Culture

Culture

Text Messages | ‘No Dogs or Chinamen’
The United Kingdom’s interest and investment in Hong Kong has been long and varied, as opium traders, colonisers and now belated defenders of human rights. 
By: Darryl Accone
22 Aug 2019
Culture

Album Review | The Balance – Abdullah Ibrahim
The 84-year-old jazz musician presents old and new material side by side on his latest album and is following it up with a solo piano offering.
By: Lloyd Gedye
21 Aug 2019
Culture

Shining a light on lesbian experiences in Nigeria
Pamela Adie’s LGBTQIA+ documentary ‘Under the Rainbow’, celebrates resilience and the pursuit of happiness and delivers its message as a love letter.
By: Mamello Sejake
20 Aug 2019
Culture

The Joburg ballroom culture creating ‘queer utopia’
New York’s queer club culture is finding its way into Johannesburg’s nightlife. These spaces imagine a different, safer and more expansive way of being for South Africa’s LGBTQIA+ community.
By: Carl Collison
19 Aug 2019
Culture

Political Songs | Happy Birthday – Stevie Wonder
The musician campaigned for years, at times putting his career on hold, for Martin Luther King Jr Day to be made a public holiday. His campaign included writing and performing a song.
By: Charles Leonard
16 Aug 2019
Culture

Text Messages | Up next, tyranny
Current world leaders are bringing to life Plato’s millennia-old warnings about democracy and the danger a few tyrannical men in positions of power pose for the future.
By: Darryl Accone
15 Aug 2019
Culture

The words and worlds of Toni Morrison
For Nakhane, the Nobel Laureate’s books bring humanity to trauma and humour to the oppressed, representing, for the first time in high art, his family, his situation, his life.
By: Nakhane
13 Aug 2019
Culture

The show goes on at iconic Alex movie house
Like most of South Africa’s township film theatres, the Kings Cinema died shortly after democracy was born. Now, the grand dame of Alex big screen is back.
By: Dennis Webster
12 Aug 2019
Culture

A collaborative tribute to Toni Morrison
The prizewinning writer lives on through the writers she has inspired, who were once the readers she held enthralled.
By: Contributors
12 Aug 2019
Culture

Political Songs | Ghana – Dorothy Masuka
A song all but forgotten by its creator provides hope for acceptance in a time of persistent xenophobia driven by rightwing politicians.
By: Charles Leonard
9 Aug 2019
Culture

Toni Morrison: A radical ancestor
In death, the woman who through her novels and nonfiction assumed the centrality of the black experience compels us to seek out the richness of meaning through careful, precise writing.
By: Danielle Bowler
8 Aug 2019
Culture

Text Messages | Morality and the atom bomb
One of the scientists whose work made possible the bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki suffered a last-minute attack of conscience and campaigned against the looming mass murder.
By: Darryl Accone
8 Aug 2019
Culture

The gospel, according to Marc
Stand-up comic Marc Lottering takes the business of making people laugh very seriously, as his career crafts an extended tribute to people on the Cape Flats.
By: Danielle Bowler
7 Aug 2019
Culture

How to ‘keep it real’ in a cash-tainted hip-hop world
Where rap meets money, politics is often sacrificed. Cape Town has arguably produced a rap rooted in the realities of marginalised people.
By: Sabelo Mkhabela
5 Aug 2019
Culture

Political Songs | The Eton Rifles – The Jam
A single line from a 40-year-old song succinctly sums up how Boris Johnson, the buffoon of Britain, ended up as prime minister.
By: Charles Leonard
2 Aug 2019
Culture

Text Messages | ‘Moby-Dick’, perpetually ahead of its time
Herman Melville’s magnificent ‘failure’ of a novel, first published almost 170 years ago when the author was in his early 30s, depicts a world to which we should still aspire today.
By: Darryl Accone
1 Aug 2019
Culture

Lee Perry’s latest album is a downpour after drought
Rainford, a collaboration between Lee ‘Scratch’ Perry and producer Adrian Sherwood, is a welcome and unexpected comeback from the duo who have worked together over the past 30 years.
By: Lloyd Gedye
31 Jul 2019
Culture

Brutal boxing film reflects reality
Jahmil XT Qubeka’s Knuckle City mirrors the violence and poverty in the Eastern Cape township of Mdantsane, which has yielded so many champions it is known as the boxing mecca of South Africa.
By: Fezokuhle Mthonti
31 Jul 2019
Culture

Political Songs | Rock el Casbah – Rachid Taha
Sung in Arabic Algerian artist Rachid Taha’s ‘Rock el Casbah’ covers and, in a sense, recovers The Clash’s classic 1982 track.
By: Charles Leonard
26 Jul 2019
Culture

Recording sun rises on ‘African Sunset’
The reissuing of Kabasa’s African Sunset after 37 years raises questions about the necessity and politics of archiving classics from South African bands that made music under apartheid.
By: Lloyd Gedye
26 Jul 2019
Culture

Text Messages | Boris Johnson is no Socrates
Ethics and virtue, which Socrates made his life work, are seemingly lacking in Britain’s new prime minister. But having studied Classics, he is not ignorant per se and theoretically capable of virtuous behaviour.
By: Darryl Accone
25 Jul 2019