The politics of ethical deception
If in India there has been an investment in myth of Mohandas Gandhi as a non-racial icon, in South Africa Gandhi also has his defenders.
Search Result(s) for: “gandhi”
Was Mohandas Gandhi a racist?
Debates about Gandhi represents a deeper crisis about belonging, entitlement and exclusion in postcolonial Africa.
The falsification of history
The charge that Mohandas Gandhi was a racist is doing the rounds again. His stay in colonial South Africa fuels those claims.
Gandhi in Somalia
A mild mannered historian and anthropologist takes over as President of an autonomous Somali republic.
Africa holds up a mirror to India
Shobana Shankar's new book, 'Africa, India and the Spectre of Race' (Hurst/Oxford, 2021) explores this complicated history.
Durban gets a new literary festival
What happens when ike's, a legendary bookstore in Durban, South Africa, creates a literary festival? For one, synergy.
No more business as usual
What can the complete civil disobedience of the Sudanese Professionals Association teach us at a moment when belief in the efficacy of nonviolent protest is in decline?
Imagining the South African Indian
How do you tell a different story of Indians in South Africa, one that shatters long-held and reproduced stereotypes?
The Last Founding Father of African Decolonization
It is not hard to understand the iconic status of Nelson Mandela and the overflow of emotion his death has provoked in the Pan-African world.
Nelson Mandela’s environmentalism
The first African head of Greenpeace International, Kumi Naidoo, on how the world could best do justice to Mandela.
Three Myths about Mandela Worth Busting
The Nelson Mandela encountered by former antiapartheid activist Tony Karon in American media is so unrecognizable.
What do they know of cricket
White South African cricket writers should stop commenting on cricket as if the game is apolitical or the national team is still as all-white as when the country was first allowed back into international cricket.
Afrobeat futures
In the first of five articles on Afrobeat in South America, Simon Adetona Akindes discusses Abayomy Afrobeat Orquestra and Bixiga 70 from Brazil.
Speaking as one African to another
South African anti-apartheid revolutionary Robert Sobukwe is often understood as a black nationalist. So what should we make of his close friendship with a white liberal?
The great opus of “Small Bobby”
Ranjith Kally (1925-2017), a legendary photographer, documented South African Indian life in famed magazine Drum.
A man of the people
Robert Vinson's biography of Albert Luthuli hints at how liberation histories might be reframed to better address the problems of the present.
The death of cities
Cities will continue to exist and grow despite the coronavirus crisis because of the distinctly human need for social interaction, physical contact, and collaboration.
What about this cartoon
What happened when an Argentinean cartoonist took inspiration from an iconic moment in African-American struggle, replaced the black athletes with monochrome white figures to make a point about gay rights.
Hip Hop Religion
While hip-hop can still connect us to our higher selves, its mainstream adaptations reveal that it is inherently human and not free from flaws.