Latest News Archive
Please select Category, Year, and then Month to display items
22 February 2018
Photo Thabo Kessah
Pakiso Mthembu will be representing South Africa in Mauritius and Algeria.
This year, the University of the Free State’s Qwaqwa Campus will unleash a running sensation that is equally comfortable on track, cross-country, and road running and is on a mission to conquer the world. His name is Pakiso Mthembu from Tweeling in the Eastern Free State. Pakiso has recently qualified for the Junior Men’s Southern Region cross-country championships that will be held in Mauritius on 24 February and in Algeria on 17 March 2018.
“I am glad that I managed to run my personal best time of 24:02 during the qualification trials held in Bloemfontein in January, which set me on the road to Mauritius and Algeria,” said Pakiso, a BEd FET first-year student.
His personal best in the 10 km road-running category and in the 5 000 m track are 30:55 and 14:29, respectively.
Praise for Soke
“It is only through dedication, hard work, and listening to my coach that I can achieve my dreams of representing South Africa at the International Association of Athletics Federations World Junior Championships (IAAF) to be held in Finland in July, and at the 2020 Tokyo Olympics. I have one of the best coaches in this part of the world and it gives me great pleasure to work with him, having grown up admiring him during his days,” he says in reference to Boy Soke, who identified his talent and recruited him to the Qwaqwa Campus.
Pakiso has already represented South Africa in Uganda.
Award-winning photographer exhibits ravages of war, 25 May 2016 until 17 June 2016
2016-06-02
The ruins of the Dimbaza Border Industrial Park built
in the 1970s as a source of cheap labour for industrialists
and ostensible employment for Ciskei Homeland citizens.
This industrial zone collapsed after 1994.
Photo: Images courtesy of the Galerie Seippel.
All images © Cedric Nunn
Cedric Nunn’s latest photographic exhibition, Unsettled: One Hundred Years War of Resistance by Xhosa Against Boer and British, opened on 25 May 2016 at the Johannes Stegmann Art Gallery of University of the Free State, and will run until 17 June 2016. Since 2014, the exhibition has travelled through South Africa and the USA as well as Germany.
The photographer, documentary film-maker, and artist’s photographic journey was launched in the early 1980s in Durban. In 2011, he won the first FNB Joburg Art Fair Award.
Narratives of the victors and the vanquished
Unsettled deals with the nine wars that Xhosa people were subjected to between 1779 and 1879 in their fight against Afrikaner and British colonial settler forces. Nunn’s art seeks to instigate social change, and highlight lesser-seen aspects of society.
The work emanated from his awareness of a notable gap in the telling of this piece of South African history, as well as the fact that, to date, little has been done to memorialise these acts of colonial aggression and Xhosa resistance. He decided to document the land where these struggles took place.
“Through revisiting this painful past in the contemporary scenes of today, this work attempts to place the present in its factual context of dispossession and conquest,” said Nunn.
Unsettled forms the first component of what will be a trilogy. The next component will address the legacy of colonial dispossession through “bringing ‘the first inhabitants’ back into the picture by giving a select number of self-describing Khoi, Griqua, and San or Bushmen a contemporary face and presence”. The final component will look at slavery.