Why does the BBC care what FW de Klerk thinks?
It's 2012 and FW de Klerk still thinks Apartheid had been beneficial to its black victims. Yet global media treats him like an analyst on South African politics.
South Africa
Waiting for Superman
The idea that leadership is the panacea to South Africa's varied troubles, is asserted as an almost axiomatic truth amongst South Africa's monotonous punditry.
‘Race jokes’ in South African ads
In South Africa, repackaging dated colonial fears about race and sex are used to sell beer and to win an advertising award for being "different."
We write what we like about Steve Biko
What does it mean for a dead man to live through us, as we chant his name and claim him?
God, too, takes the train to work
The author, also a photographer, on documenting South Africa's "train churches."
When Nelson Mandela goes
Yesterday we tweeted my friend Herman Wasserman’s guide to the media on how to cover Nelson Mandela’s hospitalization (it’s good advice if you’re a journalist). This morning I asked Nathan Geffen, a South African media activist (and author) whether we could republish here his post on the “when Mandela goes” meme. Geffen is one of the key people […]
Renouncing the Rhino
My beef with rhinos is more of a beef with white South Africa as a whole, who are all for saving rhinos but largely silent about inequality, poverty and institutional racism.
The striking minority of black contributors
Why does South African history continue to be written primarily by white scholars?
Just like in a science fiction movie
Black South Africans' concurrent lives of dread and poverty contradicted the commercialism and profits that went with 2010 World Cup.
When The Sartorialist went to Johannesburg
In South Africa, the most innovative fashion is not on the runway or at some "Fashion Week," but on the street.
Development always comes with a political agenda
An interview with the leaders of a viral online campaign originating in Norway aimed at exposing European ignorance about the foolhardiness of humanitarianism in Africa.
New, Old South African Theater
The success of 'Mies Julie' tells us more about the way that audiences in the Global North like to think about South Africa than it does about actual South Africa.
The View from the Cape
The chance that the lives of South Africa's poor will change for the better without struggle, is slim.
Kyle Shepherd X
The pianist, Kyle Shepherd, loathes labels, especially of him as the architect or savior of Cape Jazz, the music associated with Cape Town.
How to write about children in Africa
Children's Radio Foundation's shows are a testament to children’s capacity to be agents for change and to confront critical community issues themselves.
A voice that is incessantly in exile
South African jazz singer Sathima Bea Benjamin's life complicates jazz history and shows how Africans reshaped American jazz in the 20th century.
Race, Entitlement and Gay Pride in South Africa
In supposedly post-apartheid South Africa - where political and economic power are at odds - what happens in gay spaces?
When W Magazine Went to Johannesburg
They used the same examples every trendy Western fashion or pop culture publication do, when they run special issues on South Africa.
Gay Shame in Johannesburg
The confrontation at Johannesburg Pride between white organizers and a group of black activists demanding Pride honor those killed, mostly black, for their sexuality, in South Africa.
Township Life Has Never Looked So Glam
Solange Knowles is the second major UK or American artist to shoot a music video in Cape Town in so many months.