Twenty-two years of Sundays.
From 1979 to 2001 Carol Lazar wrote a weekly column for the Johannesburg Sunday Express, and later The Sunday Star. She wrote about her family, her dogs and her neighbours, for a city that read her over breakfast. She wrote about apartheid too, and its iniquities, and then about watching it come apart, which she thoroughly enjoyed. This site is her column being turned back into text, one week at a time.
Who she was writing about
Her own house in Johannesburg, mostly: four children (Barry, Ralph, Jamie and Nicky), a husband, and Henry the Hog (part Scottie, part warthog). But the country kept coming in at the windows. She wrote from the Kruger Park and the Klein Karoo, from Kariba and the Cape Flats; through the referendum of 1992 and on into “this new South Africa of ours”.
She also confronted apartheid: the racial laws that restricted where people could live, and the violence used against those who challenged them.
She set appeals to “friendship” against families threatened with eviction under the country's race laws, black people expelled from white beaches, and Archbishop Tutu and his colleagues being tear-gassed. These injustices were part of the everyday life she wrote about.
Published in LIVING, TIMEOUT and Lifestyle. Illustrated in The Sunday Star by Dov Fedler.
If you have one we don’t
This site has 531 columns, an estimated 80% of all those Carol wrote.
If you have one we don’t, please send it to us. Enjoy!