Nelson Mandela’s Humanity was a Political Education
The author, remembering Mandela, writes how South Africa galvanized progressive energies in the US in the 1980s.
Search Result(s) for: “apartheid”
Winter Reading List
A sample of Africa Is a Country editors and contributors list the books keeping them warm this winter.
Little Steven’s South African Adventure
The making of Paul Simon's "Graceland" album was controversial. But it seems we didn't know the half of it if Steven Van Zandt is to be believed.
There is no liberal tradition in South Africa
Running like a blue thread through the history of South African liberalism is a readiness to defer to white prejudices that has been consistently repaid in the coin of unambiguous rejection.
Abnormal rugby in an abnormal society
The British and Irish Lions tour of South Africa, in the middle of a pandemic, exposes the professional sports system for what it is.
Let them occupy
Housing struggles Brazil are a good case study to help us understand the limits of what is possible for urban housing movements in South Africa.
The Return of Winnie Mandela
Winnie Madikizela-Mandela, adored by the youth of Soweto in the 1980s, has gained traction in the activist imagination once more.
Who gets to define borders?
What will the renewed land debate in South Africa mean for the border woes of neighbors such as Lesotho?
Lay him down on a high mountain
What is the South African political leader Robert Sobukwe’s legacy today?
Impounded sandwiches
One major historical function of the police in South Africa remains: to manage the poor.
Criminal justice for the rising middle class
A new book on policing in South Africa wants to go beyond the usual call for reform. But adapting literature tuned for reform to the task of abolition is a difficult needle to thread.
George Houser: US ally of African liberation struggles
An ally of a who’s who of revolutionaries like Patrice Lumumba, Amilcar Cabral, Oliver Tambo, and Kenneth Kaunda.
The mysterious ways of The Black Jacobins
C.L.R. James' book about the Haitian Revolution, had an impact far beyond the Caribbean.
Was Mohandas Gandhi a racist?
Debates about Gandhi represents a deeper crisis about belonging, entitlement and exclusion in postcolonial Africa.
Home is the space
From exile, bassist and composer, Johnny Mbizo Dyani (1945-1986), explored and promoted the folk music traditions of South Africa.
Bananas and Baboons
This time, R.W. Johnson, the British-South African writer, had gone too far even for the London Review of Books ' editors. They took down a post of his.
Freedom and the struggle for dignity in South Africa
Within a context of spiraling poverty and inequality in South Africa, the lessons of uprisings in the 1980s are well worth revisiting. For millions of people, their socioeconomic demands remain unfulfilled.
The Assassins of Memory
The South African question is far too important to accommodate an explanation that is simplistic and childish.
It’s Not Just About Cecil John Rhodes
Statues of icons of colonialism continue to exist in their visibly unaltered state throughout South Africa’s major cities.
A ticking time bomb
Will the slow pace of land reform in South Africa, be the undoing of the ANC government?