It was, as she describes it, a defining moment — one that did not so much replace writing as redirect it.

“I realised that I really enjoyed making conceptual and immaterial art,” she explains. “I worked a lot with video, but essentially I was encouraged to use my writing and research skills in order to make work that is more conceptually founded.”

The writing never went away, it just found different forms.

A master’s degree at the Tromsø Academy of Contemporary Art in Norway pushed her further into language. She was thinking about what gets lost in translation between cultures and languages, and making films in which she deliberately broke Norwegian down into a hybrid of English and Norwegian sounds — a way of using language itself as a comment on how colonialism works through the words it forces people to adopt.

Then she came back to Johannesburg, spent a year working for a visual arts organisation, and decided something important about herself. She wanted to be the one with the vision, not working for someone else’s.

At the end of 2018, she was awarded an artist residency in Basel, and in 2019, things began to shift. She started laminating roses and reconstructing them, thinking about what she calls sustainable modes of mourning. That material practice — working with natural specimens, with organic matter — eventually led to perfume.

Scent, for Munnik, is inseparable from storytelling. She gives the example of the iris root, the raw material from which orris is extracted. It takes years of fermentation before the root can be distilled, and when first encountered, it smells intensely of earth and soil. But as it dries down, it starts to smell like the iris flower.

“It’s like a ghost limb,” she says. “It turns into the flower by extracting the essence of the root.”

That transformation, the earth becoming the flower, the past becoming present, is for her pure and perfect storytelling. It is also the logic that underpins everything she makes.

It is this understanding of scent as a carrier of history that sits at the heart of Concrete Jasmine (2026), her scent-based work commissioned for the Reverse Futures exhibition at the Joburg Contemporary Art Foundation.

Reverse Futures is the third and final exhibition in JCAF’s Worldmaking trilogy, housed in a former electrical shed and substation that once powered Johannesburg’s tram system. The building carries its own industrial history in its walls, and the exhibition asks what the future looks like from the Global South. Munnik’s response was to allow visitors to smell it.

The starting point is specific: jasminum polyanthum or Chinese jasmine, a weed that grows through the fences and hedges of Johannesburg neighbourhoods like Parkview and West Cliff. It blooms for about three weeks at the end of August into September, releasing what Munnik describes as the most intoxicating smell she has ever encountered.

It is the signifier of spring in Johannesburg, more prevalent there than anywhere else she has lived, growing most fully in the overlooked and dishevelled spaces of the city. The jasmine that grows through the fences of Parkview is classified as a weed, unwanted and overlooked, and yet it gives those forgotten spaces exactly what Munnik describes — a redeeming break, something absolutely mesmerising released into an otherwise arid landscape.

In trying to capture that smell for Concrete Jasmine, Munnik sourced every jasmine absolute available to her — jasmine Egypt, jasmine France, jasmine sambac — each one beautiful in its own way, each one falling short of the specific flower she remembered.

The jasmine that grows along the fences of Parkview cannot be cultivated at the scale that a perfumery requires. It exists in Joburg the way it should — wild, seasonal, impossible to bottle — and so the perfume she made carries the memory of it rather than the thing itself. That gap between the memory and the material, between what she was reaching for and what she could hold, is part of what Concrete Jasmine is about.

The scent is delivered through The Strangling Fruit (2026), her sculptural installation at JCAF. The work was first shown as a seven-piece solo exhibition at WHATIFTHEWORLD gallery in Cape Town earlier this year, running from April to June 2026, before Munnik was commissioned to bring a new configuration of it to JCAF for Reverse Futures.

The five flower heads now on view at JCAF carry the same logic as the original series but speak directly to the exhibition’s themes of place, ecology and futures imagined from the Global South.

Five resin-cast flower heads, each one made from Hario coffee filters stained with the residue of natural aromatic materials including lemon verbena tincture, tree moss tincture, synthetic cannabis raw material, saffron absolute, dragon pea flower tea, honey and rose fermentation residue, as well as brown shimmer eyeshadow and citrine crystal shards, are mounted on slim copper stems fixed to an exposed brick wall.

Arranged at different heights, they appear to be growing upward, reaching toward the light the way plants instinctively do. Each flower head contains a diffuser replenished daily — the scent releasing gently into the space around it, close enough to draw you in.

The coffee filters were not originally intended to be art. Munnik had been pouring her morning coffee through Hario filters over months, and when she noticed the residue left behind — the filters stained with the remnants of soaked coffee grains — she cast them in resin. What emerged was something flesh-like, honey-textured and translucent — something that looked organic and alive.

“There’s always an ‘aha’ moment in my practice,” she reflects, “where I push the material potential of something to the point where it transcends language, it becomes purely affective.”

That accidental discovery — a filter stained by something as ordinary as a morning coffee — became the foundation of the Strangling Fruit series.

The title comes from Jeff VanderMeer’s Annihilation, a novel about a zone where nature mutates beyond human comprehension. A particular image from the book stayed with Munnik long after she finished reading it: a woman is consumed by a bear and the bear inherits her screaming voice, so that whenever it calls out, it is the woman’s scream that emerges.

“That blew my mind,” she says. “Co-evolution, co-mutation. Climate fiction writes us into that story and makes you realise that you are not autonomous or finite. You are co-mutating with it.”

She points to microplastics found in placenta as evidence that this is not fiction but fact — the world figuring out how to consume and recycle plastic, and us already part of that ecosystem whether we choose to be or not. For Munnik, climate fiction does not feel like speculation. It feels like a description of now.

This thinking runs directly into her PhD at Stellenbosch, which she is developing alongside a teaching post where she runs a course called Re-scentualising the Museum: Telling history to the senses. The course examines Western-model museums in South Africa as colonial institutions that preserve memory by stripping specimens of life.

“In order to memorialise and historicise them, they strip them of all textural qualities,” she explains, pointing to the way wet collections bleach everything they preserve, drawing out natural colour in the very act of saving it.

Her PhD looks at apartheid-founded museums as decomposing bodies, asking what might grow from their decay. The interest in death as a methodology goes deeper than the academic, though.

“I’ve been interested in mushrooms,” she says, “and there is a famous mycologist who, when asked what she thinks the one message mushrooms have for the world is, said that death is not the end. When a mushroom dies and starts to rot, it actually spreads its spores that way. It only popped up from a mycelial network underground in order to spread life elsewhere.”

That idea, death as dispersal rather than ending, is as much a political position as a natural one. It shapes how she thinks about South Africa’s recent past and what it might be possible to build once certain things are allowed to fall away.

Scent, she argues, is where this thinking becomes most urgent. She points to the thorn hedges that Jan Van Riebeeck built in what is now Kirstenbosch Botanical Gardens as a way of making this visible. Built to keep the Khoikhoi from the livestock and grazing land that had always been theirs, and to displace the San people from land they had inhabited for centuries, the hedges were a form of what she calls colonial landscaping terror. Parts of them are still there.

“When you visit the botanical gardens, you see so much of the inheritance of colonial ecological terror that no one thinks about,” she says.

We walk past it without knowing what it was for. Nature holds that history quietly. Scent holds a different kind — one that cannot be institutionally erased.

She teaches her students about Rampies Sny, a 2022 installation by Thania Peterson at the Indigo Waves exhibition, in which a wall of organza parcels that contain dried citrus leaves smoked with frankincense essential oils, the aromatic bundles Cape Muslim communities prepare for the Prophet Muhammad’s birthday, brought a lived cultural and religious history into a gallery space that would not otherwise have held it.

Scent, she believes, speaks to the history remembered in the body. You cannot take that away from someone.

Concrete Jasmine works in exactly this way. It is a homage to a city Munnik loves and misses, but it is also a question about what gets preserved and what does not. She did not think she could have made the work while still living in Joburg. The distance gave her new eyes.

“Coming back, you suddenly realise that Johannesburg is this city that is overborne with weeds,” she reflects. “But it’s such a testament to the resilience of plants, and it’s very apocalyptic in the most beautiful way.”

What she saw when she looked again was a city whose overlooked spaces are doing something extraordinary — the same thing the jasmine does, growing where it is not expected to, giving something back that nobody planned for.

The resilience she sees in the jasmine is the same resilience she sees in the people of Johannesburg. “The further I move from the city, the more I really appreciate its occupants,” she says.

“People don’t have a choice but to work together in a really incredible ecosystem. People work together to keep this ecosystem functioning in a way that defies circumstances. I think that’s very admirable.”

Joburg, with all its difficulty, holds onto something that distance only makes more visible.

When asked where the scent goes from here, what Johannesburg might smell like in the future, Munnik is both honest and hopeful. The future of the country is a tenuous subject, she says. But she would not describe it as smelling like destruction or like an ending. She thinks it smells hopeful.

And then, thinking of the mushroom whose death spreads its spores and seeds new life, she offers something that is equal parts ecological observation and political conviction. As the next generation of young South Africans, she says, we need to move forward with the past in mind. And sometimes that means being willing to let something die so that something else can grow.

Reverse Futures is on show at the Joburg Contemporary Art Foundation, Tuesday to Saturday from 11am to 4.15pm, until December 5. Entrance is free and viewing is by appointment only. Bookings can be made at jcaf.org.za.

Wanted

There are few places in Africa where the story of wilderness, wildlife and modern conservation gathers such force as it does in KwaZulu-Natal.

In the hills of Hluhluwe, above the meanderings of the iMfolozi and beneath the basalt walls of the Drakensberg, a remarkable partnership is quietly restoring not only a collection of lodges but also a national inheritance.

Before safari became a language of spectacle, it was something more elemental: a way of entering the wild with humility, knowledge and care.

In KwaZulu-Natal, where so much of Africa’s conservation story began, an ambitious partnership between Ezemvelo KZN Wildlife and a private sector group led by Frank Reardon is returning that idea to its source, restoring a handful of exceptional wilderness properties so that comfort, access, history and conservation can occupy the same room.

In an age when luxury travel, and especially safari travel, is too often confused and conflated with excess, a quietly remarkable project in KwaZulu-Natal is offering something rarer: accessibility, authenticity, history and a renewed sense of place.

The KZN Wildlife Collection, a partnership between Ezemvelo KZN Wildlife and the private sector partners led by Frank Reardon, is far more than a lodge refurbishment programme; it is an act of careful custodianship: restoring some of the province’s most historically resonant conservation properties with enough restraint to improve their comfort, but not so much that their character is obscured or their memory disguised.

The first green shoot is Mtwazi Lodge, a century-old ranger’s house at Hilltop in Hluhluwe, set in indigenous forest above one of Africa’s most important protected landscapes. Hluhluwe-iMfolozi is often described as Africa’s oldest proclaimed game reserve, but that hardly captures its symbolic weight.

This is the spiritual centre of Zululand: once King Shaka’s hunting ground, later the crucible of modern African conservation, and the landscape from which the white rhino was brought back from the brink. Mtwazi carries that story in its walls.

It was once associated with Captain “Mtwazi” Potter, the first conservator of Hluhluwe-iMfolozi Park; his family remained connected to the house for decades, and its annex even served as a classroom for local children.

Today, after refurbishment, the lodge is being repositioned as a sanctuary in the forest atop the hill at Hluhluwe — a confluence where comfort, memory and conservation history meet. This balance is the sweet spot.

The Collection aims to upgrade four exceptional Ezemvelo properties into a small portfolio of distinctive, accessible wilderness lodges.

Each must be comfortable enough for discerning local and international guests but true enough to its origins to resist the flattening language of “luxury”. This is not about applying an overtraded safari aesthetic producing generic safari villas; rather, it is about allowing architecture, interiors and service to humbly and sincerely respond to the structure, the landscape and the legacy.

The four properties offer a striking range of KwaZulu-Natal’s natural and cultural inheritance: Mtwazi is the conservation-history lodge rooted in the Big Five country of Hluhluwe.

Hlatikhulu Bush Lodge, secluded in an unfenced idyllic Tamboti grove directly alongside and above the Black iMfolozi River, draws its power from the primitive wilderness trails tradition pioneered in these landscapes by Dr Ian Player and Magqubu Ntombela: walking, tracking, listening, and leaving as little trace as possible.

Up in the Drakensberg, Thendele Lodge looks into the Amphitheatre and towards the world’s highest waterfall, Tugela Falls, while Rock Lodge at Giant’s Castle sits among monumental stone, San art, lammergeier country and montane silence.

Together, they form a collection of unlike, connected things: bush and mountain, river and cave, historic ranger’s residence and modernist stone lodge.

That diversity is the commercial strength of the idea. For Ezemvelo, it offers a way to raise the profile, occupancy and long-term sustainability of existing assets. For donors and private partners, it offers the chance to contribute to something with legacy value rather than short-term shine.

For travellers, it conveniently opens the door to places that feel both internationally compelling and deeply South African. For surrounding communities, sustainable employment and involvement in defining the sense of place with locally sourced craft.

The design challenge is elegant and yet subtle. How does one make a 100-year-old ranger’s house more comfortable without making it anonymous? How does a bush camp become more beautiful without becoming precious?

How do interiors reflect Zulu history, San spirituality, conservation memory, local art and craft, animal life and the practical demands of hospitality without turning into a museum? — and all on a considered budget.

The answer lies in understanding and applying restraint. Durable materials, better beds, thoughtful lighting, local art, a well-located plunge pool, well-trained guides and cooks, a sense of welcome, and more than a hint of generosity.

A recognition that the celebration of place must also be a celebration of the past, of what has come before. The rangers, trackers, cooks and scullers, and communities who give these landscapes their human depth.

This is why the project matters. South Africa has no shortage of private lodges at the top end of the market. It has far fewer examples of public conservation assets being carefully reimagined so that they remain accessible, differentiated and proud of their institutional heritage.

Ezemvelo’s legacy is not merely context here; it is front and centre as the asset. In the right hands, refurbishment moves from decor to an interpretation.

It becomes a narrative, a way of telling visitors that KwaZulu-Natal’s wilderness story did not begin with or indeed end with private luxury, but with rangers’ houses, foot trails, local knowledge, contested histories and the long, unfinished work of conservation.

While the unique locations and un-replicable properties are undeniably the attraction, its essence remains in celebrating the union of some of the world’s most dramatic wilderness areas with one of the world’s most acclaimed conservation agencies.

At Mtwazi, in the forest, with nyala, warthog and duiker attendant in the garden, that story feels close. The house is not grand in the modern safari sense. Its importance is quieter than that.

It reminds us that the most compelling travel experiences are not always the newest, the most polished, and certainly not the most expensive. They are places where history has happened and has been conjured again.

This, after all, is where it began.

kznwildlifecollection.co.za

Wanted

That is one of the things that makes Tamodi Estate & Polo Reserve, the five-star boutique hotel which recently opened in The Crags, a little different.

Set among the countryside just outside Plettenberg Bay, the property is surrounded by the Tsitsikamma mountains and protected landscapes, with the Robberg Peninsula, beaches and wildlife of the Garden Route all within easy reach.

It’s the kind of setting that encourages a slower pace. Tamodi has only 10 suites, each more than 100m², with fireplaces, bathtubs and views of the surrounding landscape.

The interiors, designed by Studio Ashby, the London-based studio founded by South African-British designer Sophie Ashby, follow the same quiet mood, pairing the building’s natural textures with bespoke furniture, locally made ceramics and rugs, contemporary art and pieces from South African artisans.

The main building feels more like a country house than a conventional hotel, with a library and reading room, terraces and a swimming pool. There are places to sit with a book, linger over a drink or simply look out at the landscape, which is probably the point when you have come all this way to get away from things.

Food follows the same unhurried rhythm. Breakfast is served as a buffet, while lunch and dinner are prepared à la carte using seasonal ingredients from the estate’s garden and nearby producers. There is a snack bar for grazing during the day, including locally produced biltong, while the wine cellar focuses on South African wines. Aperitivo hour provides the usual excuse to stretch the afternoon a little further.

Then there are the horses. Polo is a significant part of Tamodi’s identity, with stables, a playing field and training tracks on the property, and 20 horses. The estate hosts invitation-only tournaments and forms part of Plettenberg Bay’s polo season, which runs from November to April.

Guests, however, don’t need to know their chukkas from their stirrups to make the most of it. Horseback rides can be arranged, while the concierge can organise guided walks through the surrounding landscape, trips to the Matjiesrivier River delta and visits to beaches including Keurbooms and Cathedral Rock. Wildlife experiences and regional vineyard tours are also available.

Tamodi notes that the property is evolving, with plans for a spa, restaurant, wellness café and lounge, and additional suites. The expansion is being accompanied by an environmental rehabilitation programme focused on restoring endemic vegetation, including fynbos, in areas where introduced species have taken over.

Tamodi also supports a community school for local children and the families of its team members, with education and training forming part of the initiative.

Tamodi is an interesting addition to the Garden Route’s crowded accommodation scene, largely because it doesn’t seem particularly interested in rushing you through it. There are horses to ride, trails to walk, beaches to explore and wine to drink, but there is also a library, a bathtub and a view.

You could, of course, do all of the above, or you could stay put for the afternoon. That luxury of choice seems to be exactly the point.

tamodi.com

Wanted

From day one, the powerhouse restaurateur was a world builder. For her, the table was always more than a place to eat; it was a space where texture, memory, family, and ritual converged. And over the past two decades, as the founder and CEO of Tashas Group has built an empire of restaurants stretching from South Africa to the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, Saudi Arabia, and the UK, she has developed an instinctive understanding of the objects people return to again and again. Tashas is not about ornamental pieces reserved for special occasions, but the plates, glasses, and linens that feel good in the hand and endure the rhythms of daily life.

Now, with the launch of Tashas Home in Sea Point, those objects have taken their rightful place as part of the Tashas universe — from the restaurant table into a retail space of their own.

Located inside the Art Deco residence Dolce Vita on Regent Road, the store feels like an obvious extension of the Tashas world. There is the same understated elegance that has long defined the group’s restaurants: warm textures, restrained styling, and an atmosphere that encourages lingering. The space is intentionally small and pared back, allowing the objects to speak for themselves.

What makes Tashas Home compelling is that this is not a celebrity lifestyle brand conjured from mood boards and trend forecasts. Every piece in the collection has earned its place through use. Much of the crockery, glassware, and linen has been sourced from or used in the group’s restaurants over the years, surviving the pressures of high-volume hospitality while retaining a sense of beauty and refinement.

The collection currently draws from three of the group’s concepts: Tashas, Avli, and Arlecchino, each with its own distinctive mood. The Tashas edit is crisp and timeless, built around white porcelain, classic glassware, and immaculate linen tablecloths that evoke relaxed Mediterranean lunches and long breakfasts that stretch into the afternoon.

Avli, inspired by the group’s Athenian-influenced restaurants in Dubai and Bahrain, introduces richer textures and more tactile finishes. There are silver-toned serving pieces, artisanal bowls, and statement platters that speak to generous shared dining and old-world hospitality.

Arlecchino, meanwhile, injects a playful Italian spirit into the mix, with characterful pieces designed to bring personality and warmth to the table.

And in true Tashas’ style, there is an almost obsessive attention to proportion and practicality throughout. Plates are selected for balance and weight. Glasses are chosen for clarity and comfort in the hand. Materials range from porcelain and bone china to stoneware and earthenware, while the South African-made linens prioritise durability as much as softness and elegance.

The store also offers a glimpse into the broader Tashas universe. Alongside tableware are the group’s published titles, including tashas Café Classics, tashas Inspired, and Galaxy Bar Cocktails, presented beside cocktail accessories and striking blue glassware in a dedicated bar section.

What emerges is not simply a homeware store but an articulation of Sideris’s broader philosophy: that good design should be lived with rather than admired from afar.

tashashome.com

From the June issue of Wanted, 2026.

I was expected at Zomerlust Boutique Hotel at a civilised 3pm. Instead, the day accumulated small irritations with the efficiency of compound interest - fiddly obligations that eat 20 minutes here, 40 there, until suddenly it’s rush hour and Cape Town has placed Paarl somewhere beyond Outer Mongolia.

I eventually pulled into Zomerlust at about 7pm, apologetic and frazzled. Waiting for me was co-owner Wayne Williams, who looked more cheerful than a man entitled to resent a guest for being late.

There was a reason. He wanted to show me his hotel and within minutes, I understood why.

Williams and his business partner, Wikus Lategan, are commercial property developers and first-time hoteliers who originally bought the 1.3ha Main Road property with grander development schemes in mind. Zomerlust was incidental: an ageing hotel that had opened in 1993 and, in recent years, lost its lustre.

Then the old house got under their skin.

“We bought it for the development land at the back,” Williams says. “But this ran away with us when we started fixing it.” Many expensive sentences begin this way!

What followed was a complete restoration and rethink of a property whose history stretches back to 1792. Originally Cape Dutch, the main house evolved through Georgian influences and later acquired the sort of early-20th-century embellishments described as “Baker-esque”. There are thick walls, lead-paned windows, handsome architraves, old tiles, elaborate woodwork and the slightly eccentric proportions that make heritage buildings wonderful to visit — and maddening to renovate.

“You can’t change anything,” Williams says as we peer into each different room. Instead, they worked with it. Local interior designer Misi Overturf has given Zomerlust the personality that makes the ubiquitous beige boutique hotel seem a failure of imagination. Her palette borrows from the Boland landscape: burnt oranges and ochres, citrus yellows, lime and forest greens, deep blues and softer shades inspired by mountain, sky, vineyard and garden.

There’s William Morris wallpaper everywhere — even ceilings, striped upholstery, florals, restored antiques and contemporary pieces. One room is enveloped in green; another feels masculine, with wooden floors and richer tones. Bathrooms appear in their own unexpected colour combinations, some with freestanding Victoria + Albert tubs, fluted-glass showers and two-tone tiles. But it hangs together beautifully.

The trick, Overturf suggests, is that eclecticism requires more discipline than minimalism. Anyone can make a room harmonious by making everything greige. Doing it with orange, green, botanical wallpaper and a coloured bathtub requires vision.

Williams’ pride in the result is transparent and very endearing. He’s positively beaming as he shows me around. “All the rooms are different,” he says, repeatedly pointing out details.

Then there are the bees. Zomerlust’s former emblem was, Williams says dismissively, “a kind of Zorro Z ... boring”. Overturf replaced it with a bee, reasoning that bees build intricate homes, live in communities and, importantly, always return to the hive.

The motif buzzes discreetly through the property. Hexagonal flooring references honeycomb, bees appear in embroidery and décor, there are bee-inspired cocktails, honey and honey-scented products. There are bee-emblazoned slippers that Williams implores me to take with me. Thankfully, nobody has dressed the staff as apiarists.

Zomerlust with all it’s charms is luxurious and grandly comfortable without making you feel trepidatious about the impending bill.

Eleven rooms occupy the main house and there are four more in Die Stalle, restored former stables. My signature suite was generous, comfortable and overlooked the Paarl landscape, but the hotel is full of smaller pleasures too: the plant-filled Sun Stoep where morning light pours in; a restored library stocked with board games and chess; all-day coffee, pastries and cold drinks included for guests. Impressively, everything in each room’s well-stocked minibar is complimentary too; and, importantly for anyone who’s ever crawled around beneath hotel furniture looking for somewhere to charge a phone, an abundance of plugs and USB points. “We installed a lot,” Williams says. “That’s one of the things hotels lack.”

The hotel’s history becomes more complicated downstairs. Parts of what’s now SMEUL Restaurant (the Afrikaans word means to smoulder) date to the late 1700s. The walls are thick; some spaces formed part of the servants’ quarters, and Williams points out barred windows and an old kitchen area associated with enslaved people who once lived and worked here. Rather than sanding history into something prettier, brittle walls have been left exposed and subtly painted by artist Mernette Swartz.

The dining and kitchen rooms belong to chef Kevin Grobler, and if the hotel is about preserving a building without embalming it, the restaurant follows the same philosophy.

Grobler, a Paarl local whose CV includes JAN in Nice and Delaire Graff restaurants, cooks with open flame and wood-fired stoves — a trend that’s both fashionable and ancient.

The menu is one of the hotel’s elements that will ensure I return. Fire-roasted beetroot arrives with smoked coconut yoghurt; lamb is cooked until its richness falls off the bone; vegetables carry the char and sweetness that flame delivers better than any sous-vide bath ever will.

Williams insists that the beef carpaccio is the most delicious I’ll ever taste, but I opt for the beef tartar special. It’s good, but when the owner’s starter arrives and he offers me a taste, I make a note to always listen to the expert. We have fresh line fish for mains, and it’s exceptional — firm, charred and full of flavour. I’m stuffed, but Williams suggests we should taste the desserts, so we have all three: pumpkin Basque cheesecake; a theatrical, marinated citrus meringue torched tableside; and chocolate and coffee semifreddo.

In winter, Zomerlust feels particularly suited to cocooning and we head to the ladies bar, one of the first registered ladies bars in the country, for a last drink.

There’s something deeply satisfying about returning upstairs after dinner, passing wallpaper designed more than a century ago, climbing a Burmese teak staircase and disappearing into an enormous bed in a room with walls thick enough to defeat both weather and stray hotel noises.

By breakfast the next morning, I was sincerely regretting my ridiculous arrival time. Every minute in this sanctuary now feels cherished. Looking out my anteroom window at the buttercup Rolls-Royce the owners bought to stand sentry in the road, I know I’ll be back.

Paarl itself has sometimes suffered by comparison with the more marketed Winelands towns of Franschhoek and Stellenbosch. But Main Road is one of the Cape’s great architectural journeys, lined with buildings representing centuries of local history, while the surrounding mountains give the town a grandeur that frames it.

Zomerlust provides another reason to explore the town. Williams and Lategan may have stumbled into hotel ownership, but the accident has produced something exceptional. They haven’t tried to turn an old Paarl homestead into a generic luxury hotel. Nor have they preserved it so reverently that staying there feels like sleeping in a museum. They’ve let the past misbehave slightly.

William Morris meets lime-green bathrooms, antique wardrobes coexist with USB-C ports, centuries-old walls contain a restaurant built around fire, a bee has replaced a boring Z, an entranceway arch is painted jewel green.

It amazes me that two property developers who intended to build something else discovered that the most interesting thing on their land was already there and then went all in, invigorating Zomerlust, as is fitting for a place full of bees.

zomerlust.co.za

TimesLive

Dozens of local kids will line up to guide their handmade and hand-driven machines around a challenging course. Success in this sport requires a carefully designed vehicle, speedy legs and deft navigation of the uneven terrain.

You may not have heard of Philipstown, located slap bang in the middle of South Africa (between Colesberg and De Aar). But its global reputation is growing, thanks to a documentary streaming on Prime Video and to WGP Mobile, a fantastic app that turns this dusty Karoo dorp into the virtual setting for a racing game.

The film, directed by Paul Ward, doesn’t present wire cars as a panacea for the socioeconomic challenges of a place like Philipstown. It is not magically transformed, nor are the lives of its residents; participation in the race cannot bring back an orphan’s parents, treat addiction, fix a literacy crisis or solve rural poverty.

But the Philipstown WireCar Foundation — the non-profit company behind the film, the game and an online shop selling draadkarre like those racing down the town’s streets — has already made significant progress towards a vision of wider community upliftment.

Racing in the grand prix (including the months of preparation that go into it) is a chance, as one racer’s mother puts it, for the children “to do the work of children”: to get dirty having some good clean fun, applying their minds and bodies to a joyful and therefore meaningful task. Above all, there is the work of exercising a childlike imagination.

This is serious business, and it’s something adults have to do too. The documentary team turn Philipstown’s wire wonders into digitally realised supercars and monster trucks, affirming the racers’ descriptions of their experience. Imagination, here, is both a tool for aspiration (an orientation towards the future) and a means of celebrating the familiar and known (reconstituting the present).

Imagination can also be a means of reaching back into the past — perhaps a history from which we have been severed, or a childhood experience we were never allowed. This is the impulse driving My Father’s Shadow, a film by British-Nigerian duo Akinola and Wale Davies that is being screened in South Africa next week as part of the European Film Festival.

The Davies brothers grew up without a father. He died when they were boys, even younger than the preteen protagonists in My Father’s Shadow: brothers Remi and Akin, whose fortunes we follow on a seminal day in Nigeria’s history. It is June 24 1993, the date on which Gen Ibrahim Babangida annulled the results of a presidential election that should have brought democratic candidate MKO Abiola to power. The country was plunged into another violent military dictatorship.

In the film, this moment of political crisis frames a day in which the boys are allowed to tag along with their otherwise absent father, Folarin (played by Ṣọpẹ́ Dìrísù) as he travels to Lagos to collect unpaid wages from his job at a factory. It is a day of connection and revelation, the kind of day that the adult Davies brothers wish they could have enjoyed with their own father.

As Achille Tenkiang has observed, My Father’s Shadow is a reminder that “in postcolonial Africa, the story of the father and the story of the nation have always been the same, and the strongman state didn’t merely fail its citizens. It orphaned them”.

One consequence of this colonial and postcolonial history is the African-Caribbean diaspora in the UK (among whom Dìrísù and the Davies brothers may be counted, along with the film’s cinematographer Jermaine Edwards). There is a powerful sense of longing in this British-Nigerian coproduction — a kind of anemoia, or displaced nostalgia.

Shot on 16mm celluloid, My Father’s Shadow is also a loving tribute to Nigeria and especially Lagos, in all the colours of its visual urban poetry and even in its brutality.

• The 13th European Film Festival South Africa runs from September 17-27 in Johannesburg, Cape Town and Durban.

Business Day

The Toyota SA Derby returns to Kyalami Equestrian Park from October 1 to 4, marking the 61st edition of one of South Africa’s longest-running equestrian events. If you know your dressage from your showjumping, you probably already have it in the diary. If you don’t, it’s still a pretty good excuse to spend a spring weekend watching some very impressive horses do things that most of us would prefer to admire from a safe distance.

First held in 1965, the Derby has retained its 1 200-metre, 18-obstacle course, making the basic challenge remarkably similar to the one faced by competitors more than six decades ago. The horse and rider have to work as a pair, judging pace, distance and timing as they make their way around a course that leaves little room for hesitation.

The Derby is also the final event in this year’s Toyota Equestrian Series, which has been running across four events throughout 2026. The overall Series champion will leave with a new Toyota Hilux D/C Legend, but for most competitors, the weekend is about the more immediate business of getting around the course without knocking anything down.

Showjumping is the obvious headline act, but there is plenty else happening across the various arenas. The programme includes Dressage, Showing and Compleat Horse, as well as the Show Horse Derby, Working Riding Derby, Working Hunter Derby and Dressage Derby.

The Micro Speed Derby is one of the more popular spectator events, packing plenty of action into a smaller format. The Compleat Horse competition, meanwhile, puts versatility to the test and comes with a R20,000 prize purse.

And then there is everything happening once you step away from the arenas. Food stalls and markets will be set up around the venue, while Toyota will have vehicle displays and driving experiences. There are activities for children, too, so you don’t necessarily have to arrive knowing the difference between a fetlock and a stirrup to enjoy yourself.

This broader, more social side of the Derby is part of what has helped it stick around for 61 years. It remains a serious competition for the riders, but for spectators it has become a fairly easy way to spend a day: watch some horses, eat something, wander around, watch some more horses, and perhaps discover that you are considerably more invested in the outcome than you expected to be.

Entry is free from Thursday October 1 to Saturday October 3. Tickets are required on Sunday, October 4, when the Derby itself takes centre stage. Grandstand and VIP tickets are also available, with access to an after-party and live music included. Visit kyalamipark.com or the Kyalami Park Equestrian Facebook page for ticketing information and details.

Wanted

Yet here I am again, this time at the Bollini family’s gleaming new Sandton Gate outpost, watching the familiar faces of the waiters from the original Oaklands restaurant weave between tables while Caterina Bollini and her son Lorenzo attempt to explain how a tiny Italian deli became one of Johannesburg’s most beloved food destinations.

The glossy restaurant that is giving St Tropez-meets-Capri vibes opened in May, and already it feels as though all of Johannesburg has arrived. Lorenzo is counting covers while Caterina is discussing service, menus and bookings in her usual brusque style. They are already fully booked.

This success story is more than 40 years in the making. When I ask Caterina what has kept customers returning for four decades, she doesn’t launch into a speech about trends or innovation.

“I think we’ve never changed the food,” she says. “We’ve added a couple of things over the years, but not really. The food is always the same. When you make the same food every day, year after year, you eventually reach excellence. We have people who have worked with us for decades. Some of them were taught by my grandmother. They do the same thing every day and that repetition creates consistency.”

Consistency sounds deceptively simple, but in a city obsessed with the next opening, the next chef and the next trend, consistency may be the rarest luxury of all.

The Bollini story begins long before the first restaurant opened its doors in 1986. Caterina’s parents, Dante and Valeria, arrived from Bologna in the late 1960s, bringing with them recipes, traditions and what Italians call mal d’Africa — a longing for Africa that never quite leaves you.

My father was determined to recreate Italy wherever he could. He started raising pigs because he wanted to make Parma ham

Caterina Bollini

“There was nothing here,” Caterina recalls with a laugh. “No food culture. No television. No cellphones. My father was determined to recreate Italy wherever he could. He started raising pigs because he wanted to make Parma ham. He made salamis. He was always dreaming up something new. Dante was in a wheelchair, but his mind travelled at 2,000km/h. He always dreamed of opening a second shop. We have fulfilled his dream.”

The name Tortellino d’Oro itself came from a letter sent by her grandfather in Italy.

“My grandfather wrote to my father and said: ‘Maybe one day you should open a tortellino d’oro.’ It was just a sentence in a letter, but somehow it stayed with him.”

The dream remained just that until tragedy struck. After the death of their young son Filippo, Dante and Valeria decided life was too short to postpone what they really wanted to do.

“My parents were accountants and neither of them really loved it,” says Caterina. “After Filippo died they said, ‘No. We’re finally going to do what we’ve always wanted to do.’ They opened a tiny little shop and started making tortellini and tagliatelle. We weren’t trained restaurateurs. We just knew food.”

The original deli measured only 35m². Yet from those modest beginnings grew one of Johannesburg’s most beloved culinary institutions.

Food, however, was never simply a business in the Bollini family.

“La tavola, the table, is not just a table,” says Caterina. “It is where life happens. It is where you discuss the dramas, the celebrations, the disappointments. When I was growing up in Bologna, my grandmother set the table three times a day. We came home from school, and lunch was ready. Everything happened around food. We met around the table. We still do.”

Across the table, Lorenzo nods. At 20-something, he represents the third generation of the family’s story and the driving force behind the new restaurant. His mother had other plans for him.

“Before I went to university she told me, ‘Become a lawyer. Don’t do what I do. This is a hard life.’ I tried. I lasted about a month and a half. Then I realised I was never going to survive behind a desk.”

After he graduated, he returned to the family business. “Food has given me everything. It sent me to great schools. It created opportunities. It shaped my entire life. Food means everything to me because it has provided everything for me.”

While Caterina protects the traditions, Lorenzo is helping to shape the future. He has curated an ambitious wine programme, assembled an impressive whisky collection and developed signature cocktails inspired by family stories and Italian heritage.

One cocktail is named after his grandmother. Others draw on memories of immigration, family holidays and the culture that shaped them.

“I think everything should have meaning,” he says. “People connect to stories. If you can give them a story, they understand what they’re drinking and why.”

Sunday Times Lifestyle

In the 1980s, Vogue Italia editor Franca Sozzani challenged Bolofo to capture images reflecting his upbringing and culture. Alongside Andrew Dosunmu ― one of the few black stylists in the field at the time ― Bolofo returned to South Africa, took to the streets of Soweto, and street-cast its residents, blending local style with European pieces.

These photographs became Koto Bolofo’s renowned Soweto Series (1997), where Bolofo transformed the portrayal of township life. The series reflects his personality and the vibrant presence between the collaborators on set. Together, Bolofo and Dosunmu constructed an alternative visual representation of Soweto, one that was rarely seen in the dominant photographic archives.

This approach was particularly important as photography has historically been treated as an objective medium, despite its use to classify, control, and dehumanise black bodies in South Africa.

Under apartheid, photographs frequently reinforced racial hierarchy and state power, showing black life through a controlling gaze. Bolofo’s work disrupted this narrative by portraying Soweto not just as a site of suffering, but also as a site of style, play and community. His models are not passive objects before the lens but active participants in the making of the images, shifting the visual language from control to authorship and using the camera as a tool of resistance.

This shift can be understood through postcolonial critiques of the gaze. The colonial gaze is about more than just looking; it’s about power, about who has the right to define meaning and who is barred from representing themselves. Bolofo’s photographs challenged this hierarchy. The individuals in the pictures rejected the limited stereotypes often associated with township life and are presented as contemporary, self-aware and fashion-forward. The series expanded what could be seen and imagined about black life in South Africa.

Bolofo has described his process as one rooted in laughter, spontaneity, and projection. He deliberately avoided ‘clichéd’ documentary images of Soweto by casting on the streets, embracing local culture by interacting in the local language, and securing permission from participants before styling and photographing them.

“I like to have fun; I like to laugh,” Bolofo noted. “And along the way, I learnt early that the key was to project my own bubbly self onto somebody and hope that we’d meet in the middle to create a spontaneous picture.”

The final images were the product of an exchange between Bolofo, his camera, Dosunmu, his collaborators, and the social energy of Soweto itself. They show the township’s liveliness and character, centralising collective effervescence and shifting the camera from an instrument of control to a tool of self-representation.

This can be understood through what Bell Hooks calls the “oppositional gaze” — a way of seeing that opposes being controlled and reclaims authority in the act of representation. Bolofo and his models transcended the fixed roles of observer and observed to become coproducers of the images. The people in the photographs are not fixed as “the Other”; instead they actively construct themselves through dress, posture and performance. Their bodies become sites of creativity and refusal, capable of mocking authority, resisting stereotypes and asserting individuality without needing to declare politics in a direct or conventional way.

The series also revealed the wider role of style in post-apartheid South Africa. Dress becomes a language through which youth and communities negotiate identity, resist control and invent new forms of belonging. Through style, they respond to and contest the structures that confine them. The body becomes a space where meaning is created and shared.

What Bolofo achieved builds on a longer tradition of black photographers in publications like Drum, who documented black life and culture with dignity and style. What set him apart was his platform and connections — his ability to bring that visual language into the pages of Vogue Italia with the support of figures like Sozzani and Dosunmu, disrupting dominant narratives about black people in Soweto from within the fashion industry itself.

I am drawn to Bolofo’s work because it represents the familiar scenes and liveliness one would find in Soweto. These pictures are not static; they are like films that play within your mind. One photograph in particular stays with me, featuring two figures posing beside a vintage Peugeot in the streets of Soweto. The image feels like something lifted from my own family album. One woman, wearing a sparkling studded sleeveless dress with matching shoes, carries herself with a kind of effortless glamour. The other figure, a man sits casually on the car bonnet in a tailored jacket and patterned beanie, composed yet playful. Against the streets of Soweto their beauty stands out clearly, producing an image of the township that has always existed.

Through his Soweto Series, Bolofo created a visual archive that feels both personal and collective, as if memory, family history and township culture are meeting within the frame. Ultimately, the series shows that the camera is not a neutral tool but a contested site of power. Under apartheid, it served as a tool of control that reinforced systems of inequality. In Bolofo’s hands, it shifts to a medium of reclamation, allowing subjects to take part in their own representation, to express their identity, and to explore new possibilities for how black life can be perceived and understood.

This writing was produced through the Writer-in-Residence programme made possible by the Roger Ballen Centre for Photography and the Inside Out Centre for the Arts. This work was developed in collaboration with Wanted Online and the African Fashion Research Institute, with funding from the National Arts Council of South Africa.

Wanted