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Cape Ballet Africa (CBA) is set to enthrall audiences with a new quadruple bill at The Baxter this October, launching the dynamic young company’s Spring Season.

Hot off its highly successful run of Swan Lake in Johannesburg, CBA presents ELYSIUM at The Pam Golding Theatre at The Baxter from 3 to 10 October.

ELYSIUM brings together four exquisite and diverse ballets by celebrated choreographers George Balanchine, Nacho Duato, Kenneth Tindall and Michelle Reid, each offering a unique perspective on the human experience.

Through contrasting choreography, music, and artistic styles, ELYSIUM creates a rich and inspiring ballet experience, exploring themes of love, resilience, transformation and joy, celebrated through the range, beauty and emotional depth of ballet.

“ELYSIUM marks two years since CBA debuted our inaugural production SALT at The Baxter,” says Debbie Turner, Artistic Director and Founder of Cape Ballet Africa.

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Every September, South Africans are invited to celebrate their heritage. We wear traditional clothes, eat food that resonates with our culture, revisit familiar stories, listen to music that connects us to home and remind ourselves of the extraordinary diversity that makes this country what it is. Maybe Heritage Month should challenge us to do more than remember.

It should ask us what we are doing to ensure that the cultural inheritance we celebrate today remains alive, relevant and accessible to the generations that will come after us.

Heritage cannot survive simply because we have preserved it. It survives when we continue to interpret it, perform it, teach it, question it and give young people the opportunity to make it their own. This is where the importance of music and performed arts come in.

This country has never had a singular musical identity. Our sound is the product of many histories meeting one another: indigenous musical traditions, choral music, jazz, gospel, mbaqanga, maskandi, kwaito, hip-hop and contemporary popular music, alongside Western classical traditions that have themselves been reshaped by generations of South African musicians.

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The latest Invest-ED Live event brought together people with very different career journeys, covering topics such as AI entrepreneurship, working in the creator economy, and converting a career in professional sport into something in a completely different space. One common thread emerged – the working world of tomorrow is likely to look unrecognisable from what it looks like today.

“What do you want to be when you grow up?”

It’s a question generations of young people have been asked – largely by those much older than them. But, the answer is becoming increasingly more difficult to pin down, as careers change, new roles emerge, and the skills needed in the working world evolve.

The latest Invest-ED Live event formed part of Investec’s national programme for grade 8–12 learners and the adults who support them. It gives young people and their families reliable information, practical guidance, and a broader view of the opportunities available to them, whilst opening their minds to potential future careers.

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If you are travelling for business frequently, working long hours, and have young children at home, can you realistically also take on a high-powered degree like an MBA? At Henley Business School, the answer is yes. And then some.

Ask almost any senior professional who is thinking about embarking on an MBA, and you’ll hear the same hesitation. People have the drive and the intelligence, but they are just not sure they have the time required.

For decades, traditional business schools have treated executive-level studies like a sleep-deprivation contest. The unspoken message was that if you weren’t running on four hours of sleep, neglecting your marriage, and pushing the boundaries of clinical burnout, you simply weren’t cut out for senior leadership.

When renewable energy entrepreneur Lunga Mkhwanazi considered studying, that myth nearly stopped him in his tracks. He had just started a family and had a newborn son at home. He remembers thinking about the grim reputation of the qualification: ‘There’s this perception about the MBA being a cause of divorce, so I wanted the assurance that I would have the support to manage my studies without neglecting my family.’

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The cat is already out of the bag: Nielsen is leaving South Africa, creating a significant question for the advertising industry: what happens to the advertising intelligence and ad-spend data that agencies, advertisers, media owners and other stakeholders have relied on?

Reliable advertising intelligence has long played an important role in understanding where brands are investing, how competitors are behaving and how the broader advertising landscape is changing.

With that continuity now under pressure, the industry needs a credible and reliable alternative.

That is the gap Ornico is working to address.

Ornico is developing a robust and comprehensive advertising intelligence monitoring and reporting solution aimed at providing the industry with continuity, while also building a stronger foundation for the future of advertising intelligence in South Africa.

The objective is not simply to replicate what existed before. It is to retain the methodology, reporting standards and structures the industry is accustomed to, while addressing historical gaps and introducing richer analytical capabilities.

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A new civic movement is betting that Nelson Mandela Bay residents who have lost faith in political parties and local government can still be persuaded that their vote matters on 4 November. Its message is simple: opting out does not opt you out of the consequences of who governs the metro for the next five years.

Residents driving through some of Gqeberha’s busiest intersections may have noticed the huge lime-and-black billboards urging them to vote on in the 2026 local government elections, which are being held on 4 November.

The billboards have gone up at Govan Mbeki Drive near the taxi rank, Stanford Road towards the northern areas, Cape Road and Mount Road, with another planned for William Moffett Drive.

They are part of a voter-education campaign by the newly established Citizens of NMB movement, which is urging Nelson Mandela Bay residents not to give up on the ballot box despite their growing disillusionment with politics and local government.

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It’s just bad news all round with the pedal firmly on the metal for a further acceleration in inflation against the backdrop of a sluggish and slowing domestic economy.

South African petrol prices will soar past R30 per litre from Wednesday, heralding more pain for motorists and fanning the flames of domestic inflation as US President Donald Trump’s war of choice in Iran continues to roil global oil markets.

Petrol 95 grade will rise by R3.33 per litre to more than R30.25 per litre, while diesel will climb as much as R3.24 per litre, taking its price to more than R35 per litre.

The usual mix was at work here: global oil prices and the rand/dollar exchange rate. The benchmark Brent Crude price averaged more than $101 per barrel in September, the Department of Mineral and Petroleum Resources (DMPR) said in its Monday announcement of the fuel price adjustment.

“The increase is due to the continued US/Iran tensions, uncertainty regarding the flow of oil through the Strait of Hormuz, higher shipping costs and decreasing inventories,” the department said.

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Ahead of the 4 November local government elections, data reveals that most eligible South African voters are opting out entirely. Driven by youth disillusionment, distrust and broken political promises, non-voters may eclipse many, and probably even all, registered parties at the polls.

As political parties ramp up their campaigns ahead of the upcoming local government elections scheduled for 4 November, they may find themselves up against the most dominant party among voters: the “No Vote” party.

The Electoral Commission of South Africa (IEC) recently announced that its voter registration drives have led to more than 29 million people being registered to vote ahead of the upcoming local government elections. This is higher than the 26.8 million voters who registered before the 2024 elections.

But with the figure representing only an estimated 63.7% of the eligible voter population, and a steady decline in the number of voters who turn out on voting day, most South African voters are unlikely to vote at all.

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The former chief of staff to Sport Minister and Patriotic Alliance (PA) leader Gayton McKenzie is the new CEO of Cricket South Africa’s incumbent ticketing vendor. This follows the sale of Ticketpro to a women-owned empowerment consortium with links to the PA, raising concerns about alleged political influence in SA’s lucrative sport and culture economy.

Sport, Arts and Culture Minister Gayton McKenzie’s former chief of staff, a McKenzie board appointee and a “proud” member of the Patriotic Alliance have emerged as central figures in a multimillion-rand acquisition that places Ticketpro in the hands of a new women-owned consortium.

Ticketpro is the official ticketing vendor for Cricket South Africa (CSA) and the South African Football Association (Safa), raising concerns over commercial dealings between Ticketpro’s new PA-linked owners and sports bodies that fall within McKenzie’s oversight reach.

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It isn’t always easy to know what to believe when it comes to cancer. In part 2 of a Daily Maverick and Spotlight special series on cancer, Biénne Huisman asks whether cancer cases are on the increase in South Africa, and why. On the way, she visits academic corridors and a Limpopo citrus orchard, all while trying to make sense of the available data.

One doesn’t have to look far on social media for scare stories about increasing cancer rates. While there are some wildly inaccurate claims, there are also several reliable sources sounding the alarm. Apart from some worrying data, there is also just the visceral reality that many of us know friends or family who died far too soon. Just in 2026, we have lost Ufrieda Ho and Estelle Ellis, two of our leading journalists, to cancer.

The picture is a complicated one. To start with, different cancers are on different epidemiological trajectories. On the one hand, rates of cervical cancer are expected to decline due to HPV vaccination (most cases of cervical cancer are caused by HPV infection), while rates of colorectal cancer in younger people appear to be on the increase. Throwing all cancers together obscures such nuances.

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The R191m blue lights tender case against former acting police chief Khomotso Phahlane has been provisionally withdrawn as Idac reviews more than 40 high-profile matters.

Ten years after former acting national police commissioner Khomotso Phahlane and his co-accused were first implicated in an allegedly corrupt R191-million blue lights tender, the Investigating Directorate Against Corruption (Idac) has provisionally withdrawn all charges against them.

Phahlane was appointed acting national police commissioner by former president Jacob Zuma in 2015, but his tenure ended two years later when he was told to step aside amid the corruption allegations. He was dismissed from the South African Police Service (SAPS) in July 2020 following a disciplinary hearing that found him guilty of dishonesty.

Idac spokesperson Henry Mamothame said the decision to provisionally withdraw the criminal case was taken after Idac’s acting investigating director, advocate Ntuthuzelo Vanara, decided to “peruse certain aspects” of the matter before it is re-enrolled.

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Originially published 6 Sep in News24

Four hundred people paid to hear apartheid's "Dr Death" defend the SADF's chemical weapons programme. Max du Preez draws a line from the Afriforum Theatre applauding Basson to a broader resurgence of apartheid nostalgia.

It would have been outrageous 20 years ago to imagine a public event that publicly celebrated one of the most notorious programmes of the apartheid-era security forces.

And yet, here we are in August 2026, when 400 people bought tickets to a talk in a Pretoria theatre (the AfriForum Theatre) where the old SAD's notorious chemical and biological warfare (CBW) programme was defended and applauded.

The head of that programme, the soldier/doctor Wouter Basson, was the headline act.

In January 1997, Basson signed his name on the wall of a Cape Town restaurant next to the venue where he appeared before the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) as "Dr. Death".

The invitation to the meeting that took place on Friday declared that Basson's enterprise was to develop "a defensive chemical and biological capability for the SADF".

READ I Sold out: AfriForum's theatre seats fill up for Dr Death's toxic tell-all

The TRC investigated the matter and held a hearing on it, and in its final report, totally rejected that notion. It found that the CBW project aimed to develop toxins and microorganisms to kill or incapacitate activists who opposed apartheid, to cause diseases that could be used politically and to use hard drugs like mandrax to control crowds. It even researched ways to clandestinely reduce the fertility of black women. Evidence was led that Basson prepared a drug to paralyse SWAPO guerrillas who were then thrown from aircraft into the sea. (He denies this.)

Horrific stuff that made many people whisper, rather hyperbolically: Dr Josef Mengele.

In 1989, the newspaper I then edited, Vrye Weekblad, exposed Basson's police counterpart and close comrade, General Lothar Neethling, the head of the SAP's forensic laboratory, and documented his ghastly record of developing toxins which were then used on activists, showing no trace in the autopsies. All our reporting was subsequently confirmed before the TRC and in new affidavits and confessions.

There was a Total Onslaught on South Africa, they said, and it necessitated a Total Strategy with no rules or regard for lawfulness, (I told my family that if I ever develop heart problems, they should take me to Basson, an experienced and practising cardiologist. He will go out of his way to keep me alive to avoid suspicion if I died under his care.)

A brief history

Are we experiencing a surge of apartheid denialism?

Every genocide, or period of gross human rights violations on a grand scale, has historically been followed by denialism by perpetrators and their followers and constituencies. (The Holocaust, Cambodia, Guatemala, Argentina, El Salvador, Chile, Gukurahundi in Zimbabwe, Rwanda, Bosnia-Herzegovina, and Gaza.)

This didn't happen to any noticeable degree among white South Africans after the end of apartheid and the advent of democracy in 1994.

As someone who was intimately involved in the TRC process, I believe that this was in large part due to the fact that white people (reluctantly) watched policemen and soldiers daily on television who pleaded for amnesty, confessing to horrendous crimes of murder, assassination, torture, assault, kidnapping and humiliation.

There was no denying it: apartheid was a vile, cruel system and ideology - a crime against humanity, as the international community called it.

READ | Fred Khumalo I Things were better under apartheid? The lie we keep telling ourselves

Okay, there was also the Mandela factor; the sweet, much-too-brief rainbow nation intervallum; the relief of being able to travel overseas without restriction; the joy of playing the All Blacks again; the pleasant surprise of not being chased into the sea and having your property confiscated. And South Africa still kind of worked - by the early 2000s, the economic growth rate touched on 5%

And then the dark side of the liberation movemet took over when Jacob Zuma became president in 2009. The backwards slide soon became manifest: rapacious state capture, crude cadre deployment, the hollowing out of state institutions, rampant corruption (as we now also know in the police), the collapse of state-owned enterprises and most municipalities, and the gross neglect of infrastructure maintenance.

En kyk hoe lyk ons nou. (And look at us now.)

Our knight on a white horse then turned out to be a dithering man on a lame donkey. He could not stop the decline, not in his party and not in the country, especially not in the municipalities.

Well, at least Cyril Ramaphosa delivered a government of national unity and facilitated a new partnership with the private sector that is somehow keeping us afloat.

Fertile ground

But South Africans are properly gatvol.

Fertile ground, then, for supercharged revisionism; for nostalgia among many whites about the "good old days". Conversations often start with "I don't hate blacks, but.." or "I don't want apartheid back, but.." And the ethnic entrepreneurs got new impetus; the identity economy and commodification of culture flourished.

The manna from heaven rained upon the ethnic entrepreneurs with the election of Donald Trump as US president and the growth of the MAGA movement. When he started singling out Afrikaners for special treatment and declared that there was a genocide, that their farms and properties were being confiscated, MAGA came to stand for Make Afrikaners Great Again.

The architect of the Solidarity movement, Flip Buys, declared triumphantly: "The Afrikaner is back!" The vast majority of refugees allowed in the US are white South Africans, primarily Afrikaners. Strident, narrow Afrikaner nationalism was kosher once again.

READ | Pieter du Toit | Fighting old battles: Revisiting the Constitution may be right-wing endgame

At the heart of the new movement is the notion that there is no such thing as a South African nation; it's just a conglomerate of "peoples", volke. The cry is for "self-determination", even to the point of a volkstaat or three. They're opting out of South Africa in our Constitution. "Ons sal self", they say. No more "We, the People", but "We, the Peoples".

Now, that sounds just a little too much like that euphemism for apartheid, separate development. And this meant that "separate development" had to be rehabilitated to sound more like 2026 than 1948 or 1976. That rehabilitation included the military and its many bloody, senseless adventures.

Don't for a moment think this is only an Afrikaner thing. The Western Cape secessionists are mainly white English speakers.

Most of the right-of-centre, reactionary podbros are English-speaking. Look at the list of speakers at the planting of 3000 white crosses referring to farm attack victims on the National Mall in Washington, D.C., on 26 September: David Ansara of the Free Market Foundation, James Myburgh of Politicsweb, advocate Mark Oppenheimer and our own version of Nigel Farage, Rob Hersov. Former English "liberals".

It was an easy jump: instead of blaming the governing ANC and its inept, corrupt leadership, blame "the blacks" - they simply can't run a modern democracy and economy. And then follows: it was better when we were in charge.

It's a denial of all the hard-earned gains of the last three decades, of a growing sense of nationhood, of our open society and robust democracy. Vote, agitate and work for positive change, don't withdraw into a white island.

I have empathy with white men who fought in the SADE's wars, believing at the time that they were fighting for a noble cause. I can understand their frustration at being demonised, their desire to sometimes get together as a brotherhood.

My advice to them would be to make peace with the fact that they were used by politicians and generals and that it doesn't all reflect on them. Rather, become productive, positive citizens, part of the South African nation.

Glorifying the nasty past and withdrawing to the margins is not in their or anyone's interest.

- Max du Preez is an author, columnist and documentary film-maker and was the founding editor of Vrye Weekblad.

Published by: News24.com - 2 May 2026

The Bell Pottinger agency's attempts to capture public opinion to support Jacob Zuma's state capture were, in the end, exposed and largely neutralised. Not so the even bolder, and ongoing, manipulation of public opinion by Solidarity and AfriForum.

AfriSol, as the movement has become known, boasts that it has about 600 000 paying members, and few would contest its claims that most white Afrikaners are sympathetic to it. It styles itself as the only bull in the Boere kraal.

In 1992, more than two-thirds (68.7%) of white South Africans (voter turnout 85%) voted in a referendum in support of "the reform process which the state president began on 2 February 1990 and which is aimed at a new Constitution through negotiation".

After the 1994 election, most Afrikaners affectionately called the first president of a united democratic South Africa "Madiba", even more so after he donned the Number 6 Springbok jersey at the 1995 Rugby World Cup victory ceremony and visited Tannie Betsie Verwoerd in whites-only Orania.

Afrikaners rejoiced at the end of all sports (especially rugby) boycotts, sanctions and the prospect of travelling, also to once forbidden countries. The Afrikaans language blossomed with the huge new cultural festivals in Outshoorn, Potchefstroom and elsewhere, the emergence of many Afrikaans radio and later television channels and vibrant book publishing, magazine and music industries. Released from their dependence on the state during decades of apartheid, many became successful entrepreneurs. (Five of the seven richest people in South Africa, all dollar billionaires, are Afrikaners.)

Fast forward to 2026. Now most Afrikaners view themselves as hapless victims of ethnic persecution. Many say there is an Afrikaner genocide. Their farms are being confiscated, and many farmers are attacked, murdered and cruelly tortured to drive them off the land.

Their children can't get jobs, promotions, or even admission to universities. Afrikaans schools are systematically closed down.

These claims have been made so repeatedly and forcefully that it doesn't matter that they are all completely baseless. Some 5 000 Afrikaners have been accepted as "refugees" in the United States and some 70 000 more are reported to have expressed interest in such refugee status.

How on earth did this happen?

The extraordinary story starts in 1992. Flip Buys, a right-wing student leader at Potchefstroom University, joined the fundamentalist apartheid trade union Mynwerkersunie, and five years later, he was appointed its head.

As a hard-core Afrikaner Christian nationalist, he opposed all negotiations between the National Party and the ANC and campaigned hard for a "No" vote in the 1992 referendum.

He was part of the Conservative Party and later General Constand Viljoen's Afrikaner Volksfront, from where a military rebellion was planned (and then abandoned) to sink the negotiations process. In 1994, Buys was a member of the Volkstaat Council that recommended Afrikaner "self-determination" in certain areas of the country.

But the cerebral Buys was frustrated with the crudeness, weak strategies and poverty of ideas of the right-wing politicians. He studied the history of the Jewish labour movement, Histadrut, formed in 1920 to establish a self-sustaining Jewish economy and promote Hebrew: Jewish nation-building. Histradut established many institutions and business enterprises and got involved with social, medical and educationa services.

So, in 2002, Buys borrowed the name from the Polish trade union that launched a revolution in the 1980s, Solidarność, and turned the Mynwerkersunie into the Solidarity movement, with Histradut as his blueprint. In 2006, Solidarity established a "civil rights" branch, AfriForm, with another former Conservative Party and Volksfront activist, Kallie Kriel, as its head. The unbending ideologue Dirk Hermann was appointed as head of the trade union at the heart of the movement, with Buys as the chair of the whole organisation.

Not even the ambitious Buys could have dreamed then that he would be so successful in building an empire. AfriSol now has about 50 affiliates, including a university, a technical college, a private prosecution service, a property development arm, extensive financial and insurance services, a radio station, online newspaper and AfriForum TV, a charity organisation, an agricultural union, and neighbourhood and farm watches. It receives around R500 million a year from members and does business with most of them, so the annual turnover could be more than a billion rand. The campus of its Afrikaans-only university, Akademia, will cost R3.2 billion.

A brilliant metamorphosis

AfriSol is today the world's foremost exponent of what is referred to as the "identity economy", or "ethnic entrepreneurship". And not a cent comes from the state. In a country where the state struggles to build anything meaningful or even provide basic services, this earns AfriSol a lot of praise, even from the black communities. "Ons sal self," AfriSol proclaims.

In the 1980s and early 1990s right-wing politicians were dour, racist ideologues with shiny suits and grey shoes, corpulent men in khaki or loudmouthed, brandy-swilling caricatures in cheap camo dress. Buys, Kriel and Hermann come from that culture, but now, chameleon-like, entered the national arena as alumni of Potch and Tuks, in jackets and ties, with a cohesive basic philosophy.

It was a brilliant metamorphosis. They will never utter the k-word, but their followers understand the subtext, and many don't have the same restraint.

Key to its success was how AfriSol successfully infiltrated and captured the Afrikaans media. Before 1994, the mainstream Afrikaans newspapers and broadcast media treated the right wing like lepers, demonising them as crude and unsophisticated racists and denying them a voice. But by the time Buys got Solidarity going, the National Party had imploded. Almost seamlessly, AfriSol became the Afrikaans media's new Pied Piper. The dolled-up, sanitised right-wingers soon dominated the Afrikaans media. Abracadabra.

Especially Beeld and Rapport, now only available online, Radiosondergrense and the TV channel kykNet drew AfriSol's leaders into the mainstream and paraded them as esteemed opinion formers and analysts on an almost daily basis. No article or programme was complete without AfriSol's comment.

This was how the head of the Orania Movement (and inhabitant of that enclave) and Solidarity's head of liaison, Jaco Kleynhans, became the foremost Afrikaans analyst on international affairs, despite having no academic background on the subject, and at the expense of many better-qualified Afrikaans-speaking academics and former diplomats.

Kleynhans is a fanatical supporter of Donald Trump and the MAGA movement.

It is important to note that AfriSol is not a political party. Leaders are not elected, their remuneration is not known, and members have no say in policies or how their contributions are spent. There is no accountability.

It is also notable that, where the EFF and MK Party want to fiddle with the Constitution, AfriSol rejects its very foundation. They want to change the preamble from "We, the people", to "We, the peoples" - they reject the entire notion that South Africa is a unitary state and want some form of racial federation, if an independent white volkstaat or two are not possible.

The other secret to AfriSol's success is intimidation and the peddling of fear and paranoia.

The newspaper Beeld, for example, was harangued after it published a picture of Potch students seemingly giving the Nazi salute, and AfriSol only relented when the editor was removed and replaced by an AfriSol sympathiser. AfriSol's boycotts of the Spur restaurant franchise and Radio Jacaranda, among others, inflicted serious damage on these enterprises.

AfriSol is selling Afrikaners false hope

AfriSol has several news outlets and a massive social media presence. They follow the dictum of the alt-right American Steve Bannon: Flood the zone. I am, inexplicably, on their mailing list, and I get regular messages, like "The ANC wants to close Afrikaans schools" or "The ANC is going to take white people's land", and then the invitation: Join AfriForum and fight back.

It must be said, though, that if successive ANC governments were not so corrupt and inept, the breeding ground for AfriSol would not have been so fertile. And if the ANC is the co-builder of AfriSol, then Julius Malema is its chief marketing guy - AfriSol gets stronger every time he chants Kill the Boer.

AfriSol got a huge injection of energy and, in their book, legitimacy, when Donald Trump became the US president and championed the Afrikaner cause with falsehoods such as the Afrikaner genocide and confiscation of white farms. Manna from heaven.

It didn't matter that Afrikaners are, in fact, thriving and that not a square inch of land had been confiscated. "Afrikaners are back!" rejoiced Buys in an opinion piece on Netwerk24.com. The sudden increase in brazen racism and threats on social media was noticeable. The "leader of the free world" gave them licence. Trump's obsession with farm attacks comes directly from AfriSol's misinformation and propaganda about the real nature and extent of this tragic phenomenon.

I think AfriSol is selling Afrikaners false hope in the process of building an empire, and that can only lead to further alienation and disillusionment. Geographical or even cultural "self-determination" is a pipe dream; similarly, "Afrikaner control" of Afrikaans-language state schools. These would necessitate a new Constitution, accepted by two-thirds of the members of Parliament. There are only 2.5 million white Afrikaners in a nation of 62 million.

As an Afrikaner myself, I hold the AfriSol leadership's ethnic machismo and aggressive foreign lobbying responsible for reviving the old image of my tribe as selfish, racist bullies.

Donald Trump's days are numbered, and his national and international standing is waning fast. The ANC is also a sharply declining party. But the damage that AfriSol has inflicted on South Africa and particularly on the Afrikaner community will be felt for a long time.

- Max duPreez is an author, columnist and documentary film-maker and was the founding editor of Viye Weekblad. This edited extract from his latest book, The End of Normal-Witness to the Unravelling of White Power in South Africa (Jonathan Ball), was prepared exclusively for News24.