[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f3OoeAeZM5Q&w=500&h=307&rel=0]

The opening episode of the new series of “The Simpsons” features a convoluted plotline where the character Krusty the Clown ends up in the Hague tried for war crimes. This is a clip from the episode.  As the South African blogger Chris Roper summarizes it (in an equally convoluted blog post):

“[At The Hague] … Bart and Homer need to find some saving grace in Krusty’s past, and this turns out to be Krusty’s refusal to play Sun City in 1990. [Remember in the 1980s, to protest Apartheid, a number of US artists refused to play Sun City, the gambling resort built in the Bophuthatswana bantustan where whites could “mix” with blacks and pretend they’re in Las Vegas.] Three days after his refusal, Nelson Mandela is freed from prison. This congruence of events leads to Krusty being pardoned, and released. …Krusty’s refusal to play Sun City [it turns out, is] not a political statement, but a protest about the kind of potato chips in his dressing room.  Krusty makes his heroic statement (“I ain’t going to play Sun City”), and then turns to his band and says, “Vuvuzela me out of here”. The band swops their instruments for vuvuzelas, and the discordant sound of the World Cup serenades Krusty from the stage.”

Further Reading

Who deserves the city?

Colonial urbanism cast African neighborhoods as chaotic, unplanned, and undesirable. In postcolonial Dar es Salaam, that legacy still shapes who builds, who belongs, and what the middle class fears the city becoming.

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.