Charles Leonard

Dec 5, 2024 | mg.co.za | Charles Leonard

Sobukwe film screened at jail where he was keptIn celebration of Pan Africanist Congress founder Robert Sobukwe, who would have been 100 years old on 5 December, the multi-award-winning film, Sobukwe: A Great Soul, will be screened at Constitutional Hill in Johannesburg on 7 December. The film was made by Free Women Films’ Carolyn Carew and One Take Media’s Mickey Madoba Dube as part of the SABC’s series on South African historical icons.

Nov 28, 2024 | mg.co.za | Des Erasmus |Charles Leonard

Thanks to her debut novel, an African woman was able to have a house built — a house named Rainclouds — which would become a national monument. This happened in late Sixties Botswana. The South African-born novelist Bessie Head’s When Rain Clouds Gather was published in 1968. The following year, thanks to this novel, Head (1937 – 1986) got an advance payment of a thousand pounds and could build her own, unique house in the town of Serowe.

Nov 28, 2024 | mg.co.za | Des Erasmus |Charles Leonard

Hardly a fortnight out, the album A Dance More Sweetly Played, by the Kyle Shepherd Trio, has already been garnering massive critical acclaim worldwide. One of South Africa’s foremost jazz pianists, Shepherd recorded the album with Shane Cooper on bass and Jonno Sweetman on drums. It features 10 of Shepherd’s original compositions, plus two unexpected covers: Massive Attack’s Teardrop and a deconstructed take of Journey’s Don’t Stop Believin’.

Nov 22, 2024 | mg.co.za | Charles Leonard

When someone writes like a groupie, fixates like a groupie and even rocks up at your launch and hovers at the back of the hall with a stack of books, is he a groupie? We are in Pan Macmillan’s Joburg boardroom, where the creator of the phenomenally successful Spud series of books, John van de Ruit, is telling me about this obsessive guy who came to the first launch of the brand-new Spud: The Reunion.

Nov 15, 2024 | mg.co.za | Charles Leonard

Inside the spacious, white-walled Stevenson gallery in Johannesburg, the abstract works in the third instalment of Zander Blom’s compelling Monochrome Paintings series are, as the name says, strictly black and white. Blom and curator Lerato Bereng have just finished the walkabout during the well-attended opening. With questions done, the art lovers take in the works some more, and then start spilling out onto the rambling Parktown North house’s wraparound stoep with its lush green creepers.