AfricaIs aCountry

The New South Africa

Africa Is a Country Podcast
African Five-a-Side Podcast

The New South Africa

By
Sean Jacobs

… This is a time when the fruits are growing out of something that was sown a long time ago. It’s not like these are the fruits of just liberation. Those kids who grew up so fucked up, the people who were tortured in the ’70s and ’80s—they’re 30 now. That’s where a lot of the crime also comes from—people who have been like, dehumanized, and they feel no hope. Hopeless. If you were to kill everybody and start anew, then stuff would be anew and then you could have hope for a new day. But the fact is, those people are still alive.”

25 year old Soweto-born artist and sometimes Malmö, Sweden resident, Spoek Mathambo (also known as the “Post-Apartheid, Post-Hip Hop Posterboy“), has views. This is Mathambo speaking in an interview with hipster music culture magazine, The Fader.

Further Reading

No one should be surprised we exist

The documentary film, ‘Rolé—Histórias dos Rolezinhos’ by Afro-Brazilian filmmaker Vladimir Seixas uses sharp commentary to expose social, political, and cultural inequalities within Brazilian society.

Reading List: Barbara Boswell

While editing a collection of the writings of South African feminist Lauretta Ngcobo, Barbara Boswell found inspiration in texts that reflected Ngcobo’s sense that writing is an exercise of freedom.

Kenya’s stalemate

A fundamental contest between two orders is taking place in Kenya. Will its progressives seize the moment to catalyze a vision for social, economic, and political change?

An annual awakening

In the 1980s, the South African arts collective Vakalisa Art Associates reclaimed time as a tool of social control through their subversive calendars.

More than a building

The film ‘No Place But Here’ uses VR or 360 media to immerse a viewer inside a housing occupation in Cape Town. In the process, it wants to challenge gentrification and the capitalist logic of home ownership.