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I have a BA HED (Higher Education Diploma), and a Tesol English 2nd Language Diploma. I have over 22 years’ teaching experience, and over 15 years’ writing experience, as a journalist in Johannesburg. For the past 3 years I have conducted tours of Joburg.

And when I’m not teaching or writing or conducting tours, I'll be taking in the Joburg vibes and events - it may be a book launch, an art exhibition opening, a touch of jazz, a talk on intriguing stuff . . . there's always something happening in this town, where I have lived for the past 36 years.

Come along on the journey with me - let's have fun exploring English and the city!

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Ponte: once a pariah, now a paradise

Jun 20, 2015

Ponte: once a pariah, now a paradise

Ponte, the tallest residential building in Joburg and probably Africa, is full at last, perhaps because it is run a little like a military camp. But this camp is loved by its residents who wouldn’t want to live anywhere else. One resident told me: “It’s nice here, it’s safe and quiet and secure.” He has lived on the 48th floor for five years, and with arms in all directions to express his enthusiasm, he said: “You’ll love it, you should move here.” This marvellous cylindrica

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Horses at home in the suburbs

May 17, 2015

Horses at home in the suburbs

Horses grazing lustily in a lush meadow with a river running through it seems like a perfect rural scene. Except that it takes place in the middle of suburbia, opposite Delta Park in Craighall Park. I have seen these horses for some time, when I ride my mountain bike along the tranquil Braamfontein Spruit. I have wondered where they are stabled, so last month I followed them home. I cycled over the bridge, and up the path to Marlborough Avenue behind them, and they clop-clopp

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The sky can be the limit for Joburg

Mar 7, 2015

The sky can be the limit for Joburg

This crazy city of ours throbs along at a pace that is sometimes breathtaking, sometimes heart-wrenching, sometimes just plain exhausting. What would it look like as the perfect city? In an article last year in The Guardian entitled “The 10 things a perfect city needs”, Paul Mason saunters through what makes a perfect city. He reckons it should have theatres where you can “look across the stalls to celebrities and states people, misbehaving in public”; and bicycle lanes and t

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Soweto's oarsome canoeing crew

Feb 7, 2015

Soweto's oarsome canoeing crew

Chunks of concrete, scraps of plastic, bottle tops and a short piece of hosepipe lie in the shallow water on the shoreline, just where the Soweto Canoe and Recreation Club (Scarc) youngsters step into the Power Park Dam to launch their canoes. But they don’t notice the debris – their focus is on sliding out on to the shimmering water, and paddling their boats into the sunset at the far end of the dam. I spent an hour and more last week chatting to some of the around 20 youngs

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Dolobran mansion sits smugly among Baker's Joburg icons

Jan 3, 2015

Dolobran mansion sits smugly among Baker's Joburg icons

For so long I have been infatuated with this house, peeping from between the trees and tall bamboo at the start of Oxford Road. That whimsical, eclectic mansion Dolobran. Recently I took a rare public tour of the house, which stares defiantly across the freeway at Herbert Baker’s more staid but still grand Northwards. Baker, Cecil John Rhodes’s favourite architect, has left his impressive footprint in the city with homes and churches dotted around the suburbs, as well as his

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The Sheds halts its wagon in Ferreirastown

Oct 4, 2014

The Sheds halts its wagon in Ferreirastown

Boer Colonel Ignatius Ferreira would be tipping his brown felt hat in pleasure at developments in the inner city suburb of Ferreirastown. It’s here that in 1886 he halted his wagon, pitched his tent and hoped that he would have more luck making his fortune with gold than he’d had with diamonds. This week another entrepreneur halted his wagon in Ferreirastown just several blocks from where Ferreira’s wagon stood, near the beautiful old St Alban’s Church, opposite the new BRT s

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Skateboarding kids are stoked

Sep 6, 2014

Skateboarding kids are stoked

Twelve-year-old Happy and 14-year-old Lucky are just that – happy and lucky. The two youngsters are learning to skateboard in the David Webster Park in Troyeville with up to 50 other kids from the hood, forgetting their troubles in what’s called Skateistan, a worldwide movement to encourage kids to learn a skill while learning much more. It hit Joburg in March this year, and it’s making waves in the lives of these often hard-to-reach kids, judging by the patient queues to get

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Greening the city is beginning to bear fruit

Aug 2, 2014

Greening the city is beginning to bear fruit

Plane, oak and jacaranda trees line many streets in Joburg. But recently the city has planted 6 500 fruit trees in the suburbs, and is planning to plant a fruit orchard soon. There’s only two places I know of where large orchards of fruit trees were grown in old Joburg: below Melville Koppies on Louw Geldenhuys’s farm, where peaches and apricots were abundant; and on the farm that is present-day Linden, where cherries and peaches blossomed. Joburg City Parks and Zoo (JCPZ) h

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Turning rubbish into power at Robinson Deep

Apr 5, 2014

Turning rubbish into power at Robinson Deep

I had an otherworldly experience last week. I went to the top of Robinson Deep in Turffontein, our largest landfill site, and took in a weird world of garbage, swirling birds, huge trucks, and men sifting through it all, against the backdrop of the best view in town. It had all the earthly rawness and energy of a scene from the movie District 9. Trucks of all sizes roared up the one kilometre slipway, winding their way to the top, and once there, reversed into the garbage, vo

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Cycling for Madiba brought us together

Mar 1, 2014

Cycling for Madiba brought us together

You know when the mayor turns up in cycling gear that something big is going to happen. And it did on Sunday, 9 February. Some 5 000 cyclists turned up for the Freedom Ride, to cycle to pay their respects to our great Madiba. The ride took cyclists from the Nelson Mandela Bridge to Madiba’s home in Vilakazi Street in Orlando West and back again. I turned up at 7.45am, and the bridge was buckling under the weight of bristling bikes and their impatient owners. Under a moody sky

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Sep 9, 2011

Birds flock to Delta Park

Delta Park in Victory Park attracts some unusual birds, with at least 40 species making it their home. The orange-breasted bush shrike, the arrow-marked babbler, and the white-crested helmet shrike have all visited the park in recent times, usually driven by drought in their normal bushveld habitat, says ornithologist Geoff Lockwood, the resident manager and education officer at the Delta Environmental Centre. He says that the sooty falcon, normally a resident of the east coa

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Salisbury House shines again

Jul 4, 2011

Salisbury House shines again

One of Joburg’s oldest buildings – the 108-year-old Salisbury House in Belgravia – has received the Johannesburg Development Agency’s Halala Conserving Joburg or Colosseum Award. The building, built in 1903, was on the brink of ruin in 2000, when the School of Practical Philosophy (SPP) approached its owners, the Johannesburg Property Company (JPC), with a proposal to restore it. Over the next five years they gave it much loving care, and today it shines in the glow of that c

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Joburg's Khoisan ancestors

Feb 2, 2011

Joburg's Khoisan ancestors

A short drive south of the city, some 10 kilometres outside the CBD, are remnants of Joburg's first settlement of Khoisan, South Africa's oldest people. They are to be found at the Eikenhof Khoisan Farm, portion 80, consisting of 247 hectares of land immediately south of the Klipriviersberg mountain, on the banks of the Klip River. The site has been occupied by Khoisan people for about 100 years, squeezed between several farms belonging to whites, who moved into the area from

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Apr 28, 2010

Wits scores its art museum

What do you do with 9 000 pieces of art? You build a 5 000m² museum and put them on glorious display, of course. This is exactly what Wits University is doing, in a dream come true for the custodians of this extraordinary art collection. That dream has been in the making since 2005 and is to be called the Wits Art Museum (WAM), previously the Wits Art Galleries. And where better to put it than in the university's cultural precinct on East Campus, at the former University Corn

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Mar 20, 2009

Mandela House opens in Soweto

Winnie Madikizela-Mandela stepped through the front door of her tiny house at 8115 Vilakazi Street in Orlando West this week, and re-lived sometimes painful memories. The restored Mandela House opened to the public on Thursday, 19 March. Madikizela-Mandela, her two daughters Zinzi and Zenani, and other family members were present. Nelson Mandela had moved into the house in 1946 with his first wife, Evelyn Mase, and in 1958 brought his second wife, Winnie, to live there. He re

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MaSisulu, one of Jozi's most famous

Dec 27, 2008

MaSisulu, one of Jozi's most famous

Albertina Sisulu, or MaSisulu, the anti-apartheid stalwart, midwife, beloved member of the ANC, and devoted wife of the late Walter, has spent most of her life in Johannesburg. She married Walter in 1944 at the age of 26, and her 59-year marriage to him endured despite enormous hardships - photographs of the two of them walking hand-in-hand or her hand through his arm, leave no doubt as to their love for one another. Johannesburg and Gauteng have honoured her, one of their mo

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One day back in '63 at Liliesleaf

Jun 6, 2008

One day back in '63 at Liliesleaf

On hearing that they had got life sentences, Denis Goldberg shouted: "Life! Life is wonderful!" And life was wonderful on that day, 12 July 1964, because the Rivonia trialists had expected the death penalty, but Judge Quartus de Wet handed down four life sentences to each of the men instead. "All rationality aside, and for all our preparedness to die for freedom in South Africa, we started smiling in disbelief, at first, and complete relief as it sunk in that the judge said h

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The homecoming that wasn't

May 22, 2007

The homecoming that wasn't

In 1990 the apartheid exiles started coming home to their families. Tsietsi Mashinini, a Soweto student leader on 16 June 1976, came home to his family too . . . in a coffin. Unlike many other parents celebrating the return of their long-lost children, his mother, Nomkhitha Mashinini, had to testify that the bruised body was his: one eye was missing and he had a large wound behind his ear. He had died in Guinea, but she was never told what happened. "I am sorry he died when m

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'We cried and consoled each other in exile'

May 22, 2007

'We cried and consoled each other in exile'

Life in exile for the teenagers who survived 16 June 1976 was hard. Some left their homes at 15, adrift in a strange country and without emotional support. This was true for people like Dee Mashinini, the younger brother of Tsietsi, a student leader who died in Guinea in 1990 - the year most exiles started coming home. "Many of us were young. I can't forget faces of youngsters crying, wanting to come back home just six months after they left. It was not easy; we cried and con

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Mar 27, 2005

The day the bus went into the Westdene dam

One of the survivors of the Westdene Dam disaster that occurred 20 years ago remembers that there were many things different about the day before the bus went into the dam. Eurika du Plessis, saved by her brother when a double-decker Hoerskool Vorentoe school bus plunged into the dam and 42 children drowned, says that usually her fellow classmates were normally loud and noisy on the bus ride home, but for some reason that day there was just quiet conversation upstairs, while

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