Martina Dahlmanns on Noordhoek beach with her children, Kal, Nene and Lele.
Review: Vivien Horler
A Person My Colour – Love, adoption and parenting while white, by Marina Dahlmanns (Modjaji Books)
What the subtitle of this absorbing book doesn’t tell you is that Marina Dahlmanns and her husband Alan’s three adopted children are black. The couple made a conscious decision to adopt the first two, a girl and a boy, and the third, half-sister to the second, more or less fell into their laps. Continue reading
There have been several golden ages of cricket depending on your preference or prejudice. The one in which John Arlott and EW (Jim) Swanton existed – even helped create – was post World War 2 until about the ‘70s when the Australian media magnate Kerry Packer broke the mould.
From a South African perspective, Princess Margaret, Countess of Snowdon, was something of a fringe character in the saga of the British royal family. Yet, says author Craig Brown, she pops up in every other British memoir, biography and diary written in the second half of the 20th century.
If, for some inexplicable reason, you wanted a reminder of the Zupta years, Zapiro’s new book fits the bill. And it’ll make you smile – wryly.
Rebecca Davis is a successful Cape Town essayist, columnist and commentator. She writes for the Daily Maverick, appears on panels at the Franschhoek Literary Festival, and has a regular Thursday afternoon gig with John Maytham on Cape Talk, when she talks interestingly and wittily about current events.
Austin Ngcumbe is not a name that will be familiar to many South African cricket fans, yet in his day he was as popular – and as good – as Kagiso Rabada. 
Ngcumbe took 10 wickets twice in matches against Gaika CC of East London, Fear Not CC of Grahamstown and Ethiopian CC of Port Elizabeth. The tournament established cricket as a sport among black men in the Eastern Cape; it was already popular among the whites. There were matches between the race groups, and black teams often won, but the white colonial mindset would not allow this to thrive and so the myth emerged in South Africa that black people did not have a cricket culture or tradition.
My dad was an engineer with Shell when I was a child and we moved every two years until I was 14 years old. This meant friendships were forever being cut short, but it also helped give me a love of books.