CNN has a story on why despite South Africa’s progressive laws, lesbians and gays are still under attack there. The basic moral of the piece is that if you’re middle class, you can form your own safe, comfortable communities even if other middle class people want to discriminate against you. If you’re working class–and South […]
Conflict of Interest

Foreign Policy’s website has this story: “David M. Crane, the former U.N. war crimes prosecutor for the Special Court in Sierra Leone, and his chief investigator, Alan A. White, indicted former Liberian warlord and president Charles Taylor in 2003. Three months ago, their new firm CW Group International offered to sell legal services to the […]
Main Street (Johannesburg) TV
I am still not sure how I feel about Main Street Life, which is both a kind of video diary and a blog about a residential redevelopment in downtown Johannesburg called Main Street Life. Hotels, apartments, shops, galleries. We get to see how the place changes through the eyes of a middle class young man, […]
Player President
The Sound of South African House
Among the Savages

I asked journalist, filmmaker and photographer Pablo Mediavilla Costa, also one of my students at The New School, to give some perspective on the Spanish reality TV series, ‘Perdidos en la tribu’ (‘Lost in the tribe’) filmed, among others, in Namibia among the San (referred to by the derogatory Bushman in the series) and the […]
China Pays for Mugabe’s Birthday Bash
Behind the Rainbow
If you’re in the US tonight and you’re close to a TV, watch Egyptian filmmaker Jihan Al-Tahri’s documentary film, “Behind the Rainbow” (trailer above), about the years between the South African ANC’s unbanning in 1990, the taking of political power and its December 2007 conference when the disastrous Thabo Mbeki was unseated by Jacob Zuma […]



