The history of popular music in South Africa continues to interest documentary filmmakers. Of recent offerings two films stand out: “Punk in Africa,” about the history of the genre in Southern Africa since the 1970s (word is it’s a bit unfocused), and Daniel Yon’s beautiful film about jazz singer Sathima Benjamin, “Sathima’s Windsong.” I’ve just gotten […]
Today, 22 years ago, Nelson Mandela walked free from a prison outside Cape Town. Four years later, in April, the ANC won South Africa’s first democratic elections and in May 1994, Mandela was inaugurated as South Africa’s first black president. These were, however, only 22 years in the 100 year history of the ANC and […]
Our tech posts never stray from tweeting new data on Twitter and Facebook usage on the continent–but now and then–as occasional readers of Gizmodo and Kotaku–we pause.
2011 was the 25th anniversary of Paul Simon’s “Graceland.” I don’t have to remind you of the album’s significance. It is hard to imagine now the impact of that album, but it did a lot of things: it resurrected Simon’s stalled career, was the first “World Music” album to be a crossover hit, won Simon […]
Next week Omar Barghouti, one of the organizers of a cultural and academic boycott against Israel, will join legendary U.S.-based scholar-activists Angela Davis and Fred Moten to discuss the correlations between the divestment campaign against South Africa’s apartheid regime and the disinvestment movement against Israel in Southern Calfornia
What is it with Dutch cultural elites and South Africa?
The American philosopher Lewis Gordon, in an essay on affirmative action: There are those who praise South Africa for making the transformation to a supposedly post-Apartheid society nonviolently. Without violence? The many blacks (in the Black Consciousness conception) and their supporters who were killed, tortured and imprisoned; the many protesters harmed; the tanks; the guns; […]
By Dan Moshenberg Tuesday, August 9, 2011, was the annual celebration, in South Africa, of National Women’s Day. This public holiday commemorates August 9, 1956, the women’s march on the Union Buildings in Pretoria, in protest of the infamous pass laws. That day 20,000 or so women famously, and heroically, chanted, shouted, screamed: “Wathint’Abafazi Wathint’imbokodo!”. […]
Apart from his role in American racial and class struggles from the 1950s onwards, Harry Belafonte (now 83) played a central role in popularizing struggles for justice on the African continent, especially against white racism in South Africa. Not just by hosting and advancing the careers of South African artists (Miriam Makeba, Hugh Masekela), making […]
UPDATE: The South African Civil Society Information Service (SACSIS) keeps bringing it. This is not the handwringing of The Daily Maverick passing for insight. Most of the op-eds on the site go over the heads of the people its intended. Others dismiss it as partisan or ideological because they can’t take the truth. Recently they […]
