AfricaIs aCountry

Postcard from Johannesburg

Africa Is a Country Podcast
African Five-a-Side Podcast

Postcard from Johannesburg

By
Sonja Sugira

The photographer Krisanne Johnson believes you can learn many things about a country by the way youth live—from fashion to music to home environments.

Image: Krisanne Johnson.

Like many others, US photographer Krisanne Johnson headed to South Africa earlier this month but, as The New Yorker points out, she didn’t go there for the football. Johnson has been to South Africa several times over the years to document youth culture in Johannesburg, including the culture surrounding Kwaito and, most recently, the fashion movement known as the Smarteez.

On her work, Johnson states: “I believe you can learn many things about a country by the way youth live—from fashion to music to home environments. And this is a recurring theme in most of my work, whether in the United States or southern Africa.” I like this.

You can view more of Johnson’s excellent pictures from across southern Africa and the United States here.

Further Reading

The people want to breathe

In Tunisia’s coastal city of Gabès, residents live in the shadow of the phosphate industry. As pollution deepens and repression returns, a new generation revives the struggle for life itself.

After Paul Biya

Cameroon’s president has ruled for over four decades by silence and survival. Now, with dynastic succession looming and no clear exit strategy, the country teeters between inertia and implosion.

Leapfrogging literacy?

In outsourcing the act of writing to machines trained on Western language and thought, we risk reinforcing the very hierarchies that decolonization sought to undo.

Repoliticizing a generation

Thirty-eight years after Thomas Sankara’s assassination, the struggle for justice and self-determination endures—from stalled archives and unfulfilled verdicts to new calls for pan-African renewal and a 21st-century anti-imperialist front.

The king of Kinshasa

Across five decades, Chéri Samba has chronicled the politics and poetry of everyday Congolese life, insisting that art belongs to the people who live it.

Drip is temporary

The apparel brand Drip was meant to prove that South Africa’s townships could inspire global style. Instead, it revealed how easily black success stories are consumed and undone by the contradictions of neoliberal aspiration.