Davido’s jacket
Davido’s appearance at 'Amapiano’s biggest concert' turned a night of celebration into a study in Afrophobia, fandom, and the fragile borders of South African cultural nationalism.
Search Result(s) for: “apartheid”
When solidarity becomes spectacle
Francesca Albanese’s visit to South Africa exposed a truth we prefer not to face: that our moral witness has hardened into ritual. We watch, we clap, we call it solidarity.
Beyond independence
The post-colonial settlement has left Africa vulnerable to conflict, external pressure, and intellectual dependency. What comes next?
More commerce than chaos
In Johannesburg’s Jeppe precinct, what looks like disorder is in fact a dense, transnational system of trade, labor, and survival at the heart of the global economy.
How we tell stories about cities
We must not forget the everyday lived realities and struggles in vanished neighborhoods.
We are not a novelty
Trans and gender diverse people are routinely told that what they are is new. In South Africa, they have not merely survived history, but they have also shaped it.
Who decides what is African?
The photographer Zanele Muholi equally mourns and celebrates South African queer lives.
It’s not the refugees, it’s the austerity measures!
Rather than the cause of Africa’s economic crises, refugees are themselves victims of the political and economic decisions that produce displacement, deprivation, and insecurity.
‘We have no Harlem in Sudan’
The current global discourse on Black Lives Matter does not yet adequately include anti-black racism beyond how the West experiences it.
The most important African country to the U.S.
What came across as recognition of Africa Is a Country from a US State Department official, was more a case of speaking too fast.
On New African Writing
What precisely is new about new African writing and what makes it different from what we have seen before?
Six LGBTQ+ figures from African history
In honor of Pride month, we revisit the past which shows that many Africans were unapologetic about their sexuality and gender non-conformity.
That’s Not Rugby
Don't expect "Invictus" to break from the "rainbow nation" narrative despite that symbolism's sell buy date having long expired.
A deafening salvo
With a new book, Chimurenga resurrects Festac, the blackest and largest ever gathering of artists from Africa and its diaspora in 1977 in Lagos, Nigeria.
Not all US media are willful idiots
This is another Weekend Special post: compiling news and links we didn't have time to focus on in the last week.
To fight unemployment we have to fight capitalism
Three activists from the Assembly of the Unemployed talk to us about the challenges facing working-class communities in South Africa.
The Year of Frantz Fanon
What gives Fanon's thinking its force and power is the air of indestructibility and the inexhaustible silo of humanity which it houses, argues Achille Mbembe.
The EFF will not bring the change South Africans need
Approaching local elections, beyond its spectacles of defiance and never-ending episodes of controversy, what do the politics of the Economic Freedom Fighters have to offer?
Archiving black South African LGBTQI
Muholi on inspirations: "Audre Lorde will always be my favorite because she informed a lot of us, gave us a new way of thinking."
Cape Town: Beautiful Ugly
The city's past and its predilections render neat formulations like Creole city and European city equally hollow.