What does it have to do with Marikana?
The Marikana Massacre changed democratic South Africa forever. It can also catalyze resistance to the current order.
South Africa
New dawn or false dawn?
South Africa’s ruling party’s devotion to its policy of cadre deployment is an indication that it values its own power more than the public interest.
Divided by the word
Why languages, particularly black African languages, have become a battleground in postapartheid power and identity politics in South Africa.
The Stay At Home Strike
Before the Soweto Uprising in 1976, students and workers organized one of the largest strike actions in South Africa’s history.
Reading List: Nicky Falkof
What happens to the contemporary explosion of moral panics, urban legends, and other paranoid narratives when they manifest in a place like South Africa?
Nelson Mandela and the revolutionaries
The ANC and Nelson Mandela’s turn to violent anticolonial struggle in the early 1960s, is the subject of a new book by historian of South Africa, Paul Landau.
Instrumentalizing migrants
From Operation Fiela to Operation Dudula, xenophobia in South Africa is bent on protecting the interests of politicians.
Resisting petty apartheid
The historian Premesh Lalu’s film about an apartheid-era cinema on the Cape Flats also offers a glimpse of a future beyond racism for South Africa.
The doctor from District Six
The University of Edinburgh will award an honorary doctorate to Joe Schaffers, a working-class educator from Cape Town, South Africa. It will be a new benchmark for this tradition.
Against the youth fetish in politics
Politics is about effectiveness, and casting youth as a political subject (rather than simply a demographic), is a bad way to do politics.
A new politics, from the ground up
Cape Town-based activist Axolile Notywala wants to bring people from different backgrounds together to build a movement on what it means to be free in South Africa.
Punks of the Witwatersrand
The Rise and Fall of National Wake, South Africa’s first multiracial punk band at the height of apartheid, that sang about state violence and political freedoms.
The promise of platinum
Platinum holds promise for a net-zero future. But the promise of platinum cannot be founded on the broken promises endured by those who live in its spaces of extraction.
It takes a team to raise an athlete
Race, class and the story of struggle and sacrifice in the making of South Africa’s next generation of track and field athletes.
Navigating queer utopia
A new book presents an empirical challenge to the myth of South Africa as the “pink capital” of Africa and contributes to building an archive of queer, African, and religious narratives.
Stellenbosch University’s intractable racism problem
The University of Stellenbosch in South Africa treats racism as an issue that must be soft-soaped to avoid alienating white people.
Take back the unions for their members
Why South Africa needs to democratize its labor movement.
Madiba and Mali
There is a remarkable connection between Mali and South Africa, dating back to the liberation struggle, and actively encouraged by the author’s work.
Rushing to boycott
The cultural boycott of Russia turns to the flawed precedent of apartheid South Africa for inspiration, while ignoring the much more carefully considered boycott of official Israeli culture by the BDS Movement.
Where is black feminism?
The first book collection dedicated to contemporary Black South African feminist perspectives has seen the light. One of the editors breaks down the content.