I went to ESPN’s website to check WC scores and was surprised to find two short videos on its soccer homepage commemorating the June 16, 1976 student uprising in Soweto. A day which is now recognized as “Youth Day,”  a national holiday.

Check them out for yourself:

South Africa Celebrates Youth Day

Voices of South Africa: Youth Day

They are not particularly impressive, especially because neither details exactly what happened on June 16, 1976, i.e. what the students were protesting or who Hector Pieterson is. I would say the biggest flaw is that the videos, likely to be watched by many checking scores today, makes it seem as if the struggle is in the past. Former SA footballer, Shaun Bartlett, says it best:

It’s more these days about the memorial, so there are no more protests involved. It’s all about going to church and remembering what happened on that day in a very calm way.

– Allison Swank

Further Reading

Djinns in Berlin

At the 13th Berlin Biennale, works from Zambia and beyond summon unseen forces to ask whether solidarity can withstand the gaze of surveillance.

Colonize then, deport now

Trump’s deportation regime revives a colonial blueprint first drafted by the American Colonization Society, when Black lives were exiled to Africa to safeguard a white republic.

On Safari

On our annual publishing break, Gaza’s genocide continues to unfold in real time yet slips from public grasp. This is not just a crisis of politics, but of how reality is mediated—and why we must build spaces where meaning can still take root.

The battle over the frame

As Hollywood recycles pro-war propaganda for Gen Z, Youssef Chahine’s ‘Djamila, the Algerian’ reminds us that anti-colonial cinema once turned imperial film language against its makers—and still can.

Fictions of freedom

K. Sello Duiker’s ‘The Quiet Violence of Dreams’ still haunts Cape Town, a city whose beauty masks its brutal exclusions. Two decades later, in the shadow of Amazon’s new development, its truths are more urgent than ever.

When things fall apart

Against a backdrop of global collapse, one exhibition used Chinua Achebe’s classic to hold space for voices from the Global South—and asked who gets to imagine the future.

The General sleeps

As former Nigerian president Muhammadu Buhari’s death is mourned with official reverence, a generation remembers the eight years that drove them out.

The grift tank

In Washington’s think tank ecosystem, Africa is treated as a low-stakes arena where performance substitutes for knowledge. The result: unqualified actors shaping policy on behalf of militarists, lobbyists, and frauds.