This is not about art

Between the relentless media coverage, the twitter deluge, the pronouncement by a South African judge (“This is a matter of great national importance”), and declarations by the South African President’s daughters about “the straw that broke the camel’s back,” you might be forgiven for thinking that–finally–some urgency about South Africa’s big issues was making national news. Were we talking about how to deal with the persistent racial and class inequality, joblessness, and a lack of government accountability? Not so much.

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Akin Omotoso’s Country


A recurring theme in director Akin Omotoso’s films is the fraught postapartheid relationship between Nigerian migrants and their South African hosts. Part of the reason is autobiographical: Akin is the son of Kole, the literary professor, who moved his young family, including his then teenage son, to South Africa in the early 1990s from Nigeria. The result is that Omotoso is as much Nigerian as he is South African.

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Pinkwashing South Africa


Guest Post by T.J. Tallie and Maria Hengeveld
This week BBC News reported on the rise in Cape Town’s status as a premiere international gay tourist destination. The article itself went on to report at length from gay South African hoteliers and organizers, many of whom lavished praise on the progressivism enshrined in the country’s constitution, and the comparative sense of freedom that South Africa in general (and Cape Town in particular) provided for LGBT-identified people. While it is undeniable that South Africa can boast one of the most inclusive constitutions in the world, particularly in regard to protecting the rights of those with different sexual orientations, the BBC article and much of the rhetoric surrounding ‘Cape Town as gay paradise’ obscures far more complex realities.

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New public TV series from South Africa: “I am Woman”


Starting on April 1, South Africa’s public TV channel SABC3 has been running a weekly series called “I am Woman.”  Every week, the show tries to follow the arc of a woman’s journey, the ways in which she comes to understand herself and the world by creating herself as the world and the world as herself. Imagine doing that without over-weaning ego or impossible humility, and you get the picture. The leap of faith is ultimately each woman’s discovery and invention of her own amazing and ordinary kind of humanity. Her discovery, and ours. If you don’t live in South Africa, you can also view the series online.

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The Unfinished Revolutions


by Guest Contributor Jeffrey R. Kerr-Ritchie*
There is little doubt that we are witnessing a profound transformation of the political realities in the Arab world. At the same time, these changes are occurring during a remarkable historical moment. The global economy is more fragile than it has been for generations. The US Empire is in a state of partial withdrawal due to over-extension, growing anti-war sentiment domestically, and the adverse effects of the Great Recession. Unrest is not sporadic, isolated, and local, but rather continuous, widespread, and global. What is the nature of the Arab Revolution? Why did it start and where is it headed? Most important, what is the potential for the emergence of new forms of political democracy, social equality, and regional autonomy in the Arab world? Let me introduce my position by stating what the Arab Revolution is not.

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Achille Mbembe at the Tate Modern


Over the last six months, the Tate Modern in London has held Topology: Spaces of Transformation, a series of ‘keynote conversations’ which have brought in an impressive array of international intellectuals. Previous events have tackled borders, edges, concepts of north-south, continuity and infinity. The subject of Saturday’s talk was to be no less huge, gathering David Harvey, Drucilla Cornell and Achille Mbembe to speak on ‘The Vast Space-Time of Revolutions Becoming’. Oscar Guardiola Rivera convened the event from a pair of noteworthy purple moccasins, immediately answering the title of his book What If Latin America Ruled the World (“we would all dance better”) then describing the speakers as ‘butterflies’ moving across the globe, ‘commanding’ the space they ‘hover’ above.

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The ‘passing’ of Ernest Cole


Information on famed South African photographer Ernest Cole’s decision to ‘pass’ from ‘African’  to ‘coloured’ in Apartheid South Africa’s kafkaesque “race classification system” is not readily available beyond the ready-made theories and rationalizations repeated in museum catalogues or on websites. From those sources we get glimpses of his anxiety or the stress the decision brought on his family in short scenes from the only documentary film on Cole’s life, that by the photographer Jürgen Schadeberg. But even then, Schadeberg’s film neatly sidesteps the issue of passing by not probing Cole’s motives. Like with play-whites (coloureds who passed for whites), we won’t know how many ‘play-coloureds’ there were. What the writer Zoe Wicomb has said of play-whites applies: “We don’t even know how many of them there are. There’s no discourse, nothing in the library, because officially they don’t exist [anymore].” [Read more...]

Fighting Pop

Congolese/South African (via Belgium) musician Yannick Ilunga, AKA Iamwaves, has been rather busy lately. His group Popskarr, a new ‘electronic/Nu Disco/Misty Pop’ outfit, has just released a stylish single called Fighter; and as his alter ego Petite Noir he has released a mixtape for Okayafrica’s ‘Africa in Your Earbuds’ series (which earned him a tweet shout out from Questlove of The Roots) and a new video for ‘Till We Ghosts’ (above). [Read more...]

The geo-branding war


Geo-branding is a serious thing. It is particularly serious when people from other geographic areas decide to brand your geographical area and the people in it, the way they see fit and the way that fits their purposes. No other country, region or continent, I’d argue, suffers from other peoples’ nonsense as much as the continent of Africa. Actually, the reason why people generally and casually talk about Africa as one place is because of what Nigerian-American author C. P. Eze refers to as “their geo-branding war”. [Read more...]

Uganda, now you have touched the women


In October 2011, the Ugandan government sent Ingrid Turinawe to the infamous Luzira Prison–Uganda’s Guantánamo–for the treasonable act of walking to work. This week, the State, again, attacked Turinawe and other women activists for the “crime” of standing, speaking out, driving, and generally being. Big mistake.

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