The Lord’s Chief Justice
Mogoeng Mogoeng, South Africa’s chief justice from 2011 to 2021, is midwifing the conservative turn in South Africa’s public life. From retirement, he may also eye public office.
South Africa
Organize or starve!
Instead of voting for the bankrupt ANC or DA, South Africans could do better with social movement candidates in upcoming local elections.
Mission betrayed
The New Apartheid, a new book by Sizwe Mpofu-Walsh, seeks to define a generational mission in South Africa. Instead, it shrouds our existing one in complete opacity.
Reimagining local government in South Africa
If re-municipalization—returning a privatized service to local public control—is to work in South Africa, we need other forms of social contracting between municipalities and citizens.
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.
Post-apartheid symptoms of morbidity
Ordinary working-class people have been forced to the belief that there can never actually be real solutions; stripped of the confidence that fundamental change can happen.
Growing pains
For all the grief Afropunk gets, including its commercialization and appetite for expansion, it still manages to bring people, mostly black, together over two days for a pretty great party.
Some kind of personal comfort
Kyle Shepherd’s new music blooms brightly from out of the shadow of pandemic and considers what it means to be South African, African, and human.
The cry of Black worldlessness
Poet Mongane Wally Serote’s 40-year lament, still haunts Black South Africans: “it is only in our memory that this is our land.” The land haunts our memory, and, in turn, we haunt the land’s memory.
Not mere intellectual dissenters
Why is South Africa's draft Hate Crimes and Hate Speech Bill contradicting the constitution and proposing to shield academics and scholars who propagate racist and bigoted ideas?
Even dogs are racist
A vernacular attempt at a social anthropology of dogs across three countries: Nigeria, South Africa and Canada.
Jivin’ in Joburg
Africa Is a Country Radio continues its season focused on African club culture. Our next stop is Johannesburg with South African journalist Sean O'Toole. Listen here and on Worldwide FM.
No two elephants are alike
The July riots in South Africa felt similar to those by Peronists in Argentina in December 2001. But Zuma’s people are moving from a much weaker position.
It’s never just about the music
Vinyl reissues are about engaging in a fight against forgetting much more than music. Gideon Nxumalo and Spirits Rejoice's music is transcendent of repressive daily conditions.
The exilic geographies of the South
Dugmore Boetie was part of a wave of South African writers who fled Apartheid. His exile and future literary notoriety, however, took a different path to some of the more classic refugee peregrinations.
Israel’s actual relationship with apartheid South Africa
Learn more about historical relationship between apartheid South Africa and apartheid Israel in this short video.
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.
A terrifying vision of South Africa’s future
If South Africa’s Left can’t find a way to channel popular discontentment into the building of mass progressive movements, it will instead morph into anarchy, nativism and, inevitably, authoritarianism.
South Africa’s fatigued and narcissistic nation-building discourse
Springbok rugby projects itself as progress, but preserves the way things are in the popular consciousness of South Africans.
What is Black Conservatism in South Africa
South African politics remain fertile ground for new orientations: mainly by black conservatives.