M: Hello down there Jasper, how are things around Sedgefield, around your stoep, in these times of digital media ?

J: Well, OK, for the moment as far as the water story goes. As far as digital media goes, we are one of the few places to have an independent media presence, The Edge, lively especially when our water and power cuts are informatively understandable.

M: Yes, I recall enjoying a copy of The Edge, when I visit your neck of the woods, near the old Choo Tjoe railway line, and its station restaurant. Today I am again wondering, this time in my opengates.africa playpen, about the ongoing role of ‘media’.

J: Ongoing? More like vanishing. That’s disturbing, though. I just read an article finding that all metrics show decline since introducing any form of digital education. It makes me think of Disc Jockeys talking to me of their ’talent’. Oxymoron! Sure, I can’t do what they do, but flipping discs in the same breath as bebop trumpet? Ayikona!

Looking at screens, it seems is not, and will not be, as fundamentally formative as hand-writing and paper. I can hear an English gent muttering …

I have seen the past, and it worked.

M: I put it to you, oh boy, that the trilingual community newsjournal Toverberg Indaba, we both worked on at its start from July 1990 was, what the clevers call ‘prescient’ - what AI today calls ‘having foresight, knowledge, or keen insight into events before they occur’. Take the front page 4 banner points when Toverberg Indaba was launched (credible workshopping) :

• to serve the entire community of Colesberg and surrounds;
• independent not party political;
• not for private profits;
• democratic and accountable for all .

I guess one could, at risk, be able to substitute the place, Colesberg, for any other interesting place. At best this could preferably be rural, mainly as the media presence is a form of stoeptalk that survives with and without an actual newsjournal!?

That means even with or without actual freebies, promos, and advertisers and other influencers. I would go as far as, you know, to claim media is there whether one likes it or not, even well in time for those remembered days in a playpen, or its equivalent – in a conception, in a womb, in a delivery room, in front of a midwife, or hanging on by one’s delicate fingers to the front of a warm body or wrapped in swaddlings to the back of a warm body.

In other words, my friend, media is with us, from the start! Even departments of Health, even the World Health Organisation (the WHO ?, asks my showbiz friend Donald T) , recognise that: ands even in turn such organisations as community clinics and Colesberg’s own (nuwe) Hantam Community Education Trust (HCET to you Donald T, if you would like to help out).

J: I hear you when you say substitute Colesberg “for any other interesting place”. How interesting was Kofifi (Sophiatown)? Look at the endless fascinating stories Jim Bailey’s Drum that were Kofifi-sourced. Can’t get away from the Baileys, can we! I can’t accept that bo- en onderdorpe, country wide, lack stories! Colesberg and Willowmore are well represented by local writers.

M: You know, I have just this week, returned to the settlements of what I call Somerset’s Vest, via the spectacular Meiring’s Poort pass from the genuine village of Klaarstroom where my friends Jerry and Sharon Wits-Hewitson run a great guesthouse they have nurtured. Talking about other credible places, what an interesting community of fellow journos I think we are, or could become, with the help of such as the Klaarstrooms of this world?

J: On a road trip, my mother, whom I naively thought had probably not even mentioned dagga in a single sentence in her entire respectable life, let slip that farmers in the Eastern Cape were endlessly amused by newshounds commenting on the plethora of strange stories told by ox-wagon transport riders in the area of one tiny rural halt. These strange happenings always befell the travelers the day after they had overnighted at the halt. The place was called Daggaboersnek!

Can you imagine how they would have been spooked by Toverberg if it loomed straight after Daggaboersnek, while they were still feeling blue?

M: Talking of Meiring’s poort, within a few hours of our travel through those mighty mountains, to the R62, passed the famously boring Ronnie’s Sex Shop, out of the innocence of blue skies, while on our return journey, Jerry WhatsApps:

J: Baie water onder bo-oor die brug 🤣