Rethinking the boundaries of blackness
South Africa’s visual culture reveals that its racial categories were never fixed, while the history of indenture complicates the terms of solidarity and exclusion.
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The genuine goema captain of Cape Town
The musician Mac McKenzie, who passed away in April 2024, helped pioneer a sound that captured the Mother City’s Creole heritage.
Beyond the boundary
South African cricket is currently the subject of TRC-style hearings into the racism and nepotism in the game. It makes for riveting TV, but focuses too much on individual instances of racism and discrimination.
The Woolworths ‘Tribute’ to Nelson Mandela
Are corporate entities really well intentioned in celebrating Mandela the freedom fighter or are they merely using these tributes to position their brands on the right side of history?
Where everyone can go together
The struggle in Israel-Palestine lacks a sense of inclusivity, like in South Africa, that aims to take over and transform the state into a democracy for all its citizens.
The slow cancellation of the future
Anxious and isolated, living in poverty or financial precarity, we sink into ourselves and adopt self-destructive coping mechanisms.
The proper course of justice
Existing models of racial healing center whiteness and demand the emotional labor of Black folk, fetishizing reconciliation but forsaking justice.
What needs to fall to what needs to rise
The video playlist from our one-day symposium marking the 10th anniversary of the Marikana massacre — funded by Rosa Luxemburg Stiftung — is now on YouTube.
Children are the first to die
There is a particular historical pattern of colonial settler genocide that links Africa to Palestine.
Anti-imperialism for the ruling class
Although the material basis for today’s non-alignment movement stems from the constraints imposed on the developing world by American economic primacy, counterbalancing Western encirclement need not mean a pivot East.
The Bisho March and the Leipzig Option
Revisionist histories of South Africa’s transition to democracy are overdue, like on the deadly march on Bisho in the Ciskei homeland on 7 September 1992.
What’s So Funny
Tracing the origins and development of newspaper cartooning in South Africa, and its political place.
Confronting Afrikaners’ cultural masochism
The frustration or inability to establish an identity that is free of hegemonic constructed myth – that ceases to be at odds with current reality.
The left does not need priests of purity
If the South African left cannot engage the messy, contradictory spaces where working class politics are actually happening, then it cannot lead.
The distance between
The Cape Town Marathon has become Africa’s first World Marathon Major. But can a city that sees itself as an exception to the continent be its marathon capital?
Tiptoeing across the minefield of neutrality
Recent US-South Africa relations appear to be firmly stalled in the cul-de-sacs of imperial or sub-imperial diplomacy.
The land and the sea
Communities whose land is being targeted for exploration by oil and gas companies are increasingly using the courts. South Africa points to good lessons for social movements about allying with the law.
Making African celebrity culture
Considering the proximity of celebrity culture to how capitalism operates in Africa, why is it not given more serious attention?
There are no monuments
Gladys Nzimande-Tsolo, who died on 27 September 2023, was a South African freedom fighter. Why has she been forgotten?
Policing the colony
We have to become more open to the possibility that what our society needs is not better policing, but less. And ultimately no policing at all.