REPLETE WITH ITS jazz dives, camaraderie and poetry, its dinginess, brothels and gangs Sophiatown aka Kofifi was a suburb in Johannesburg that was an apartheid loophole until 1955. It was the one place in which black people could live in relative harmony with people of all colours, free […]
THE QUEEN IS dead. Long live the queen. So begins Pieter-Dirk Uys’s current foray into the shenanigans and hypocrisies that have been the Vaseline of South African political intercourse for the last 40 years, and #HeTwo does the unthinkable. Uys, in his 70s, continues to ratchet up the […]
IN EVERY GENERATION, real issues need to be taken seriously by the youth. Ours is no different. And these ‘real issues’ include struggle history. It’s a curious thing to be able to watch the focused attention awarded to a play about youngsters in 1980s South Africa, torn and […]
WHEN YOU WATCH the political rhetoric being thrust hither and yon on social media and other young platforms, the one thing that you notice is its lack of nuance. Political diatribe in South Africa in 2019 paints white people as racists. Blanketly. Utterly regardless of their history or […]
WHAT ARE THE basic parameters that inform a festival of contemporary dance? Should there be a gatekeeper who assesses wannabe shows on the gig and plays god, in his or her ability to give a hopeful group of applicants the ‘yay’ or ‘nay’? And who is that gatekeeper? […]
ZANE MEAS ADORES everything about South African writer Chris van Wyk. It’s about the cunning and oft self-deprecating magic of being Coloured in a world that doesn’t consider you black enough or white enough. It’s about the chalky memories of racism and the mixed up words and opaque […]
EVERY GREAT POLITICAL yarn has an underbelly and a back story that you will not really be able to find in all its grubby details in the historical or official literature or records. It’s about the back-stabbing insecurities that comes of a system not always fully trusting itself. […]
IT IS NOT everyday that you find a truly South African story told with unabashed frankness in the eye of the horror of apartheid. It’s even rarer that you find one that is not only about the broad terrain of apartheid, but one which also burrows in a […]
THERE’S A CLINICALITY to this intense body of photographic work that repels your inner being and makes you want to turn away and then run away really quickly before you encounter the works in detail. But that same inner being of yours knows that if you do this, you […]
Searing the South African political and Jewish landscape with a glance that takes in everything from the bizarre realities of farming culture and land reclamation to the philosophy of the kibbutz and where it is flawed, Marilyn Cohen De Villiers’s second blockbuster novel is a real page turner. […]
Geoff Sifrin
Robyn Sassen
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