Technocratic buzzwords like urban renewal and gentrification provide a bland gloss for a much more sinister and violent reality. In cities throughout the world, poor and working-class people are finding themselves pushed out of their homes to make way for wealthier new residents. This is often achieved through eviction and police violence. Gentrification also intensifies…
In her 1979 essay The White Album, Joan Didion begins “we tell ourselves stories in order to live”, but of course long before this (and long after) humans have held the sentiment that stories hold some importance. From Maya Angelou’s “there is no greater agony than bearing an untold story inside you” to Jean Luc…
“So which one is Siya Coolisi?” a white elderly woman asks. Picky picky mabelani sala sala gentlemane; that one I respond as not being an avid watcher of rugby, more truthfully not being a watcher of rugby at all, I too have no idea. However, I have less than half of the squad to choose…
Siting inside the chair on any given weeknight was the infamous Miss Cleo. She looks like the 80’s black aunty of your dreams. On any given day, her outfit is an eclectic match of kente cloth tent dresses and silk scarves used to wrap up her thick black hair. She wears chunky jewellery made from…
October is Mental Health Awareness Month and each year I’m reminded of the terrible state of black youth’s mental health. The month has seen a lot of people share their stories on social media and on television and there’s a common thread I noticed among many, particularly black South Africans. It’s important to recognise the…
Is having conversations about sexual violence enough? “He had an entire team behind him”, is the statement that is repeated whenever the sexual assault accusations against R. Kelly come up. During the six-part docu-series that looked at the laundry list of sexual assault accusations against the singer, a woman named Lizette Martinez unpacked her experience…
It was in a Social Media Marketing seminar at the University of Cape Town, a few years ago, that I first heard the phrase “side hustle”. The lecturer was encouraging us to “think beyond ourselves as just students but rather as content and knowledge producers who can get compensated for that labour”. Since then, the…
In light of recent atrocities in our country, we may have forgotten or not even known that September is self-care awareness month: a time to remind ourselves to rest and take deliberate steps, no matter how big, towards improving our quality of life. The theme of the month of September rings true; taking care of…
Open chrome, google Afrofuturism, click images – what you find is images of disembodied faces with rings around their heads, complex headpieces and third eyes. These figures seem to be floating in space and are often illustrated or abstracted to the point that they don’t actually seem real. If Afrofuturism as an imagination is meant…
“So, the beginning of this was a wom(x)n and she had just come back from burying the dead.” Zora Neale Hurston, Their Eyes Were Watching God “Nothing mattered much. Nothing much mattered. And the less it mattered the less it mattered. It was never important enough. Because Worse Things had happened. In the country that…
Africans can never be foreigners in Africa – this is an obvious fact. Without getting too preachy and riled up about how borders between Africans were the white man’s idea, there are some serious internal fallacies that need to be dispelled. We need to talk about how employment opportunity in South Africa can’t, logically, be…
I begin this article with a trigger warning: the content below divulges in matters of womxn’s assault, rape and killing by men. It tells stories of womxn you may know and they aren’t pretty. This was not easy to write as it is a very scary and sensitive time for womxn who, like me, are…
