The doctor from District Six
The University of Edinburgh will award an honorary doctorate to Joe Schaffers, a working-class educator from Cape Town, South Africa. It will be a new benchmark for this tradition.
Search Result(s) for: “apartheid”
Born coloured, not born free
Jazz bassist Benjamin Jeptha’s latest project interrogates the meaning of Creole identity in South Africa, thirty years after the end of white-minority rule.
Sleepwalking into fascism
That reactionary politics today lack a mass character is what makes them so dangerous.
Selling fencing as freedom
What happens when companies start to sell the idea of a frictionless consumption that helps people at the same time?
The myth of the apolitical commission
In response to the Johannesburg fire disaster, the South African government has announced a ‘politically free’ commission of inquiry. But there is no such thing.
Don’t mobilize, organize
To rebuild, the South African left must realize that there are no shortcuts to power.
Never again should be for anybody
South African writer, publisher and curator Zukiswa Wanner explains why she is surrendering her 2020 Goethe Medaille.
Elon Musk’s South African fantasy
Musk’s outrage over land reform in South Africa isn’t about fairness — it’s about fueling right-wing paranoia and preserving economic privilege.
Against the youth fetish in politics
Politics is about effectiveness, and casting youth as a political subject (rather than simply a demographic), is a bad way to do politics.
Projecting radicalism
Noni Jabavu was one of South Africa’s most trailblazing writers. Her commitment to elite ambivalence makes it difficult to hail her as a black feminist icon.
Learning Zulu
The author, a German journalist new to South Africa, writes about her first impressions and experiences, especially with local whites; so different from anything she knew or experienced before.
Paralyzed with Fear of the Past
J.M. Coetzee wondered in the late 1980s what price white South Africans are willing to pay for fraternity with Black South Africans.
The politics of reforming traditional land in South Africa
Land reform in South Africa has to not only tackle racial inequalities of ownership, but also the power of chiefs and the Zulu royal family.
Three Books on Nelson Mandela
The American public radio network, NPR, asked me, in anticipation of Nelson Mandela's birthday, to recommend 3 books its listeners could read on his life and legacy.
Chester Williams and the making of modern South African rugby
Williams, the only black South African player in the 1995 Rugby World Cup, was a complex figure in complex times. He deserves to be remembered as such.
Decolonizing Africa’s past
On national anniversaries and democratic survival.
More morbid symptoms
Much of what passes for politics these days is actually just anti-politics: not a function of too much politicization, but a severe lack of it.
The making and unmaking of permanent minorities
Mahmood Mamdani’s new book asks how communities that have been enemies can heal. But does it succeed?
After Mandela
Nelson Mandela would recognize himself in young protesters for whom freedom has been postponed and view South Africa's government as an obstacle.
The two mutually irreconcilable Nelson Mandelas
Both Nelson Mandela’s historical role in the South African transition to democracy and his own management of his legacy paved the way for vacuous treatments of his life.