Downtown Johannesburg looks remarkably empty in this video for Bongeziwe Mabandla’s first track of his upcoming album. Zuluboy throws in his lines in the second half. And a pop-perfect kids choir finishes it.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SNn2bqNSS6k&w=600&h=369] Filmmaker Kurt Orderson sent me “The Unseen Ones,” his new 19-minute musical documentary about the very talented Cape Town rasta rapper Nico10long working on his new self-titled EP (produced by Martin Muller). The dialogue is mostly in Afrikaans with subtitles. Rastafari’s appeal, gangsterism, HIV-AIDS, and identity politics, all get a turn. Fellow MC’s Benji […]

What do you do as a South African tourist industry when the promised surge in visitors after the World Cup fails to materialize? You move your aim, target the local ‘upcoming individuals, independent couples and families’, draw up an ‘energetic, vibey and pacey’ campaign, get some of those upcoming individuals on board — and you […]

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UYngRIzG3Uk&w=600&h=373] “In South Africa,” anthropologist Jean Comaroff tells us in this lecture, “murder rates are held to be diagnostic of violence run amok, of governance haunted by a past of inequities that no constitutional reform, no right of reconciliation can fully dispel. Especially indicative is the failure of the police to protect the populace, to […]

Photo Credit: Doreen R [soundcloud url=”http://api.soundcloud.com/tracks/19741147″]

Cape Town-based Driemanskap’s ‘I will make it’ is not new, but the video for the track is. We threw 5 questions to Damian Stephens, founding partner of Pioneer Unit Records, the independent hip hop label to which Driemanskap is signed. He is also a music producer (as Dplanet) and one half of an audiovisual ‘band’ […]

Before moving down from Maseru to Cape Town in 2008 and exploring the Cape’s hip hop scene, Core Wreckah was already heavily involved in Lesotho’s capital hip hop scene. When we saw him plugging his new song ‘Reverb’ here and there on the web, we thought it a good moment to throw him 5 questions […]

We liked the previous recent work by DJ Hamma and Jitsvinger. No surprise then the result of the two of them collaborating is dope. The track is lifted from the album we blogged about last year, but the video’s new. DJ Hamma says: “We shot it in August 2010. I was initially very disappointed with […]

The internets have been rightly outraged at a white couple, “Dave and Chantal,” who decided on a “colonial” (and Apartheid) theme at their wedding in South Africa complete with an all-black wait staff in red fezzes. Like it was a scene out of the film “Out of Africa.” It turns out the happy couple asked […]

Achille Mbembe (the links are to previous references of Mbembe on this blog) gave a lecture at the Birkbeck School of Law in March of this year. You can download an audio recording of the talk entitled ‘Law, Democracy and the Ethics of Mutuality: Notes on the South African Experiment’ here. 

From that same interview that I have been so liberally cutting and pasting from this week—in Comparative Literature–the Communist poet and intellectual, Jeremy Cronin, talks about the conundrum for black intellectuals after the end of Apartheid: … For obvious reasons that I’ve already alluded to, a great premium is placed on unity and loyalty within […]

Dan Moshenberg has written guest posts for AIAC before and we’ve HT’d him a few times. But this posts marks the first of his weekly posts here on gender politics.  He’ll keep the focus on Africa. Like today when he discusses Michelle Obama’s South Africa trip. Dan, who has lived in South Africa (I’ve known […]

More from that 2008 Comparative Literature interview with my favorite Communist poet, Jeremy Cronin. Bua Komanisi: … A sense of audience has always been important for me. When I write a poem, or when I go back to an old poem, I try to listen to it with the ear of someone else, perhaps an […]