Every time I visit the prison, I try to notice as much as possible. The…
Tag: slavery
Justice in a Portuguese slave store
Dona Ana Joaquina dos Santos e Silva was the most renowned high society hostess of…
Whip it Good: Artist Jeanette Ehlers is using the white man’s tools to strike back
Jeannette Ehlers’ ‘Whip it Good’ seeks to create poetry between aesthetics and the brutality of the…
The romanticism of history, and the (Afro)future of Brazil’s quilombos
Brazil imported more African slaves than any other country in the Western Hemisphere. With over…
The Queering Slavery Working Group
Since I first started out selecting digital projects for this series, I have been struck…
Remembering Slavery in South Africa
“I recognized Cape Town the first time I saw it,” Deborah Thomas revealed at a…
Remembering Differently
The Haitian scholar Michel-Rolph Trouillot opens his remarkable work “Silencing the Past” by pointing to…
The Economist magazine has had a “Slavery Problem” since 1843
The Economist has a slavery problem, as Greg Grandin has recently called it. Grandin’s wonderful article is…
The Cape Town company that designs and markets “slave ship” ironing boards and aprons
What is it with some white South Africans’ penchant for living in an a-historical bubble? Gumtree, the South African Craigslist, is running an ad for an apartment in Randburg, a former white suburb of Johannesburg (with about 30% black residents) to which only “young white professionals” are invited to apply; then people who should know better (journalists, researchers) think Apartheid wasn’t so bad after all. Now there’s a Cape Town company that–in the name of subversive “art”–designs products using a slave ship drawing from a 1788 abolitionist broadside (chances are you’ve seen it). Yes: a graphic of a slave ship packed with slaves, intended to depict the inhumanity of chattel slavery, is now printed on dresses, aprons and ironing boards (which they actually refer to as “slaving boards”).
Weekend in Stellenbosch
On Sunday, walking past the Exclusive Books store, it was interesting to see Kees van der Waal’s new edited text, Winelands, Work and Wealth: Transformations in the Dwars Valley prominently displayed in the window. I found it striking because it brought to the fore something that is so obvious but so well hidden in Stellenbosch town. Walking through the oak lined streets steeped in Cape Dutch vintage, it’s hard to tell that all of it was built up by the sweat of black slaves and workers over roughly 3 centuries. I could not find a slave or workers monument in the town, despite noticing how rich the public art culture was.