Apartheid

Tuesday, October 22nd, 2013

Confronting Afrikaners’ cultural masochism

South African artist Richardt Strydom’s photography is beautiful to me – albeit it in a perverse, guilty kind of way. Through self-observation and re-positioning, his art challenges ideas of power, agency and complicity through analysing and dismantling notions of Afrikaner male identity: “In my experience my forefathers, the previous generation, were the only ones to

Tuesday, October 8th, 2013

How we tell stories about cities

A few weeks ago, Nigerian-American writer Teju Cole was the guest of the Troyeville Hotel book club in Johannesburg. Observing that the one constant in cities is that they change, Cole commented: “Cities are built on people’s...

Tuesday, July 9th, 2013

Nelson Mandela is around like never before

If one believes media reports, Nelson Mandela is no longer with us. Yet, in more ways than one, he is. In the midst of the frenzy of soundbites and images that now circulate through the space left...

Friday, June 28th, 2013

A History of Violence

While South African men seem to increasingly realize that it is their responsibility to do something about the endemic levels of violence against girls and women, the resulting initiatives have often taken the form of symbolic gestures,...

Monday, April 15th, 2013

Apartheid in Manhattan: The International Center for Photography’s “Rise and Fall of Apartheid”

The International Center for Photography (ICP) is located in the heart of Manhattan, at the corner of West 43rd Street and the Avenue of the Americas. Nearby, Times Square’s mirages—brilliant expanses of neon fantasies, some spanning the...

Wednesday, March 13th, 2013

The Voortrekker Monument and “the many mistakes” of the Afrikaner past

On a recent trip to South Africa, I managed to fit in a visit to the Voortrekker Monument, the enormous mausoleum on a hilltop just outside the capital Pretoria. The monument, which celebrates Afrikaner nationalism, was begun...