centre.
The dream has both its origins and its expression in Vangi’s travels to poetry festivals: she has entranced and challenged audiences in Malawi, Gabon, Algeria, Cote D’Ivoire, Mocambique, Morocco. Inclusivity goes beyond geography to LGBTQ+, and is centered on an inclusive feminism. It is LOUD, and also deeply spiritual.
Are loud and spiritual contradictory? Not for Vangi. She is a healer in training. Spirituality underlies everything she says and does. A spiritual connection, she explains, is what enables people across different languages, who do not understand the meaning of the words, to respond to poetry.
Perhaps it is also this spirituality that allows Vangi to address big issues through small domestic issues – the colour of the cotton used to sew on a button; a small girl who “feels the sting of loneliness”
Are loud and spiritual contradictory? Not for Vangi. She is a healer in training. Spirituality underlies everything she says and does. A spiritual connection, she explains, is what enables people across different languages, who do not understand the meaning of the words, to respond to poetry.
Vangile Gantsho is