A Silent Way: Routes of South African Jazz, 1946-1978.
By Julian Jonker First, a warning. The writer approaching the intersections and digressions that comprise the history of jazz in – and outside – South Africa is confronted with the conundrum of finding a place to start. How does one tie up the mutiplicitous locations and trajectories of the jazz story and mould them into something […]
Soft Power South African Style
Sean Jacobs mediates the tensions between local pleasure, global capital and cultural imperialism through the desirous and politicised spectacle of satellite television. They say you can’t choose your family. Across the continent, in Africa, people have little choice over their satellite television provider. It’s almost as if DStv comes with the house; as long as […]
Together in the Picture
John Peffer scans the photographic styles that image a black South African self outside the Apartheid frames of negation, negativity and separation. The story is well known. As Apartheid was gradually imposed in South Africa during the 1950s, urban black families were forcibly removed from mixed-group neighbourhoods to locations far from the city centres. […]
My Life as a Seventh Day Adventist
By Paula Akugizibwe Jesus waits in the swimming pool. The tenth commandment lies in pieces all over my sinful heart as our queue snakes towards salvation. We are facing the pastor one by one, waist-deep in water warm and dirty from all the sinners that went before. Around the pool, the congregation is gathered, singing […]
Land Homeland
Q&A with Mahmood Mamdani Chronic: Your book Define and Rule: Native as Political Identity is a short but fascinating study on the development of key terms in colonial administration, specifically ‘tribe’ and ‘native’. You argue that these terms become important in developing indirect rule and rather than (British) colonialism depending on the strategy known as […]