Cape Town’s make-believe politics
Cape Town remains one of the most racially and economically segregated cities in South Africa, and there aren’t many signs of things getting better.
South Africa
Benetton Politics
The made-upness and the shallowness of the Democratic Alliance of South Africa's vision of a non-racial future.
Mdu Ntuli’s ‘Izikhokho Show’
You’ll excuse our South African focus today here and on Twitter. A burger chain writes in braille; author JM Coetzee writes about cricket; “a gym member tells of racist insults”; “Minister of Arts and Culture supports boycott, disinvestment and sanctions against Israel”; and here cartoon artist Mdu Ntuli wraps up the first month of the […]
JM Coetzee’s Cricketing Life
The news that J.M. Coetzee had contributed to a book entitled "Australia: Story of a Cricket Country" rankled the author, a committed Coetzeephile, slightly.
Steve Biko’s Son
Nkosinati Biko on a close and present relationship with his father that is unusual for children in general and for the children of activists in particular.
Inbox
It has come to this. Don’t focus too much on the ‘your scholarship’ line. An email from an American lawyer in my inbox: I am writing to request your help in a matter based on your scholarship on South Africa. My immigration law firm is currently representing a family of white Afrikaner farmers who are […]
Colonial Fantasies
Just a sample: A "Heart of Darkness"-themed ship, Tarzan in South Africa and a travelogue on the Congo River.
Oprah’s expensive South African education
The talk show host started a private school for girls in South Africa. Shocker: it mostly makes things worse.
Cape Town is ‘the most dangerous’ city in Africa
A Mexican research group has listed the world's most dangerous cities based on homicide rates. South Africa's cities finish tops.
The New South African Superstar
Zahara has become the top pop artist in South Africa in a fairly short time but curiously enough, for the media, she has remained something of an enigma because she doesn’t appear to have any obvious unique selling points beside her talent.
Benetton Politics
South Africa’s Democratic Alliance, usually very slick and media savvy, have really outdone themselves with a new campaign by its youth wing. Fresh out of leader Helen Zille’s troublesome ‘AIDS Gestapo’ views and calling the ever disgruntled musician Simphiwe Dana a “Professional Black” on Twitter, the DA now give us this poster, above.
Nelson Mandela and the ANC
Nelson Mandela has always elicited divergent, incorrect and unrealistic reactions among his detractors and supporters.
Afrikaner Bloods
Factual media reporting on how South African relationships and attitudes, especially between blacks and whites, evolve are hard to come by.
Remember Caster Semenya
The story of Caster Semenya was always a story of a Black African woman, and was equally always the story of a Black woman.
An acute deficiency in generosity
Some journalism and "analysis" about postapartheid South Africa by outsiders amounts to hysteria dressed up as analyses.
Africa’s oldest liberation movement is 100 years old
Does South Africa's ruling ANC still fight for the same values it championed 100 years ago?
The Year of Frantz Fanon
What gives Fanon's thinking its force and power is the air of indestructibility and the inexhaustible silo of humanity which it houses, argues Achille Mbembe.
Helen Zille’s ‘AIDS Gestapo’
The leader of the opposition Democratic Alliance makes offensive remarks about AIDS, then smears her critics, AIDS activists and journalists, as Nazis.
The business of selling beer
SABMiller's new Impala Beer is marketed to poor people who don’t buy other commercially distributed beers because they are too expensive.
The fear-riddled DNA
A new ad for how DNA works feeds into a fear-riddled white South African state of mind about black crime and blacks-as-a-class as criminals.