Abstract The piece that is to follow is a Song of Mo(u)rning from a place of love for my grandmother. However, it is made complicated by its location inside the House of History. With it I fabricate a ceremony of re/membrance and healing. With it I enter into the History House packed to the ceiling…
Pretty much everyone is having sex. When we think about sex as more than just a man and a woman doing missionary, almost all of us are engaging in some form of sexual behaviour (both with ourselves and with other people). Sex is normal, and so media’s depictions of sex should be normal too. The…
Texture – polyphonic. Timber – loud, brassy, warm, melodic, thick, soft and loud again. Tempo – quick, joyful, lively and frantic. Effect – exhilarating, uplifting and healing. Enter the party scene. As major cities in South Africa, Cape Town and Johannesburg have very different party scenes. What they do have in common is that a…
Britain has given us some of the most rubbish reality TV. And I mean rubbish in the best way. The UK has brought us cultural gems like Geordie Shore, Big Brother and The Great British Bakeoff. The British have, in many ways, picked up what American reality TV left behind: keeping some of the grit…
Kewpie was a hairdresser and celebrated queer figure from District Six. She was born in 1941 and identified as gender fluid according to available knowledge. She preferred the use of feminine pronouns as did her friends, though she did not strictly regard herself as either male or female. After her dreams of becoming a dancer…
In Jamaican reggae and dancehall culture, there is a thing called a riddim. An artist will release a track, and if the track becomes popular, multiple other artists will use their own lyrics on top of the already existing beat. Major 2000s dancehall hits like “No Letting Go” by Wayne Wonder, Sean Paul’s “Get Busy”,…
The video for “Persistent” opens with a woman who works for Shugga Mobile (a re-vamp of T-Mobile) walking down a Brooklyn street past a strip of bodegas, bakeries, liquor stores and quick-cash markets. She enters an empty room in a porn shop, sits down on the table, picks up a remote control and presses ‘6-9’…
Through our work, we aim to create a safe space to be yourself, start conversations, learn from one another and grow together. That and have a whole lot of fun! The creative studio and digital content creation platform, The B Word founded by Bokang Lehlokoe is interested in unpacking the human experience. Started as a…
In the 1920s, Josephine Baker left Jim Crow America for Europe. She had spent her youth between the streets and stages of St Louis, with no stable place to live while performing as a backup dancer for show troupes. Dreaming of stardom and tired of being too black to enter her own shows through the…
In 2017, EFF President Julius Malema stood in front of Parliament and said: “People of South Africa, if you see a beautiful piece of land, take it, it belongs to you”. Debates about land reform have been on the tip of everyone’s tongue since Malema and the EFF forced the issue into the forefront of…
Gaining popularity through its injection into pop culture is the profile of the sex and love addict, with portrayals of support groups featuring in such shows as Amazon’s Transparent and Netflix’s Love. When Harvey Weinstein was accused of sexual assault by a significant number of women it was reported that he went to rehab for…
Abuse. Brokeness. Cancer. Disaster. Electricity. Fire. Gender. Home. Ignorance. Jokes. Killed. Listeriosis. Money. Nervousness. Other. Penis. Queer. Respect. Sex. Trial. University. Virgin. Whining. Xanax. Zeros. The A to Z of the human condition. This is the breath of responses garnered from what began as a simple question; “O jewa ke eng?”—loosely translated as “what is…
