The distance between
The Cape Town Marathon has become Africa’s first World Marathon Major. But can a city that sees itself as an exception to the continent be its marathon capital?
South Africa
Kicking out migrants won’t create jobs
The leaders of South Africa’s anti-migrant movement claim that Black African migrants are primarily responsible for unemployment, crime, and failing public services. None of these claims is supported by evidence.
South African journalists have a choice to make
Across South African radio and television, anti-immigration framing has become the norm.
What Bafana Bafana teaches South Africa about itself
For decades, Bafana Bafana embodied the disappointments of the democratic era. As the team recovers, South Africans are once again projecting their political aspirations and fears onto the national side.
The left does not need priests of purity
If the South African left cannot engage the messy, contradictory spaces where working class politics are actually happening, then it cannot lead.
Nothing left
A much-anticipated “Conference of the Left” was supposed to unite South Africa’s progressive forces. Instead, it confirmed the harder truth: the left doesn’t need unity, it needs rebuilding.
The right to belong imperfectly
In South Africa, one of xenophobia’s quieter moral mechanisms is the way foreign wrongdoing is made to carry more meaning than citizen wrongdoing.
The price of survival
South Africa’s municipalities are collapsing under a neoliberal model that treats water, electricity, and sanitation as commodities to be sold rather than rights to be guaranteed.
The heart of the South African film industry
A debut feature set on the Cape Flats turns a familiar crime premise into a quiet study of fatherhood, masculinity, and survival. But its limited reach reveals the deeper problems facing South African film.
More commerce than chaos
In Johannesburg’s Jeppe precinct, what looks like disorder is in fact a dense, transnational system of trade, labor, and survival at the heart of the global economy.
Where are the politics of Bafana Bafana?
While most sports in South Africa are inseparable from the national political imagination, men's football manages to stay relatively removed.
The boys are back in town
Bafana Bafana’s resurgence has been forged where South African football always lives — between brilliance and the bizarre.
Mapping Johannesburg’s wounds
In his latest exhibition, Khanya Zibaya charts the psychic and spatial terrain of a city where homelessness, decay, and human resilience sit uneasily together.
The golden light of Pops Mohamed
From Actonville to global stages, Pops Mohamed blended tradition, futurism, and faith — leaving behind a musical archive as luminous as the spirit he carried.
Davido’s jacket
Davido’s appearance at 'Amapiano’s biggest concert' turned a night of celebration into a study in Afrophobia, fandom, and the fragile borders of South African cultural nationalism.
Empty riddles
Drawing on his forced migration from Rwanda, Serge Alain Nitegeka reflects on the forms, fragments, and unsettled histories behind his latest exhibition in Johannesburg.
Who cares about African heritage?
While the world debates restitution, Africa’s own heritage institutions are collapsing. The question is no longer who took our past, but who is keeping it alive.
Whose transition is it anyway?
Africa’s first G20 presidency could mark a turning point for the continent — or simply another performance of green-washed extraction led by mining elites.
The invention of foreigners
From indirect rule to Operation Dudula, the lines dividing citizen from stranger trace back to the way empire organized identity and labor.
When solidarity becomes spectacle
Francesca Albanese’s visit to South Africa exposed a truth we prefer not to face: that our moral witness has hardened into ritual. We watch, we clap, we call it solidarity.