The cultural resilience of a creole city
On this month’s AIAC Radio we head to Cape Town to understand how this creole city's musical culture resisted containment throughout history. Listen on Worldwide FM and follow us on Mixcloud.
Apartheid
The poet of colouredness and exile
Dennis Brutus described Arthur Nortje as “perhaps the best South African poet of our time.”
Israel’s Africa strategy
AIAC Talk investigates how Israel is courting the continent in a bid for international legitimacy. Watch on Youtube, Facebook and Twitter.
The legacy of violence in the struggle for South Africa
An excerpt of an essay, titled “Nongoloza’s Ghost,” in Lapham’s Quarterly. It's published in partnership with Africa Is a Country.
Living on
The Indian activist ES Reddy led the fight against South African apartheid at the UN. More importantly, his life reflected the best of left internationalism.
The most wanted man
The legend of Nelson Mandela was built years before his lengthy jail sentence catapulted him to global fame.
Introducing ‘AIAC Talk’
Africa Is a Country is proud to announce the official launch of the AIAC Talk livestream show.
The Che Guevara of the Cape Flats
Ashley Kriel, murdered on 9 July 1987, embodied a kind of politics that people feel are missing from South African politics today: tireless commitment and sacrifice.
Eric Garner in Palestine
Activists in the occupied territories reinvent the Freedom Rides of 1960s America and in the process link US and Palestinian struggles for liberation.
Mandela and the Others
What can we learn from the 256 hours of audio recordings of the 1964 Rivonia Trial's proceedings?
To remember selectively
How partisanship distorts the construction and narration of public memory about historical events, especially the resistance against apartheid.
Excavating forgotten histories in South Africa
Remembering Adelaide Tantsi Dube’s poem 'Africa: My Native Land,' first published in 1913, the same year the white government stripped black South Africans of their land.
Linda Ronstadt is still playing Sun City
Nearly four decades later, Linda Ronstadt’s arguments against the cultural boycott - repeated in a new film - ring hollow.
The short, white woman with a South African accent
Urdang reflects her long friendship with fellow political exile Jennifer Davis, the anti-apartheid activist and changemaker.
Detritus of revolution
Nthikeng Mohlele’s novel Small Things (2013) provides a rejoinder to J. M. Coetzee’s Disgrace (1999), depicting a black man’s perspective on the failures of South Africa’s transition.
Music is the weapon
During Christmas 1980, Hugh Masekela and Miriam Makeba performed at a concert in Lesotho that deeply challenged and disturbed South Africa’s apartheid regime. The record of that concert is being reissued.
Jennifer Davis: Fearless and visionary
Davis, who died at 84 on October 15th, was a prominent leader of the anti-apartheid movement in the US and an analytical thinker and visionary.
The virtual reality of Walter Sisulu
While Sisulu's political career is less celebrated than Nelson Mandela, it was as remarkable.
“Converting Eviction”
A reflection—by one of the group’s artists—on a Swiss-South African art project exploring eviction and extraction.
The mysterious ways of The Black Jacobins
C.L.R. James' book about the Haitian Revolution, had an impact far beyond the Caribbean.