South Africa
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 whiteness in South Africa
White South Africans rarely look in the proverbial mirror to reflect on where they come from and how those histories shape their current realities.
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.
The Transformation of Bill Freund
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.
Herman Mashaba wants you to forget
When considering Herman Mashaba’s new political plans, the South African public must reckon with the former mayor of Johannesburg's actual record.
To fight unemployment we have to fight capitalism
Three activists from the Assembly of the Unemployed talk to us about the challenges facing working-class communities in South Africa.
The second lives of zombie monuments
How do we deal with the unfinished business of the past? Cape Town has a surprisingly poetic answer.
Journalism: The essential non-essential
COVID-19 re-affirmed journalism is a public good, yet as newsrooms collapse, journalism is in danger.
The soul is dialectic
Drummer Asher Gamedze’s new album is a groundbreaking body of work in the musical trajectory of South African jazz.
Gangs and activists
What does it mean when a community takes justice into its own hands? Revisiting the case of People Against Gangsterism and Drugs (PAGAD) in Cape Town.
The mechanism of contagion in racism
How race came to function as fuel to an exploitative economic system. Take the case of South Africa.
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?
The Che Guevara of the Cape Flats
Ashley Kriel, murdered on 9 July 1987, embodied a kind of politics that people feel are missing from South African politics today: tireless commitment and sacrifice.
The existing order of things
As the South African ruling class wages a protracted war against the poor and working class, it grows comfortable with the idea that people have more or less accepted the status quo.
What does it mean to be African in a post-apartheid academy?
The Nigerian scholar and poet, Harry Garuba, who died in February 2020, was a key figure in African Studies and teaching literature in South Africa.
Reading List: Xavier Livermon
Livermon’s new book explores how South African kwaito artists, Lebo Mathosa and Mandoza, pushed against the boundaries of gender and performance in their music.