Twenty years goes by in a flash – especially when you’ve got your finger on the fast forward button on the microfilm machine at the Cape Town Library. This is where the Cape Times has been archived.
It’s like time travel: the film is threaded into a projector and, with a flick of a switch, you’re taken back to any year in the Cape Times’s 157-year history. The year we’ve chosen is 1994 – when the Cape Times cost R1. It’s now R7.50. Then 24 beers cost R31.75 – you can’t even get a six-pack for that anymore and probably will only buy a draft at one of Cape Town’s more lah-di-dah drinking establishments.
South Africa was making its way from apartheid to democracy. It was the year of jazz in smoky nightclubs; amandlas in the street; it was the year of hope – and, for some, it was the year of fear.
The country’s democratic debut comes to life on the Cape Times’s news pages. The newspapers flash by in headlines:
l Vote the beloved country.
l Blast rocks Pretoria.
l Uys satire ban angers viewers.
l New flag to be hoisted in 9 cities.
l Countdown.
Streams of copy about political violence, threats to boycott the elections, the accusations and the counter-accusations and how the country is on a knife’s edge. Rent-a-quote pundits describe the political situation as “fragile”. The country is politics obsessed.
However, we’re looking for the smaller stories, stories that slipped through the news cracks because we were distracted by the momentous political transformation.
The first non-poll headline jumps out from the sea of election news: SA man charged with drugs in Thailand.
He is Alexander Fregys Krebs. He was arrested on April 26 – on the eve of the election – after being caught with 1.2kg of heroin at Bangkok’s international airport. The heroin had a street value of R500 000, which would have bought half a million copies of the Cape Times. Krebs was sentenced to death, but that was later commuted to 100 years, then 40 and, after serving 18 years, he was eventually pardoned on Thai King Bhumibol Adulyadej’s 84th birthday.
Krebs was sent to jail as the country was set free. He spent his days in prison painting pictures. He drew a portrait of Nelson Mandela, which was given to Mandela.
In 2012, on April 22, he arrived back. “I could feel the freedom in the streets,” he says, speaking yesterday on the second anniversary of his release.
Now known as Shani Krebs, he says he spent his first day in jail while people were voting. “I was denied being part of that historic day, but I had committed the crime and had to face up to the consequences.”
In the last two years, he has become an anti-drug campaigner, a motivational speaker and an author: his book, Dragons and Butterflies, documenting his 18-year experience, has just hit the shelves.
“Our society had made massive strides,” he says. “We are integrated and South Africa has become one nation.”
In 1994, integration made news – especially when the people integrating are an ex-apartheid cabinet minister and his “coloured” girlfriend. Remember Piet Koornhof? There’s a picture of him and his girlfriend Marcelle Adams. Koornhof, who had been a researcher for Hendrik Verwoerd, had taken a hop, skip and jump across the colour bar.
In 1994, the Cape Times ran a story about who the colourful couple would vote for. Koornhof joined the ANC in 2001 and died in 2007. By that time, Adams had moved to Germany to be with her next lover, pilot Fritz Cherdron, where she was a full-time mother to five children. She didn’t attend Koornhof’s funeral service, but said she was “very hurt that I couldn’t attend the cremation service”.
On the Cape Times’s appointments page, where companies boast about their employees’ achievements: Nicole Lissner is made manager Radio Active Sales Team, Dr Daniel Ncayiyana is appointed director of Western Cape Regional First National Bank and Eric Schmitz is named “marketing manager of replacement tyres” at Dunlop.
A preliminary Google search reveals that Lissner turned from sales to stunts and went to Hollywood where she “starred” in 2012, White House Down and Diary of a Wimpy Kid. After a bit of cyber sleuthing we manage to track her cellphone number down and find the real Nicole Lissner, who left Radio Active the following year to work for (wait for it), Independent Newspapers for 15 years.
She now owns her own business in Elsie’s River, manufacturing branding in the clothing and footwear industry.
According to Google, Ncayiyana has been very busy in the last 20 years: he became an editor, a professor, a dean, a vice-chancellor and is now an emeritus professor at UCT with a string of academic articles published in prestigious journals. He also helps build new medical schools in Africa.
He doesn’t remember the newspaper announcement, but recalls being a bit of an outsider at the bank. “I was the first black person to be appointed to their board,” he says. He was there for three years before throwing himself completely into academia.
There’s only one Daniel Ncayiyana to track down. However, using the world wide web to find “Eric Schmitz” is like looking for a noodle in a spaghetti bar. Facebook lists 213 Eric Schmitzes. A woman at Dunlop remembers his name, but isn’t sure where he is. Perhaps he has retyred.
The microfilm flashes past an interview with Kirstin Lewis, a promising archer, who had won one of her first major archery competitions. In 1994, Lewis had just turned 18 and was able to vote. She was hoping she had a chance to go to the 1996 Olympics. Lewis does two better. She represents South Africa in the 1996, 2000 and 2004 Olympics, where she ranked 30, 32, and 16 respectively. These days, though, she’s living in Switzerland.
Some people play hard to find, but some people are right under one’s nose. A notice in the Hatched, Matched and Dispatched section (aka The Classifieds) announces the birth of Alexander Cassar to Anthony & Mandy. Cassar, it’s a familiar sounding name. That’s when Eddie Cassar, public relations and promotions man extraordinaire, bounces through the Cape Times’s newsroom. “Alex? That’s my brother’s boy,” he confirms, remembering how he’d visited his brand new nephew after he voted. Bingo.
Born on April 26, Alexander Cassar is one day older than our democracy. He didn’t know that his parents had taken out a classified ad about his birth. Cassar is studying marine mechanical engineering at CPUT. He plays rugby and is into water sports.
“I don’t often think about politics,” he says, “but when I think about what our country has been through I’m glad that I didn’t have to go through that. I just hope that we achieve equality and that racism and discrimination end. And that people can live in harmony. And corruption should end,” he says.
Another notice records that Josephine Stiebel and Mark Dendy-Young are matched in 1994. Has their marriage survived? A Google search reveals that in 2001 the couple had their second child. After some more internet scratching we discover that they have defied SA’s divorce stats and are still matched and own the fancy Franschhoek restaurant and winery La Petite Ferme.
The classifieds is also where you can order a Bunnygram – at just R65. It comes with a chocolate and a teddy. The number – 021 453 604 – no longer works. The horoscope for the country’s democratic birthday reads: “Financial stars are looking relatively healthy, so you have nothing to worry about on that score. It is spiritual and metaphysical questions that are uppermost on your register.”
Those stars are long gone and so are some of the newspaper’s cartoons, like Heart of Juliet Jones, Wizard of ID, Blondie and Dagwood, Peanuts, King Tut, Shoestring. However, 20 years on: Calvin & Hobbes and Madam & Eve are still going strong.
So is the Red House in Newlands. Dressed up in estate agent’s speak as an “historic home”, it’s up for sale for R1.5 million. The Red House dates back to 1729, making it one of Cape Town’s oldest buildings. According to Pam Golding Properties, the house was sold in 1996 for R1m and then again in 1997 for just under R3m. Ben and Ingeborg van Maanen bought it in 1998 for R3.5m and run it as a guest house. It’s on the market again for R12m. Van Maanen said he and his wife were selling the Red House because it was time to move on.
From the excitement of the poll to the normality of house sales, the Cape Times in 1994 captured the silly, the surreal and the sinister – such as the report of the murder of former Rhodes student Fiona Spencer.
No arrests were made days after 24-year-old Spencer was found dead, but police tell reporters they want to speak to two of Spencer’s male acquaintances. Spencer had a good job as a public relations officer with a leading Harare fertiliser company and, three years earlier, had been selected one of the aides to Queen Elizabeth II when Liz visited Zimbabwe.
Spencer had died from “asphyxia due to suffocation” and had multiple bruises on her body
According to a report in 2002, the male acquaintances were arrested in connection with her murder, but charges against both men were withdrawn due to lack of sufficient evidence.
There’s nothing else on the web about Spencer.
Another story that doesn’t get an ending is a drive-by shooting of four teens, brothers Faizel and Yassir September, and Ahmieh Anthony and Ismail Kariem. Yassir is dead. His brother Faizel is left with a bullet lodged in his eye. What happened next? Were the killers caught or did the shooting end up as yet another unsolved case in a dusty docket in a filing cabinet in the bowels of some police building?
Meanwhile, 16-year-old Angelique Orso and her 17-year-old boyfriend Lawrence van Blerk try to get off a murder charge, claiming demons had made them bludgeon Orso’s sleeping mother with a frying pan.
The judge didn’t buy it and Orso was sentenced to 11 years behind bars and Van Blerk got eight years.
An “Angelique Orso” web search reveals that French singer Michel Orso shot to fame in 1966 with his song Angelique– he sold 300 000 records in a few days. But there’s no trail for the mother-killer.
For now Orso and Van Blerk, the Septembers and their friends and Fiona Spencer are just 20-year-old unfinished stories, captured in headlines on black and white microfilm in a corner of a library.