Henrik Klijn

I saw a headline this week about Beacon that got me in a tizzy. Breathe, I thought. So I read some more reading. Turns out TV Bar lives. Nosh is OK. Black Cat, Wonder Bar, Jelly Tots, the Jungle bar in your kid’s lunchbox, all of it good. What Tiger Brands sold was the name Beacon and the machines that stamp out chocolate slabs, not the sweets you grew up fighting your cousins over. It bears mentioning that the doom obituaries doing the rounds have it backwards.

Bafana Bafana touched down in Pachuca on Tuesday, and the first thing waiting for them wasn’t a security cordon. It was a crowd. A wall of cameras outside the team hotel, locals saying interest in the South Africans is the highest they can remember—all of it pointed at a squad that has not been to a World Cup since we hosted one. That welcome sits oddly against the paperwork.

You’ve probably filed both of these under “things happening to South Africa this week” and moved on. Don’t. They are loose parts of the same story, and they meet in the middle. On 26 May, Cyril Ramaphosa filed a 63-page application in the Western Cape High Court asking judges to throw out the Section 89 panel report on Phala Phala. The same week, the Trump administration raised the US refugee cap for white Afrikaners from 7,500 to 17,500. One man wants a report about hidden cash to disappear.