I know we’re already seven days into March, but visual artist Michael Paul Britto’s request for ‘an extra day to be black’ in mainstream media outlets, still holds. (For those in the dark, he is ripping into Black History Month.)
Street Party, Johannesburg
April 18, 2011 By 1 Comment
The series Security [by photographer Mikhael Subotzky] takes as its subject the guards employed for protection by the middle and upper classes in wealthy districts of Johannesburg. It includes a watched-over street party and a visual catalogue of the garden sheds or ‘Wendy houses’ that guards sit in to defend the houses and properties of their employers.
Music Break
March 25, 2011 By 4 Comments
I love this track, “It Would Be,” by Cape Town’s Alleycat (government name: Enslin Grootboom) featuring fellow rapper, T100. The song is Cape Town for real: riding the Jamaican riddim, the transplanted patois and the stripped-down video. (Artists in Cape Town rarely do bling unlike their Johannesburg counterpunts.) I also recognize the milieu: The music video was filmed in and around an area, Elsies River on the Cape Flats, where I spent most of my school holidays as a teen a long time ago. (My cousins still live there.) Things haven’t changed much for the city’s poor. As for Alleycat, he’s been rapping since the mid-1980s. In an email, he describes his lyrics as “stirred by emotion – happiness, social welfare, love, fears, amusement, failures and achievements.” Bring that emotion.
New Zealand
July 17, 2010 By 4 Comments
Just like new Zealand
It’s nice to see the odd
Black face now and again
* Haiku by Cape Town poet, Gus Ferguson, on the (not so new anymore) “Neighborhoods Market” (UPDATE: It’s actually the Neighborgoods Market) at the Old Biscuit Mill shop complex in gentrifying Woodstock, an inner city suburb of South Africa’s second city, Cape Town.
Working Class and Gay in South Africa
February 27, 2010 By 1 Comment
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 Africa is a very social conservative country, with the working classes holding some objectionable views too–and gay, then you condemned to a more precarious life.
APARTHEID’S FINAL TRICK
October 6, 2009 By Leave a Comment
Researcher Kelly Rosenthal writing in the Mail & Guardian about witnessing the beat-down of a poor black homeless man by black security guards in a shopping mall in Cape Town while shoppers (both black and white) look on approvingly:
This is the true toxic inheritance of apartheid, the final trick played on us. Yes, we dismantled an elaborate legal apparatus of segregation and repression. Yes, we made the transition from repressive police state to democracy without civil war. Yes, we conducted a mass ritual to deal with decades of state-sponsored violence. Yes. We did all that. But we did not expunge from ourselves the terrible talent of seeing members of our own community as radically other, signified by some arbitrary feature. It used to be race. Now black people, too, can stand by and laugh when someone is beaten. That’s democracy. These days the more dangerous signifier is class. To be poor is to be inhuman. To be poor is to be a different kind of citizen. And, of course, race is never far from class in this country.
