South Africa is a nation of significant symbolic capital. Through popular culture, South Africans participate in an exchange of sounds, fashion and dance – as an embodiment of identity, self-fashioning and freedom. At the nexus of social media and popular culture, we witness the unabated invigoration of the ‘Lüh Twizzy movement’ – a movement largely…
While it is pristinely produced, the Prime series Swarm has been unsurprisingly divisive. It was co-created by Janine Nabers and Donald Glover, with direction from Adamma Ebo, Ibra Ake, and Stephen and Donald Glover. Preceding each episode is a message that reads: “This is not a work of fiction. Any similarity to actual persons, living…
It is no secret that South Africa has an alcohol problem, one only has to look at the number of bootleggers that popped up across the country during the 2020 Covid Lockdown. People were digging into their wine collections and selling them to others at outrageous amounts. As the days of lockdown went past those…
Founded in 1886 after the discovery of gold in the Witwatersrand region, Johannesburg was once fondly called the “City of Gold”. It became a major centre for gold mining, with its surrounding areas producing almost half of the world’s gold output by the early 1900s. Today, Johannesburg’s mining industry remains an important part of its…
Television is a constant presence in the lives of many South Africans. Most people schedule their lives around the viewing times of their favourite shows, starting with Skeem Saam at 18:30, House of Zwide at 19:00, the News, and then Generations: The Legacy at 20:00, followed by Uzalo and a grand finale of Muvhango at…
In 2018, the chief curator at the Johannesburg Art Gallery, Khwezi Gule, curated, “All Your Faves are Problematic”, an exhibition intended to provoke different ways of thinking about South African modern and contemporary art. The press release notes: For the most part, South African modern and contemporary art is treated with some kind of reverence…
From ‘Don’t Look Up’ to ‘The Menu’, satires seem to be dominating the current box office. Films and shows are commenting on class divisions, environmental catastrophes and political crises more and more. We’ve also witnessed a rise in different forms of satire, from Saturday Night Live sketches to talk shows such as Last Week Tonight…
In 2021, Gwede Mantashe called the environmental activism against Shell’s attempts to blast the Wild Coast looking for oil, “apartheid”, a “colonialism of a special type”. The chance to strike black gold in the Eastern Cape presented an opportunity for economic prosperity for a country in desperate need of it and according to our Minister…
Over the past few years, we’ve seen the same paradigm of stories and archetypes of heroes hitting the big screen. With the same storylines and sometimes even the same predictable dialogue, Hollywood studio films all feel derivative right now. One of the few types of films we keep seeing, again and again, is the biopic….
There is a thin line between life and how it imitates art. In an essay titled ‘The Decay of Lying’, 1889, Oscar Wilde describes it vividly, expressing the notion of events in the real world being inspired by creative work. Wilde offers insight, yet, what remains, still, is the inquisition: how do we use artistic…
Once in a while, it is a good idea to take stock of where we are. It’s so easy to become desensitised to the political realities around us. It becomes like a buzzing in the ear that the body acclimates to, muffled in the cacophony of noises. For example, to state that corruption is a…
I’ve been thinking a lot about space recently. Not the endless cosmos, the scope and size of which seem unfathomable. No, I talk here of space in a far smaller, if not more pertinent sense – the spaces in which we move, we choose to occupy and find comfort in. Here, we come across a…
