THEATRE REVIEW: RETURN OF THE ANCESTORS WITH A POTENT nod in the direction of the 1981 classic South African play, Woza Albert!, Mike van Graan’s Return of the Ancestors is a provocative essay on what has become of the world in which we exist. It offers a premise […]
FILM REVIEW: MOFFIE HOWEVER MUCH OF the horror and cruelty you may think you will experience in Oliver Hermanus’s Moffie, there will be more. This searingly important testimony to the obscenity of South African apartheid is riddled with the kind of truisms that will make you wish to […]
THE FILTHY OBSCENITY of ratified apartheid legislation in South Africa put a very special and specific spin on the meaning of taboo. This was never pornography in the traditional sense, because that form of sexual gratification was deemed completely verboten. Rather, what you got under the apartheid regime […]
IF YOU WERE conscious in South Africa between the 1960s and 1990s, when the apartheid army held sway over South Africa’s male youth, the premises of Korporaal Lemmer en die Rowers, this week’s Afrikaans-language radio drama on Radio Sonder Grense will bring swarms of goosebumps, blending army humiliation […]
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 […]
Geoff Sifrin
Robyn Sassen
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