The name Jabu Stone is synonymous with hair care, especially dreadlocks, and his love of natural hair combined with his entrepreneurial spirit were the driving force behind one of the most successful brands in South Africa.

The man himself has recently released a handbook for entrepreneurs called Turning Passion into Profit – a must read for people interested in biographies, entrepreneurs, mentors and people in the hair care industry.

Stone has also started a YouTube channel, which contains vital information for those wanted to know how to care for their natural hair.

The first video is titled: “How To Start Your Locks”. Take a look:

1. Go to a stylist or skilled friend.

2. Your hair must be natural or unrelaxed with 5-6cm of length.

3. If you go to an experience stylist, they will be able to lock your relaxed hair from the new growth just before the relaxed section using Jabu Stone’s Invisi Wax.

4. Sectioning is exceptionally important as it determines your entire look.

Watch the video for more information:

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Book details

• Turning Passion into Profit by Jabu Stone
  Book homepage
  EAN: 9780992232962
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Former IEC Chairperson Brigalia Bam delivered the annual Chief Albert Luthuli Memorial Lecture recently.

The lecture was held at the University of KwaZulu-Natal in Durban.

Luthuli was a teacher and activist, and became the president of the African National Congress. He was awarded the 1960 Nobel Peace Prize, becoming the first African to be awarded the prize.

Bam said it was important remember to remember that, as an activist, Luthuli remained deeply involved in his community as a spiritual leader.

“He is comparable to other world leaders that we know, like Mahatma Gandhi, Martin Luther King Jr, Mother Theresa, the Dalai Lama, and others,” Bam said.

“These were leaders who were moved by their faith in waging the struggle for social and political justice.”

Watch the video:

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Related stories:

• Brigalia Bam reflects on the ‘suppressive streak of the Mail and Guardian’ after Thabo Mbeki article
• Former IEC Chairperson Brigalia Bam Argues for a New Electoral Regime for South Africa in Her Autobiography
• Brigalia Bam: South Africa Needs a Electoral System that is Relevant to Our Present Situation (Podcast)
• Does South Africa Need Electoral Reform? Brigalia Bam Considers the Case on a Dispatch Panel (Video)

Book details

• Democracy – More Than Just Elections by Brigalia Bam
  EAN: 9780992232931
  Find this book with BOOK Finder!

A sculpture by the late Dumile Feni sold for R6 million at the Cape Town Art Fair last year, and a current exhibition of his work, including never-seen-before pieces – turned heads at Gallery MOMO in Cape Town recently.

In a piece for Financial Mail, Ashraf Jamal hails Feni’s “visceral, charged, agonistic” art, which he says “captures a prevailing unfinished story of inequality and dehumanisation”.

Jamal compares Feni, who died in 1991 of a heart attack in his favourite record store in New York, to both Frantz Fanon and William Kentridge, commenting that despite his “ferocity”, the “Goya of the Townships” is also big business.

Read Jamal’s article:

For art professor Anitra Nettleton, Feni “never seems to have softened his approach in order to pander to the sentimentalist demands of the white-dominated market in SA”.

And yet, at this moment in time, one finds a curiously voyeuristic interest in the suffering of others, particularly the suffering of the black body which Feni, through his art, and Frantz Fanon, through his writings, sought to liberate from its chains. One cannot therefore ignore the fact that Feni’s impressively moulded busts, with their high-Modernist sheen, would look very nice indeed in a corporate setting.

As for the drawings, they reminded William Kentridge, as a little boy, of “down and out scarecrows. But when you came within a few feet of them they would give you a kick in the guts.” All well and good, but Feni is also big business. Kentridge, after all, was greatly inspired by Feni’s charcoal drawings, though his art has never conveyed Feni’s ferocity.

• Complete article: Financial Mail

Watch a video taken at the exhibition:

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Related stories:

• Don’t Miss Never-Before-Seen Work by Legendary Artist Dumile Feni at Gallery MOMO
• Dumile Feni’s Sculpture, “The Prisoner”, Sells for R6 Million – Breaks all Previous Art Sales Records

Book details

• The Beauty of the Line: The Life and Times of Dumile Feni by Chabani Manganyi
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  EAN: 9780620510135
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Vishwas Satgar and Roger Southall’s latest book, Cosatu in Crisis: The Fragmentation of an African Trade Union Federation, was launched at the Gordon Institute of Business Science (GIBS) in Illovo recently.

The speakers participating in the discussion on the past, present and future of Cosatu included Satgar, labour lawyer Joe Mothibi and former Cosatu national spokesperson Patrick Craven.

“If we didn’t have Cosatu we wouldn’t have the democracy we have today,” Satgar said in his introduction. “Without labour we are not able to redistribute social gains in any country.”

Satgar continued: “In the context of South Africa, where we’ve had very deep inequality, labour has been important. But again, there’s an important question, how far has it gone? Has it gone sufficiently forward to ensure that particularly vertical inequality has been addressed substantively and sufficiently?”

Satgar summarised the central premise of Cosatu in Crisis: “Cosatu’s been a democratising force, but did it lose its way somewhere?”

Watch the video:

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Read Katie Kilpatrick’s coverage of the event:

Senior lecturer in International Relations at the University of Witwatersrand Dr Vishwas Satgar said the possibility of a strike-ridden economic environment, characterised by tumultuous industrial relations, was a real threat.

Dr Satgar said Cosatu had lost its way and was facing a multifaceted crisis: Labour unions had lost ground due to bureaucratisation and the undermining of worker control within organisations.

There had also been a structural class shift in the skills base of workers from traditionally unionised, unskilled labourers to semi-skilled, white-collar workers in the public sector that had led to the ascendance of public sector unions.

• Complete article: City Press

Book details

• Cosatu in Crisis: The Fragmentation of an African Trade Union Federation edited by Vishwas Satgar and Roger Southall
  EAN: 9780992232948
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Justice Malala, political commentator and author of Let Them Eat Cake, recently invited AgangSA’s acting president, Andries Tlouamma, to the Justice Factor on eNCA.

In the introduction, Malala ponders on the future of Agang: “What is it achieving and can it be a viable party at all?”

Malala probes how Tlouamma became the president of Agang, what the party stands for today, and how Agang aims to become, as they’ve vowed in the media, “more radical than the EFF”.

“We don’t want to be a party that functions in the sky, we want to be in the communities,” Tlouamma says, adding that it’s important to thank Mamphela Ramphele for what she did for Agang.

Watch the video:

• Watch on eNCA

Book details

• Let Them Eat Cake by Justice Malala
  EAN: 9780620448888
  Find this book with BOOK Finder!

Brigalia Bam, former chair of the Independent Electoral Commission, recently participated in a panel discussion hosted by the Dispatch about her book Democracy – More Than Just Elections.

Bam, Bantu Holomisa, Nompumelelo Runji and William Gumede, who made up the panel, began by responding to the question “Does South Africa need electoral reform?”

Bam says that the way that the South African context interacts with elections and democracy is still being worked out.

“Our own system, that was established, has served us very, very, very well,” she says.

Bam believes the system is commendable especially considering how little was known about newly enfranchised South Africa at the time, and how little many South Africans knew about the processes of democracy.

There are certainly good things in our country’s electoral process, says Bam, but she hopes thorough-going dialogue will result in reformed processes even better suited to the South African context.

Read the article Siphe Macanda wrote about the discussion for the Dispatch:

Bam said it was not only the electoral system but a number of other issues relating to political parties that needed to change.

“We are a young democracy.

“We are at a stage where we begin to implement our Constitution and test it.

• Complete article: Dispatch

Watch the video:

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Book details

• Democracy – More Than Just Elections by Brigalia Bam
  EAN: 9780992232931
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Justice Malala recently invited the deputy speaker of parliament, Lechesa Tsenoli, to The Justice Factor show to discuss the new parliamentary rules that were put in place last month to regulate disruptive members of parliament.

Malala’s first question to Tsenoli is, “Were these rules designed essentially to shut the Economic Freedom Fighters up after what happened this year and last year?”

The deputy speaker answers, “No, the rules are intended to prevent disruption, the rules are intended to protect the rights of all political parties in the National Assembly to have an opportunity to ask the President questions and that no one party must monopolise that time and actually disrupt the proceedings.”

The author of Let Them Eat Cake insists that surely the new rules could allow the ANC to “remove the EFF for something that they’ve said, on a subjective basis” and argues that the rule can enable the speakers, who belong to the ANC, to treat the EFF unfairly. “It’s almost like an ANC disciplinary hearing,” he says.

Watch the video:

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Book details

• Let Them Eat Cake by Justice Malala
  EAN: 9780620448888
  Find this book with BOOK Finder!

Muzi Kuzwayo, marketer, adman and author, recently gave a TEDxSoweto talk titled “The magic we need to change Africa is inside us”.

Kuzwayo is the founder of Ignitive, former CEO of leading advertising agency TBWAHuntLascaris and an executive director of Project Literacy, an organisation dedicated to promoting literacy in South Africa.

He is also the author of the best-selling books Marketing through Mud and Dust, There’s a Tsotsi in the Boardroom and Black Man’s Medicine, as well as a contributor to How to Fix South Africa: The country’s leading thinkers on what must be done to create jobs.

“I was born 50 kilometres east of Johannesburg in a place called Daggafontein,” Kuzwayo says. “So when I started working, I found white people buying dagga for R5 – so much money!”

He continues on a more serious note, explaining how poverty sparked his interest in marketing. Omo washing powder, for example, had the tagline “works even in cold water” – as there was no hot water available to its target marker – and the brand became the market leader.

Watch the video:

With a combination of humor and straight talk, author, marketer and adman Muzi Kuzwayo takes us through slices of his own life of poverty, resilience and inventiveness to show that his wish for a future when Africa produces the best quality in the world is a real possibility, despite the odds.

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Book details

• How to Fix South Africa: The country’s leading thinkers on what must be done to create jobs edited by Ray Hartley
  EAN: 9780620549882
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Brigalia Bam, whose memoir Democracy, More than Just Elections has just been published by KMM Review publishing, chatted to SABC Digital News about the process of writing her book.

Bam has headed six of of South Africa’s elections in 12 years, and her name has become synonymous with the IEC. She explains how she began by writing a biography, before she and the publisher decided to focus on the elections, meaning the book needed an extensive rewrite and a new title.

Bam also speaks about her relationship with Nelson Mandela, explaining why the name “Madiba” was not used much in the “early days” as it is a term used for “mature people”.

“It’s important to mention that Madiba also didn’t call me by my name, Brigalia, he also used my clan name, he would say ‘Mkhiwa’, so it was wonderful. He was very supportive,” she says.

But she says the most “hands on” president was Thabo Mbeki.

Watch the video:

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Book details

• Democracy, More than Just Elections by Brigalia Bam
  EAN: 9780992232931
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Justice Malala recently invited the National Chairperson of the Economic Freedom Fighters, Advocate Dali Mpofu, on the Justice Factor show to talk about SARS’ sequestration case against EFF leader Julius Malema.

Cutting straight to the point, the Let Them Eat Cake author asks if the party truly believes that there is a “hidden hand in this matter”. Mpofu says once Sars reneged on their original agreement with Malema it became clear that there was another motive behind their actions.

Malala asks: “What then would have led to the flip, the total 360 degree change in Sars, who then instructed their legal representatives at 4 PM to abandon the case?”

This leads him to ask another pertinent question: “Is Sars an institution that is compromised and what do we do about it?”

Watch the video for this riveting conversation:

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Related links:

• Julius Malema Does Not Have to Pay Back the Money Either – and says He “Forgives” Sars

• Sars Isn’t Finished with Julius Malema Yet

Book details

• Let Them Eat Cake by Justice Malala
  EAN: 9780620448888
  Find this book with BOOK Finder!