South African film director and auteur Oliver Hermanus has made film history this week and his cell phone is blowing up. “Yesterday was a hard day for my phone,” he writes via email, “She’s taken a sick day today.” The reason is that his latest feature, Endless River, has become the first South African film […]
Since 2010, July 18 has been `celebrated’ as Mandela Day. Nelson Rolihlahla Mandela aka Madiba was born on July 18, 1918. Last Saturday, South Africa celebrated this day for the second time since Madiba’s passing. Last year, many bemoaned the empty symbolism of “a day of volunteerism”, and that not even a day but a […]
We’ve just passed that time of year when the Charitable Industrial Complex puts on its Sunday best for Mandela Day. This is the time every year when well-meaning South Africans clad in carefully chosen ripped jeans paint murals while wearing crisp protective clothing (in case they actually have to touch the disenfranchised). No rest for those thumbs […]
The relationship between the massacre of workers at Marikana and the rational destiny of market fundamentalism.
An interview - captured on film - with Cape Town-born artist Kemang Wa Lehulere about his work.
The blinding privilege of South Africa’s ‘white’ middle and upper class which has found new means of subjugation: online community groups.
The agreement to establish a truth commission for Colombia have the sides looking at the South African experience.
Discussion on this episode of Africa is a Radio features a report back from Sean Jacobs on his recent trip home to Cape Town, a discussion on Kagame’s Rwanda and its relationship to the international courts, and finally a visit to the Americas centering in on Charleston, South Carolina and the Dominican Republic. The music selection […]
The astonishing lengths to which the South African state went to demean and diminish Marikana miners, dead and living, and their loved ones.
During a visit to Durban Pride, the authors conclude that democracy feels strange. For one, it feels like increased LGBTI visibility and increased backlash.
How would Colombian audiences react to films from Africa?
“Ex-South Africans” are a white, right-wing strain of South Africa’s diaspora that identify with and longs for the South Africa of apartheid.
The terrorist Dylan Roof is by no means the first white American to find common cause with racist colonial regimes in Africa.
In the documentary "Remembered Futures" the filmmakers interrogate the ways South Africans understand their own history and how this affects their futures.
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 […]
What to do with the universities South Africa inherited from the violences of Apartheid.
“Load shedding” is a nice South African term for daily deliberate shutdown of electricity supply in parts of the country due to shortage in supply. The following are three short stories from art exhibitions that took place on one week of May in the suburb of Woodstock, Cape Town. Torches and candles provided. … 1. […]
South African hip hop audiences blatantly ignore Ill Skillz’ craft because they're from Cape Town.
On Mozambican TV, South Africa is divided between the people of good will with their pots of rice, and the people of Goodwill with their knobkieries and pangas.
The truth of our global age is that autochthony, nativism, or heritage no longer define us exclusively. So, solidarity based on phenotype or heritage is dangerous.