For a global audience, the movie ‘A United Kingdom’ provides a topical account of race relations. The love story is likely to revitalize the popular viewpoint of Botswana as a national success story.
Sometimes album sleeves reveal little about the music. Instead they illuminate the society it came from, exposing unexpected stories of people, art forms and struggles.
The system of apartheid is long gone. But its legacy of poor funding for historically black universities - and of planning that banished black universities to cities’ margins - remains.
September is celebrated as heritage month in South Africa. How to get it right? A revisit to a national newspaper’s decade-old, ambitious project is a good yardstick to use.
Susan Williams, School of Advanced Study, University of London
The Soviet Union tested its own atomic bomb in 1949, to the profound shock of the US. This heated up the Cold War dramatically and thrust the Congo to the centre of American geopolitical strategy
The main criticism leveled at the body that oversees the work of South Africa’s elite police unit, the Hawks, is that it lacks the power to initiate investigations, making it ineffective.
Qunta advocates a reparations fund to accelerate corrective policies, that schools be freed from colonial indoctrination and that African culture should be mainstreamed, especially African languages.
During the 1980s, press coverage of South African family murders suggested that something was ‘wrong’ with white society – and with the white Afrikaans men who were usually seen as perpetrators.
Britain’s acquiescence in the face of Afrikaner intransigence set the precedent for the progressive disenfranchisement of nonwhite South Africans and laid down the foundation for apartheid.
The protagonist in the novel ‘The Silent Minaret’ gets us to question that powerful political-cultural myth of being tied to nation. That is a remarkable achievement in fiction.
When celebrating Nelson Mandela Day, it would benefit South Africans to reflect on what the statesman’s legacy means for the nation and how they are living up to his dreams for the country.
In the heart of South Africa’s apartheid era, Professor Chabani Manganyi was among a handful of black psychologists offering expert testimony in the country’s courts.
Sections of South Africa’s student movements regard transformation as a complete failure. Responding to this perceived failure, some have adopted an anti-democratic stance.
Black Consciousness activist, Afrikaans poet and revered academic Adam Small has passed away. In his large volume of work he gave voice to the downtrodden – those marginalised by apartheid.