All That is Solid Melts into PR
Mark Fisher, author of the book Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative? and the blogger known as k-punk, speaks to Bongani Kona about the social, economic and cultural totality of late capitalism, the pervasive cynicism in which we seem to be mired, the omnipresence of PR and the possibility of countering it all by re-igniting a belief in […]
The Other Brother
by Bongani Kona. At the centre of Masande Ntshanga’s debut novel, The Reactive, are two brothers, Luthando and Lindanathi Mda, born a year apart. By the time the book begins one of them is dead. “Ten years ago, I helped a handful of men take my little brother’s life,” Lindanathi says in the novel’s unforgettable opening […]
The Case of Sipho Mchunu
by Bongani Kona In her brilliant review of Didier Fassin’s book, When Bodies Remember: Experiences and Politics of Aids in South Africa, Hilary Mantel quotes how the history of this country, steeped as it is in centuries of racial brutality, is not to be found at the Vootrekker Monument or at the Apartheid Museum but is warehoused in the body, in “words and […]
A History of Blacks on the Green
In an attempt to dispel the myth that renders black golfers as tangential to the ‘white pro’ or mere reflections of contemporary corruption, Bongani Kona swings wide of the bunker and straight into an archive of South African successes. Photographs by Lerato Maduna. This old-timer […]