Imaginary homelands
A new biography of former apartheid homeland leader Lucas Mangope struggles to do more than arrange the actions of its subject into a neat chronology.
7 Articles by:
Wamuwi Mbao
Wamuwi Mbao is a writer and literary critic. He teaches at Stellenbosch University.
Memory and forgetting
Almost 30 years since South Africa’s first democratic elections, apartheid can sometimes seem like a distant past. However, three new films interrupt both the temptation to forget and to selectively remember.
Paradise forgotten
While there is much to mourn about the passing of legendary American singer and actor Harry Belafonte, we should hold a place for his bold statement-album against apartheid South Africa.
Where laws and guns cannot reach
South African poet Don Mattera, who died in July, was the real deal—preferring to throw his lot in with the ignored and the undervalued. Unsurprisingly, his monumental life and work is undervalued too.
Stellenbosch University’s intractable racism problem
The University of Stellenbosch in South Africa treats racism as an issue that must be soft-soaped to avoid alienating white people.
A debased tradition
What continuities can be drawn from the murder of Ahmed Timol in apartheid Johannesburg to the killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis?
Rearranging the furniture in Stellenbosch
The vigorous disruption by social movements and artists of the thuggish racialized mythmaking that dominates Stellenbosch’s cultural memory.