White Lives Matter
An angry and desperate review of the five phases of blackness: innocence and oblivion, confusion, awakening and shame, anger, and survival.
South Africa
Some observations on race and security in South Africa
The writer, an anthropologist, gets a quick lesson on race and crime on a visit to South Africa.
Who is Dulcie September?
The author stars as the famed South African activist in a new play. Dulcie September was murdered by a conspiracy of South African and French death squads.
Explaining Racism to a White South African Liberal
Highlighting spectacular incidents of racial violence is that they overshadow the daily, unrecorded anti-black racist acts.
Remembering Slavery in South Africa
People forget that for 176 years, racial slavery was the central institution in a large part of the territories that would come to form South Africa.
Remembering Differently
Slavery, despite its centrality to South Africa's founding, remains on the periphery of popular and institutional memory there.
Soweto Punk Revolution
A punk festival comes close to what one would imagine the DIY-embracing, eccentricity-accepting and obedience-ignoring CBGB’s of the ‘70s to have been like.
How To Use a Sjambok
This and other lessons from the South African front lines.
Has the giant fallen?
The split within South Africa's largest trade union federation, COSATU.
The Bullshit Files: The “Mandela Ray Ban Sculpture”
Public art, the vandalism of Nelson Mandela’s legacy for commerce and the spoiling of public space in Cape Town.
The Spear of the People
The KwaZulu-Natal Midlands has a bit of a reputation as a “sleepy hollow.” But it was a crucial node in the struggle against apartheid.
Making African celebrity culture
Considering the proximity of celebrity culture to how capitalism operates in Africa, why is it not given more serious attention?
The Politics of Postapartheid Housing
Rather than the endpoint of the post-apartheid urban crisis, deficient delivery reproduces it anew, accentuating discontent in the process.
Angry farmworkers on a tractor
Done 'debating' whether “Larney Jou Poes” is free speech? Let's talk about the conditions of farmworkers.
The Dookoom Debate
What role should media play in the midst of controversial cultural expressions, like songs that address racist violence by white farmers against their workers in South Africa?
Dookoom Rises Up
A Cape Town hip hop group causes a huge stir with its music video "Larney Jou Poes" (roughly translated: Boss, your cunt.) depicting an uprising by farmworkers.
South Africans lack table manners and posture.
The country’s first School of Etiquette situated in one of Johannesburg’s rich northern suburbs is more evidence of how much its public culture has slid to the right.
How do we talk about the memory of Apartheid
The fact that the choices for black people under Apartheid were either martyrdom or compromise was part of the injustice of that system.
What’s the matter with … Stellenbosch University
Legacies of colonialism and apartheid are etched into social dynamics of the town in the way its inhabitants occupy public space. The same goes for the university.
The Fingo Revolution
How an an annual, independently-run series of events founded in 2011 in the Eastern Cape have propelled the genre in that South African province.