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What’s old is new again. This time from French fashion magazine, Numéro, which manages to merge two of our favorite (fashion) trends into one spread: black babies and blackface!
I would be offended except this is completely boring and wholly unoriginal. Yawn.
Via Jezebel (h/t Jacob Mundy).
Black Diamonds is a recently released short documentary by Dutch filmmaker, Saska Vredeveld (view the film here). The film offers an inside view of the personal lives of three black South African entrepreneurs, including the odd Felicia Mabuza-Suttle, the “Oprah of South Africa.” The film’s promotional material very mistakenly refers to these people as South Africa’s emerging middle class, while I would peg them more accurately as the new rich.
The Boston Globe’s “Big Picture” site has also published Reuters photographer Finbarr O’Reilly’s widely circulated series of a group of 450 poor whites shack dwellers living in a camp in Krugersdorp close to Johannesburg. As I suggested before I am not surprised at this. The number of poor whites are obviously quite small when compared to the number of black poor. The site quotes O’Reilly: “… Researchers now estimate some 450,000 whites, of a total white population of 4.5 million, live below the poverty line and 100,000 are struggling just to survive.” But once the racial safety net for whites, in the past provided by the Apartheid state, wears off, they will increasingly get to experience how the majority of black people live in South Africa. And that there’s no reverse apartheid going on.
Here‘s a link to the series.
– Sean Jacobs
Few other authors in the 19th and 20th centuries made greater contributions to Hollywood’s racist images of Africa than Edgar Rice Burroughs – Tarzan’s creator.
During his lifetime, Burroughs mastered the staple “jungle” movie that has characterized films set in Africa since the early part of the 20th century. The scope of Burrough’s “Africa” work is quite impressive from a man that never stepped foot on the continent. His Tarzan series originated in 1912 with Tarzan of the Apes, and continued on through 46 other features plus countless spin-offs (did anyone catch Brendan Fraser’s brilliant performance in George of the Jungle [1997]?).
For this short review, I look specifically at two films: Tarzan, the Ape Man (1932) and Tarzan Escapes (1936), both starring Olympic swimmer Johnny Weissmuller as Tarzan (above).
In Argentina members of that country’s military dictatorship that conducted a “dirty war”) against its people way back in 1978 still go to jail for their crimes (this week actually), while in South Africa Apartheid’s generals and government ministers get amnesty and fat pensions, holiday homes in Wilderness, mansions in Pretoria’s suburbs, find Jesus and wash the feet of their victims or demand huge speaker fees, announce themselves as victims of reverse racism while the black char serves them lunch, or are lauded as statesmen when they finally die. Before you throw the forgiveness card at me, Argentina also had one of those truth commissions.
– Sean Jacobs
Satirist Evita Bezuidenhout breaking down the declining significance of the famous war between the Zulus and the Boers in mid-19th century “as God was looking the other way.” The Boer victory became part of the founding myths of Apartheid and of Afrikaner identity. Apparently now it was only propaganda; it never existed.
Via Zoopy TV]
This piece on nostalgia for the old South Africa among some whites–including among young people born after legal Apartheid ended in 1994–on social network site, Facebook, is genius. It is in Afrikaans.
It must be Blackface season. All manner of white people, whether people dressing up for Halloween, Australian TV variety shows, fashion magazines and even French TV programs think it is okay to put on Blackface.
The clip above–the latest incident of blackface–is from the French TV program, “Rendez-vous en terre inconnue,”" which sends celebrities to encounter “remote tribes.” The offending part comes about 1.20 minutes into the video; also watch the reaction of one of the few black people in the audience at 2:27.
I would recommend they all go read Gary Dauphin’s graphically illustrated Blackface User Guide.
The Chicago-based literary theorist Walter Ben Michaels has been going on about why we privilege race over class. His right to a point. But that’s it:
Race … has been a more successful technology of mystification. In the US, one of the great uses of racism was (and is) to induce poor white people to feel a crucial and entirely specious fellowship with rich white people; one of the great uses of anti-racism is to make poor black people feel a crucial and equally specious fellowship with rich black people.
Probably the most insightful one-liner I’ve read about South Africa in a while.
From a piece by The Guardian’s South Africa correspondent, David Smith. It’s what a cynic told him about Apartheid and its legacy.
Read Smith’s take on recent events in South Africa, including the white refugee crises here.
It’s worth reading the comments on the piece, which confirms this insight.
