After 12 years of running Until Until Events and co-owning The Royale restaurant, she made a decision in 2024 that surprised many: she was done. ‘I just quickly recognised that I didn’t give a damn about marketing in the traditional sense,’ she says bluntly. The woman who co-founded an events company at 19 and built an empire in Johannesburg’s service industry had simply had enough. ‘I never wanted to be a marketer. Until Until was one of those things that happened to me, right place, right time, right friends.’ This is the story of Amahle “Jaxx” Java.

So she sold her shares in both the restaurant and the company, and by 2025, the deals were finalised. Now, she’s a full-time content creator, the unofficial news anchor for South Africa’s youth, known for her signature ‘Howsit’ that signals it’s time for a news update.

To understand her pivot to current affairs commentary, you have to understand where she comes from. Born and raised in the Eastern Cape to a single mother who is a doctor, Amahle Jaxa grew up in a household where she was surrounded by politics from an early age.  Her father spent a decade on Robben Island after being imprisoned in 1976. And she would spend hours talking about current affairs with her mother. “Growing up, I read the newspaper with my mum and had fierce debates about current affairs,” she says. “My poor brother would be dying in the backseat because he has absolutely no interest. But we would spend four or five hours just debating what’s happening in the country”. 

One of the first books she picked up was about the arms deal scandal. “I watched my mum and my dad debate the arms deal. I felt so left out of the conversation and asked my mum how I could find out more. She gave me the book. I remember struggling through it, I must’ve been in grade 7 or 8, trying to read this book”. That early immersion led to a degree in politics, philosophy and economics from UNISA. 

Today, Jaxa’s TikTok videos breaking down complex current affairs have made her what many call the unofficial news anchor for South Africa’s youth, often breaking down and talking about current affairs in a 5-10 minute TikTok video. “The mark of intelligence is making the complex simple. I don’t dumb anything down. I simplify,’ she says. “I’ve always struggled with people who isolate communities with language. In a country where  literacy levels are at an all-time low, traditional media is isolating an entire group of people”. 

Her process is thorough. She buys The Sunday Times every Sunday. Most mornings, she watches the news, scrolling between CNN, BBC, Sky News, eNCA, Al Jazeera and Newsroom Africa. ‘The news will play in the background for about four hours,’ she explains. When a topic catches her attention, she dives deep, reading articles, watching speeches, building timelines, writing questions and creating notes. “All those notes get compressed into a 10-minute video that somehow manages to capture the essence of complex geopolitical situations. I have no idea how I do it consistently, to be honest with you”, she shares. 

Does she face pushback? ‘Yeah, I have,’ she says, though she doesn’t dwell on it. ‘A lot of the pushback is a difference of opinion. And unfortunately, that has nothing to do with me.’ She recalls having a conversation with a critic who had a difference of opinion regarding the way she had reported on the Venezuela situation and the Venezuelan president. But she realized that the difference of opinion didn’t come from research but rather an AI prompt. Their opinion wasn’t based on the research I’ve done. Their opinion is based on asking ChatGPT for some information,’ she says, explaining that she doesn’t let such critics stop her from doing what she loves. 

Perhaps nowhere is Jaxa’s analytical approach more evident than in her recent commentary on Cape Town’s housing crisis. What started as casual observation, watching her international friends’ holiday groups grow larger each year, renting multiple houses in Camps Bay, evolved into a clear economic analysis.

“I started thinking about the affordability of it all. How are they getting these massive five, six-bedroom houses in Camps Bay?” she recalls. Then came the pattern: more international buyers, more Airbnbs, students complaining on Twitter about struggling to find flats, black and brown people raising alarms that nobody seemed to hear.

“In 2024, it got really bad. You would just be in Cape Town and hear all these people from foreign countries,” she says. What frustrated her most was seeing white South Africans tell struggling residents to ‘just move to Khayelitsha, move to Langa.’

“Comments like that are so stupid because economics doesn’t care. Economics doesn’t care what race you are,” she says. “I found it so interesting that white South Africans thought they were going to be absolved from basic economics of supply and demand.”

Her call to action wasn’t about voting patterns, it was about recognising power dynamics. “White people in general in this country hold a lot of power. When a black woman gets killed in South Africa, it’s everyday news. A white woman gets killed, it becomes headline news. So my call is: you guys need to speak to the officials running your city because this is unsustainable.”

The solutions she proposes are borrowed from other countries: rent controls, restrictions on foreign property ownership (like Thailand’s requirement for local partnerships), visa fees that could fund affordable housing.  “There is light at the end of the tunnel,” she concludes. “It’s just about whether or not the provincial and national government care to do anything about it”. 

Looking ahead, Jaxa sees herself growing as a source of information and analysis for the South African community beyond social media. She sees herself as an educator, something TikTok officially recognised when they deemed her a teacher. ‘My grandparents were teachers. So I hope to one day be able to teach in some way or form. But for now, I think this is the route I’m taking.’

It’s a route that combines her political heritage, business experience and genuine desire to make information accessible. In an era of information overload and declining media literacy, Jaxa has found her niche: translating the complex into the comprehensible, one ‘Howsit’ at a time.