Ok. Don’t be fooled by people’s emotions, stereotypical biases. The fact that this question is asked in the first place indicate that South Africa is a well developed first world country. It’s the most developed country in all of Africa. Im not just talking services and infrastructures. Technology too. World class universities and research institutions. South Africa easily built nuclear weapons during the cold war starting as far back as the 1960s to 80s. Many South African are not aware that South Africa built nuclear weapons. There are European countries that tried to build nuclear weapons but failed.
May 19, 2026
Recently, Sedgefield suffered a period of 9 days, only one day of which served up electricty to this Garden Route Paradise.
It proved to be a feast of two things for me:
Flute? At 81? Yes, messieurs et mesdames, it is easier to lift than a sackbut. Old trombonists never die, they just can’t lift their butts. So they learn flute. Every player of large instruments - think: Hammond organ - has said, with great feeling, at one or other gig:
May 17, 2026
Brevity … soul … wit
The Writing
I want to make this: a writer’s site, for a club of 4 writers to start with, but expandible to a loan club cycle of 6 to 12 (ie bi-monthly or monthly). Each of us pays a sum, based on a 600 word (A4 page) article size, per word, with the price per word shared by us four. For example, at 600 words, & R1,00 per word, we each are paying R0,25c per word. We can adjust that “going rate” per word as we wish.
April 27, 2026
${\LaTeX{}}$: The Good Donald
The title is the “fairness equation”. I will leave you to google that.
In entire history of computer software, only one man succeeded in writing a program to typeset mathematics on both paper and screen. Remarkably that software:
- was bug-free.
- was so challenging that it has not been bettered.
- has always been free to use.
To summarise: One man wrote the best program ever written, for free.
April 17, 2026
How I rated things
Appendectomy
I had an appendectomy on New Years Eve 1962. I would have died without it, true. But, I also awoke, and sat up, during the operation, causing panic stations about the theatre. I was sewn up very badly, and suffered through decades of pain from adhesions, making distance running (my passion at the time) impossibly painful. That pain abated only in my fifties, meaning it took 30 years to heal. I have to score it as a part-botch.
April 16, 2026
Slim
“We get there, and who the hell cares how.”
… was a saying of one of my teenage whodunnit heroes, Peter Cheney’s Irish sleuth, Slim Callaghan. It became a mantra throughout the years I spent in the quest to get cataracts removed by SA public health. Short story. It took six years.
What follows is a rear view mirror look at what passed for my life-long health care summary of Private vs Public medical care. Shortest possible conclusion: NHI has a case …
April 3, 2026
Civic IT
As a kid growing up in PMB, I saw the Mayor. From my position about 20 paces from the dignitary, all I could see was his gold chain. To be candid, at the first glint of gold, I thought he had egg on his tie, but then, seeing the size of the mayoral chain, it had the desired effect. I thought “Wow. What a lot of expensive gold”. I think that Mayor was named Downes. Wally Downes, maybe.
April 2, 2026
This draft is designed to resonate with the EU’s 2026 “Digital Sovereignty” and Global Gateway initiatives, which specifically favor open-source, sustainable, and auditable technology over proprietary “black-box” systems.
It positions my project not just as a “tech buy,” but as a Strategic Governance Infrastructure that aligns with the current Horizon Europe Africa Initiative IV.
PROPOSAL: The Sovereign Civic Ledger (SCL) Project
A Blueprint for Fiscal Transparency and Vocational Excellence in South Africa
March 25, 2026
Quiet Revolution Code
Government is a homeless tax junkie. Parliament, for most of them, is a temporary home. They can’t evidently do much, but to do even that, they need inexhaustible supplies of money. We (unlike them?) are law-abiding and give to them, because we have Stockholm Syndrome, and because we don’t enjoy jail. How many of us are truly getting close to what we want and need?
A businessman once said to me:
March 19, 2026
What About My Share?
I don’t wish to speculate on cultural reasons for why our majority routinely expect to be paid a share of anything that is being bought, nor why they think that salaries are for pitching up to work sometimes, and actual work is extra). I rather accept it, playfully wish to work with it. Why (to use a quaint phrase favoured by my dad’s generation) “fart against thunder”?
March 10, 2026
Lex Fridman interviews Keyu Jin
Chapter 1: Introduction
L: The following is a conversation with Keyu Jin, an economist at the London School of Economics, specializing in China’s economy, international macroeconomics, global trade imbalances, and financial policy. She wrote the highly lauded book on China titled “The New China Playbook: Beyond Socialism and Capitalism,” that details China’s economic transformation since 1978 to today. And it dispels a lot of misconceptions about China’s economy that people in the West have. This is the “Lex Fridman Podcast.”
February 24, 2026
“Over and Out” is how I let AI channels know I am done.
Oberon is the subject of this post, more specifically A2 Oberon, an all-but-forgotten free, quick and tiny operating system, created by a famous Swiss computer scientist. Oberon (in cricketing terms) is ’not out’, after a long innings. Oberon’s innings opened in 1987, and Oberon has come and nearly gone, but it is still “in”.
February 20, 2026
Recently, my son said something that just, sommer, clicked. Here on holiday from one of the countries he has spent years living and working in, he said:
“They are not serious”
Poor Payers
I knew this in 1964 already, after visiting then Rhodesia, and discovering what a Bulawayo booking clerk for Rhodesian railways earned compared with the salary of a PMB friend doing the same job, and then gradually establishing that everything in Rhodesia paid better than everything in South Africa. At the time, I concluded it was a unspoken deal: Afrikaner Nationalists expected us to love being paid peanuts in exchange for keeping blacks out of job-contention.
February 19, 2026
Why Open Source
Corporates come and go, and their products go with them. IBM was once synonymous with everything computing. They lost out to Microsoft. Nokia was once synonymous with phones. Microsoft bought them, the Windows phone tanked,and Nokia nearly went with it.
February 19, 2026
Keeping it Simple
In a horseshoe bend on the Keiskamma River, half a century ago there lay a successful citrus export farm. Its packing shed was designed and built by hand from the ground up by a man I knew as Willie. I never knew him well enough to know whether he had been to school. The first day I met him, he repaired a tractor, then drove off on it, wearing his then main hat as a tractor driver. Much later than that, he donned other hats, like engineer, architect, designer, builder, electrician, mechanic, fencer and maybe more.
February 14, 2026
In 1985, I needed a break from Jozi. The Karoo was calling again.
“Time” I thought “to do some work on Toverberg Indaba. A change is as
good as a holiday.
January 1, 0001
Fourie’s a jolly good JuJu
Gen JC Smuts was never allowed to forget Jopie Fourie. I don’t think firing a gun, not aimed at anyone, is worth five years, and I doubt I am alone. The absolute last thing we need is to make a martyr of Juju.