The stranger among you
How does one ask the black church to offer hospitality after a white, racist stranger made the historic inner sanctum of the black community the space of death?
Blog
Blood dripping from his head
A painful, violent story of migration captured in the song "Lagos" - for our series "Liner Notes," in which musicians talk about making music.
Buika is the best
Earlier this week I was at the launch of a friend’s excellent book about music piracy. The book goes into the nitty-gritty of how the MP3 file was first developed, through a painstaking process of figuring out how to compress recorded sound without the smaller file sounding any different. (This, of course, permanently changed the music industry.) Sounds made […]
The US nostalgia for racist regimes in Africa
The terrorist Dylan Roof is by no means the first white American to find common cause with racist colonial regimes in Africa.
A Certain Kind of Black
A meditation on Haiti and Charleston. Being Black, these days, means living in constant state of siege.
Is Africa really rising? No.
The rhetoric around “Africa rising” is giving us a false sense of comfort and distracting us from the real work that needs to happen.
Freedom, youth and remembrance
In the documentary "Remembered Futures" the filmmakers interrogate the ways South Africans understand their own history and how this affects their futures.
Haiti and the Dominican Republic
The Dominican state and the country's elites make up a history of conflict with Haiti to justify the periodic deportation of Haitians in the Dominican Republic.
It’s about more than Mexico
How about giving US presidential aspirant, Donald Trump, some reading material on what the United States has brought to Latin America.
Hillbrow invasion with @YoungstaCPT
Cape Town-based wordsmith Youngsta’s been in Johannesburg for a few weeks, here on a mission to build bridges and shake a few industry players’ hands, all the while invading the city with his brand of Kaapse rap. It’s been roughly five years of steady hustle and grind for the emcee whose claim to fame is having released 24 mixtapes in a period of eighteen […]
What’s the word? Sister/woman have you heard from Manenberg?
To honor the June 16, 1976 Soweto Uprising, aka Youth Day, the Rock Girls are on a five-day road trip, from Manenberg to Port Elizabeth. These girls embody all that is powerful and hopeful about Youth Day. They live the injunction of organizer Mary Harris “Mother” Jones, “Pray for the dead and fight like hell […]
Badvertising and the Soweto Uprising
The worst crime of a new ad "celebrating" the martyrs of 1976 is the message does not accord with the realities of young black South Africans.