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.) About these ads
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
