• B Camminga

Trans and gender diverse people are routinely told that what they are is new. In South Africa, they have not merely survived history, but they have also shaped it.

• Faraaz Mahomed

How do the struggles of one generation echo, decades later, in another’s?

• Sarah Setlaelo

Although Nelson Mandela lacked the oratory of Nkrumah and the theory of Senghor, his contribution to the world of ideas was something rarer: pragmatism.

• Kawthar Jeewa

A landmark housing ruling in Cape Town and anti-migrant marches in Durban look like opposite stories. But they are two extremes of the same colonial question: who is permitted to occupy space?

• Sabeeka Al-Kuwari

In apartheid South Africa, Drum magazine showed Black readers what it meant to be modern. But not everyone got to be modern in the same way.

• Mandla Radebe
• Vijay Prashad

Kevin Cox’s NLR essay on South Africa claims to correct liberal and culturalist accounts through historical materialism. But it reproduces the very epistemic and analytical failures it sets out to overcome.

• Gunnett Kaaf
• Mazibuko Kanyiso Jara

The Conference of the Left was not a solution to the crisis of the South African left, but an opening. What follows must be built differently from what came before.

• Duncan Nortier

Bafana Bafana’s World Cup exploits has South Africans chanting “No DNA, just RSA!” But against a rising tide of xenophobia, what South Africa are we actually rooting for?

• Bonginkosi Ndadane

Some African football fans have been hate-watching Bafana Bafana at the World Cup because of South Africa’s anti-migrant politics. The team’s apolitical stance has left them without a defense.

• Lester Kiewit

Abdullah Ibrahim was difficult, suspicious, and brilliant. And beneath all of it, he was searching for home.

• Mattie C. Webb

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?

• Khwezi Mabasa

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.

• Rumana Akoob
• Lumka Oliphant

Across South African radio and television, anti-immigration framing has become the norm.

• Lee Nxumalo

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.

• Mazibuko Kanyiso Jara

If the South African left cannot engage the messy, contradictory spaces where working class politics are actually happening, then it cannot lead.

• Niall Reddy

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.

• Anye-Nkwenti Nyamnjoh

In South Africa, one of xenophobia’s quieter moral mechanisms is the way foreign wrongdoing is made to carry more meaning than citizen wrongdoing.

• Siyabulela Mama
• Lily Manoim

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.

• Tsogo Kupa

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.

• Stéphanie Perazzone

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.