An indispensable figure of African photography
Homage to Santu Mofokeng, photographer of quotidian black life in South Africa.
Search Result(s) for: “apartheid”
Why is Israel in Africa?
A new book explores the rationale of Israel’s efforts to expand its influence on the African continent.
Zimbabwe’s forgotten football history
Zimbabwe’s national football was under black control decades before independence — but the colonial legacy of racial segregation still haunts.
Twitter and a new criminal type
What might the fascination in displaying and seeing the body of “the criminal” tell us about South Africa today?
Who will watch the watchmen?
Who will watch the police and the army in South Africa as they act on behalf of the state to enforce COVID-19 regulations.
Solidarity under quarantine
Nelson Mandela's life teaches us that being quarantined is not the end of politics, but for the regeneration of politics.
The ‘abnormality’ of Cape Town’s traditional carnival
Breaking with the usual media conversation about the carnival that recalls Cape Town’s slave past.
Out of sight
In South Africa, social distancing to bring down COVID-19 infections takes a decidedly local shape. In a racialized society, it manifests primarily as white melancholia and black Afro-pessimism.
The virus of whiteness
COVID-19 has been used to justify xenophobia and anti-Asian racism, but a white South African woman’s hoarding behavior illustrates the global anti-black and anti-poor response to crises.
At the limits of inequality discourse
Race reductionism is stunting the possibility for radical change in an ever unequal South Africa.
Mandela and the Others
What can we learn from the 256 hours of audio recordings of the 1964 Rivonia Trial's proceedings?
The complex history of skin lighteners
The intersecting dynamics of class and gender, changing beauty ideals, and the expansion of consumer capitalism in Africa.
Whiteness in Southern Africa
Rethinking white societies in Southern Africa from the 1930s to the 1990s, particularly the region’s white workers and white poor and their relationship with white-ruled states.
Ivan Vladislavic and Muhammad Ali
How do white South African writers confront the country's as well as their own pasts?
Reading List: Xavier Livermon
Livermon’s new book explores how South African kwaito artists, Lebo Mathosa and Mandoza, pushed against the boundaries of gender and performance in their music.
‘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.
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.
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.
Cape Town: Beautiful Ugly
The city's past and its predilections render neat formulations like Creole city and European city equally hollow.
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?