• Atiyyah Khan

From Actonville to global stages, Pops Mohamed blended tradition, futurism, and faith—leaving behind a musical archive as luminous as the spirit he carried.

• Gopolang Botlhokwane

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.

• Bárbara Rousseaux

Drawing on his forced migration from Rwanda, Serge Alain Nitegeka reflects on the forms, fragments, and unsettled histories behind his latest exhibition in Johannesburg.

• Ngaire Blankenberg

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.

• Charlize Tomaselli

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.

• Ntsika Dapo

From indirect rule to Operation Dudula, the lines dividing citizen from stranger trace back to the way empire organized identity and labor.

• Ali Ridha Khan

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.

• Lynne Brown
• Desiree Lewis

The passing of the pioneering South African writer and critic leaves behind a body of work that challenged racial mythologies, unsettled identity politics, and grounded transhistorical vision in the particulars of place.

• Gopolang Botlhokwane

The apparel brand Drip was meant to prove that South Africa’s townships could inspire global style. Instead, it revealed how easily black success stories are consumed and undone by the contradictions of neoliberal aspiration.

• Nare Mokgotho
• Molemo Moiloa

MADEYOULOOK’s 'Dinokana' debuted at the 2024 Venice Biennale. Now back home, Molemo Moiloa and Nare Mokgotho reflect on sound, place, and why their work is always meant for South African audiences first.

• Jordache Ellapen

South Africa’s visual culture reveals that its racial categories were never fixed, while the history of indenture complicates the terms of solidarity and exclusion.

• Olufemi Terry

What does it mean to imagine a city with no fixed essence, only shifting histories and unstable forms of power?

• Pontsho Pilane

Charlie Kirk was not a household name in South Africa. Yet, as evidenced by the local outpouring of grief that followed his death, South Africans must confront the truth: his ideas were already at home.

• Itumeleng Mahabane

A Johannesburg-Cape Town high-speed line could turn apartheid’s corridors of extraction into a green spine of connection, industry, and justice.

• Kim M. Reynolds

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.

• Shelley Pryde

In echoing the anti-trans panic sweeping the Global North, South African political heavyweight Helen Zille joins a reactionary tradition of racialized sex policing.

• Zaheer Ally

As far-right politics gain traction across the globe, some South Africans are embracing Trumpism not out of policy conviction but out of a deeper, more troubling identification.

• Olerato K. Mogomotsi

Afrophobia in South Africa is no longer shouted—it is rationalized, rebranded, and wrapped in the language of law and patriotism.

• Sean Henry Jacobs

The formerly exiled ANC activist and later judge Albie Sachs is archiving his life, including a new film that forms part of a larger project of legacy-making.

• Kristen L. Miller

In Johannesburg, a new generation of Black cyclists is redefining joy, movement, and solidarity—taking over the streets to ride, to reclaim space, and to reimagine freedom.