Congo’s white ‘refugees’
After the fall of colonial rule, some whites fled from their African countries of residence and sought refuge in apartheid South Africa.
South Africa
Tupac is alive in Africa
How Tupac Shakur endures for urbanized and alienated African youth.
Living on
The Indian activist ES Reddy led the fight against South African apartheid at the UN. More importantly, his life reflected the best of left internationalism.
The corporatization of food in South Africa
We can only end hunger when people have control over what they eat and how that food is produced.
A cycle of diminishing expectations
South Africans are learning the hard way that corruption cannot simply be solved through technical fixes and increasing “accountability” through locking the villains up.
Johannesburg cannot police its future
South Africa’s biggest city is ground zero for debates about the long-term effectiveness and constitutionality of militarized urban policing and how we imagine the post-COVID city.
The myth of South African nationality
Growing xenophobic nationalism in South Africa is a danger to African people across the continent.
Where are the flowers for Gilbert?
The drummer Gilbert Matthews was a visionary of South African jazz. The silences on his passing from official quarters are discordant.
The hallucinatory bunker of the white right
The anti-Black Lives Matter backlash in South Africa highlights the growing ideological convergence between the far right and conservatives.
A city on a hill
The viral sensation “Jerusalema” and its dance challenge reveals a deeper longing and desire to re-imagine the world.
The most wanted man
The legend of Nelson Mandela was built years before his lengthy jail sentence catapulted him to global fame.
The media and the workers of Marikana
The anniversary of Marikana just passed us. Media coverage of the massacre is an important part of its legacy.
Challenging notions of whiteness in South Africa
White South Africans have never really had to look in the proverbial mirror and reflect on where they come from, and how their histories have shaped their current realities, which inform their sense of belonging, shame, and entitlement.
The culture wars are a distraction
When our political parties only have recourse to the realm of identity and culture, it is a smokescreen for their lack of political legitimacy and programmatic content. It is cynically unpolitical, and it’s all bullshit.
Carceral feminism is not the answer
We need to reimagine our conceptions of feminist justice in South Africa: Putting people in cages is not liberation.
Religion outside the law
Some churches in South Africa have become embroiled with criminal economies.
Bill Freund: Historian, Africanist, Intellectual
Bill Freund was a Marxist historian in method, attentive to political economy and to the material underpinnings of power, while retaining a critical distance to Marxism.
Fighting the pandemic in the global South
On the other side of the pandemic, we must strengthen and build strong working-class movements to challenge imperialism and neocolonialism.