Ashraf Jamal I When, prompted by her elders and peers, a white schoolgirl squats over the beaten body of a black schoolgirl and shits on her, the act is not only gross but also curiously intimate. That the act, which made national headlines, occurs in a South African high school in 2003 is all the […]

Andrea Messon The pace and grit of Jozi living has never phased me. My twenty-odd years in the bowels, on the fringes and in the relative comfort of leafy green suburbs has made me a die-hard fan of this mad and throbbing metropolis. My inner city North American veins have for years been nourished by […]

by Sean Jacobs The latest slogan of Brand South Africa is, “South Africa: Alive with Possibility”. On June 14, 2004, I found South Africa’s branding attempt plastered all over the walls and projected onto a giant video screen in a dining hall on the seventh floor of the New York Stock Exchange in Manhattan. The […]

by Naeem Mohaiemen “It is like writing history with Lightning. And my only regret is that it is all so terribly true.” – President Woodrow Wilson, quoted in early prints of D.W. Griffith’s Birth Of A Nation. About a decade back, Bangladeshi and Pakistani teenagers in England began re-appropriating the dreaded “Paki” word. Once a […]

by Patricia van der Spuy “Whenever her name was mentioned in security circles, a shudder went through the ranks,” Eugene de Kock, security policeman. (more…)

by Carl Hancock Rux Two turntables, a mixer, sampler, pitch―speed control, two CD players, a Pioneer DJ M-500 with built-in effects from the outboard; a G4 with Pro Tools. He was over at the bar, I was checking out the equipment on the makeshift table―unwrapped in boxes, except for the mixer, which was in a […]