You can hear the hadedas, those ubiquitous urban adaptors, calling loudly in the background during this interview. Perhaps they are a good symbol for Chief Ntshingila: a lot of this podcast is about successful adaptation.

“I would like to keep for Africa what is good for Africa, and take into Africa what is different”  These were the words of King Sobhuza of Swaziland, Chief Ntshingila’s maternal grandfather.

In this podcast we hear a man fitting new and old roles and ideas together, as carefully and neatly as a master craftsman dovetailing different pieces of wood.

During Heritage Week, Chief wears his Zulu regalia to the Methodist church he attends; other Sundays he goes to services in the uniform of the Amadodana, as his father and older brothers have done before him. Cultural and religion, he finds, fit together much more comfortably than culture and business.

“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”

http://www.702.co.za/articles/289730/when-you-re-honest-people-feel-it-and-that-s-what-carries-storytelling

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

MmeMaggie’s work as a mother to the wider community has been recognised by both Church and State. The Church awarded the order of Simon of Cyrene, the highest honour which can be bestowed on a lay person in the Anglican Church. The Order of the Baobab was conferred on her by the State President of South Africa.

In this podcast professor Alex van den Heever sets out what South Africans need by way of health insurance, and what parts of this are and are not covered by the proposed NHI.

He also discusses social grants, and economic growth. No, he says, child grants do not cause pregnancy. All the research shows that fertility rates continue to decline in urban areas in South Africa.

Grants support families, mitigating some of the stresses on children that can shape the rest of their lives, from cognitive performance to relationships. Grants also don’t lead to dependency: “Our economy would grow faster if we pushed up grants to 6-7% of GDP…long-term evidence around the world shows that unequal economies grow more slowly”

For Ishmael Mkhabela, Black Consciousness is not an ideology, it is a way of life: “an examined life, where you reflect, and also where you accept yourself….history made people consider themselves as the lesser children of God…. the Black Consciousness project of humanising society is much richer than the rhetoric of politicians…we are humanised in our interaction with others. Ubuntu/Botho is an act of responding to real human needs.”

Mmabatho Mtimkulu’s business is named after her grandmother. Selina Mtimkulu’s son was politically active, and in exile. This brought Selina continued presence of the apartheid police , harassment, imprisonment, assault and insult.

Mmabatho hopes to bring to her activities, and the pressures and shocks of business, the resilience and courage which her grandmother showed.

Mmabatho’s gift is to bring together the two halves of the healthy, organic equation: the customers and the suppliers. She knows her suppliers – all 40 of them – and has stories about each one. “You are buying from a real human being, supporting a real human being” Most of her suppliers are young black women – a network she began to develop when she first sold eggs at the Brownsense market

Bookwormers is certainly not your caricature book club, where the books provide the background to a little gossip and a lot of wine. It is a high-energy community outreach and an ever-changing fashion statement. Books are not so much read as devoured, dissected, and sometimes the members of the club even offer visiting authors better endings for their books! Members arrive with books where the pages have been marked with post-it notes and highlighted, ready for a vigorous discussion.

If you ask Dr Geci Karuri-Sebina about her academic qualifications and interests, she explains that she is an architect, a town planner, a computer scientist, a sociologist and that her particular field of interest is innovation. But innovation does not mean only looking forward. We badly need to look back, like the Sankofa bird, and bring both indigenous knowledge and practice, and common sense, into the way we plan and heal our cities. We need to listen more, and fix less. In particular, we need to listen to our elders : “What is so profound about what my elders say is how sensible it is.”

If the clouds come up when you are on the 51st floor of the Ponte building in Hillbrow, the light reflects of the red advertising sign above the building, and glow pink. This happened the night I was there, interviewing Nickolaus Bauer. It felt as if the building was wrapped in a pink feather boa. This was part of the inspiration for the TweetingGogo logo. Here you can see the view of the lights of Hillbrow through the pink cloud.