Cringe, the Beloved Country

by Pat Hopkins

Cringe, the Beloved Country is a hilarious celebration of the tackiest, trashiest and most tasteless things that have sent collective shudders down the national spine for the past forty years. Digging in a number of areas – fashion, politics, morality, entertainment and others – it unearths people and events that will haunt you with delightful embarrassment.
The book will take you back to Jani Allan’s liaison with Eugene Terre’Blanche; macramé and rope cornices; mullets and miniskirts; Whites Only signs and the Immorality Act; PW Botha’s wagging finger; the private lives of Piet Koornhof and Allan Boesak; stripper Glenda Kemp and her python; Scope magazine and nipple stars; local TV, radio and pop music; Clive Weil’s Checkers adverts; Zola Budd and other sports scandals.
You’ll find the programme schedule of South Africa’s first-ever TV broadcast in 1976, the Top 30 of local pop songs, the funniest newspaper headlines and graffiti, Van der Merwe jokes, and a dictionary of South African slang, from aikona to zonked. And running throughout are quotes from politicians and celebrities, news reports and gossip columns, dredging up things that you’ve probably tried to forget, and which you’ll remember with tears of laughter.

132 pages, Paperback

Published January 1, 2003

About the author

Pat Hopkins was a history and political science graduate from the former University of Natal, now the University of KwaZulu-Natal. He was an award-winning travel journalist and author and co-author of more than 18 books, including Place: A Collection of South African Travel and Landscape Quotations, 101 Beloved Bars of Southern Africa, Voëlvry: The Movement That Rocked South Africa, all published by Zebra Press, and Padlangs deur Suid-Afrika: 'n Streek-vir-Streek Reisgids, published by Struik Travel & Heritage.