The video for the song, “Staan My By” by Die Radio Kalahari Orkes, a South African band that count among its members the controversial author Rian Malan and the actor Ian Roberts (his credits include the movie, “Tsotsi“). Some might easily dismiss it as a vanity band. So I asked my friend Herman Wasserman, who […]
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 […]
NELSON MANDELA’S CHILDREN
September 5, 2009 By Leave a Comment
Description of panel, titled “Mandela’s Ego,” scheduled for Friday, September 18, at The New Museum on the Bowery: Members of South Africa’s Generation X speak about the intricacies of post-coloniality. Expect complicated ambiguities as the panelists MC Lee-Ursus Alexander, Dineo Bopape, Hlonipha Mokoena, and Gabi Ngcobo present alternative perspectives on art, music, literature, masculinities, and […]
THE POLITICS OF WATER IN SOUTH AFRICA
September 2, 2009 By Leave a Comment
For the next two days South Africa’s Constitutional Court (the equivalent of the Supreme Court) will hear “… the final appeal in a case brought by five Soweto residents challenging Johannesburg’s discriminatory prepaid water meter system. Their six-year legal battle would reaffirm the constitutional right to water for all South Africans.” The short film above, […]
