Late last year I had the opportunity to review College of William and Mary History Professor Robert Vinson’s remarkable new book, The Americans Are Coming! Dreams of African American Liberation in Segregationist South Africa. Vinson details both physical and intellectual journeys between South Africa and the United States in the decades before apartheid. His characters […]
The big kick-off is nearly upon us. Just 11 months after that extraordinary Zambian triumph in Libreville, starting Saturday we have another month of football ahead as Africa’s top teams (and South Africa, there as hosts) fight it out to be Champions of Africa. We’ll be covering the tournament more intensively this time around, in […]
Last Wednesday the Brooklyn rappers collectively known as Black Star*–Mos Def (now going as Yasiin Bey) and Talib Kweli–were guests on the satirical news show,”The Colbert Report.” They last brought out an album, “Mos Def & Talib Kweli Are Black Star” in 1998. Yasiin Bey and Talib Kweli then proceeded to effortlessly perform two songs–the […]
I’ve blogged here before about the impact of Garveyism on South African cultural and political life, an area ripe for research. Which brings me to “The Prodigal Son,” a film by my friend, director Kurt Orderson. It is an independently produced film that explores the filmmaker’s personal links between the Caribbean and Cape Town. In […]
In the 1920s and 1930 black men and women in segregationist South Africa–including leaders and members of the African National Congress, the party now governing South Africa–appropriated Marcus Garvey’s ideas of “… racial pride, pan-Africanism, and modernity to sustain themselves and to propel South Africa?s struggle for freedom,” as historian Robert Vinson (he teaches at […]
Early 20th century Jamaican black nationalist Marcus Garvey’s ideas of black uplift and racial consciousness still hold sway among large parts of the black South African population, especially adherents of Rastafari. Like in this short video, filmed in August in a black township outside Cape Town’s city center, by my friend, the filmmaker Kurt Orderson, […]
