The official Canadian view of South Africa

The Canadian High Commission to South Africa, probably meaning well or deliberately unaware of the emptiness of rainbow metaphors, is looking for photographs capturing “the Rainbow Nation”. They’re working with the Johannesburg Bailey Seippel Gallery on this. The photographer’s entries will have to display “multi-cultural, multi-ethnic and multi-racial South Africa”.

Like it’s still the 1990s.

Meanwhile, as a reader reminds us, the Canadian effort is at least an improvement on what you see at the South African High Commission to Canada in Ottawa:

…whereas the South African High Commission to Canada has glass cabinets containing dolls in ethnic costume that look like something from the days of the Tomlinson Commission. Maybe the Canadians can donate them some of the rainbow photos…

Further Reading

How to unmake the world

In this wide-ranging conversation, para-disciplinary artist Nolan Oswald Dennis reflects on space, time, Blackness, and the limits of Western knowledge—offering a strategy for imagining grounded in African and anti-colonial traditions.

A migrant’s tale

On his latest EP, Kwame Brenya turns a failed migration into musical testimony—offering a biting critique of ECOWAS, broken borders, and the everyday collapse of pan-African ideals.

What Portugal forgets

In the film ‘Tales of Oblivion,’ Dulce Fernandes excavates the buried history of slavery in Portugal, challenging a national mythology built on sea voyages, silence, and selective memory.