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Hip-hopping: The Back to the City Festival will take place in Johannesburg on 11 October. Photo: Supplied

Diary: Back to the City Festival; Babalwa Mentjies; A Protea Is Not a Flower

Your essential dose of art and culture

For the record: Conceptual artist Dada Khanyisa rebuilt a record player for the installation Summer Flowers by Cape Town architect and artist Ilze Wolff, which is on at the 15th Dakar Biennale in Senegal. (Supplied)

Flowers, music, books and how to be an architect in a horrible world

Summer Flowers, representing South Africa at the 15th Dakar Biennale, is an homage to author Bessie Head

In South Africa, the struggle against apartheid found its most potent voice in a confluence of literature and activism. Steve Biko, a revolutionary thinker and anti-apartheid activist, authored I Write What I Like.

Scribes of freedom: Southern African literature works for a just society

From critiques of apartheid to reflections on post-colonial identity, Southern African literature has chronicled the region’s history and shaped its trajectory to a just society

Dark thunderclouds: ‘Maru’ by Bessie Head, who had a white mother and a black father, is part autobiographical in that a main character in the book, a teacher raised by a missionary, is San and experienced discrimination in Botswana. Photo: George Hallett/Gallery MOMO

‘Maru’  is more than a classic

One should reread Bessie Head’s book to fully appreciate it in all its magnificence

Freestyle pantsula dancers in Soweto, Johannesburg, 2016. (Photo: Chris Saunders)

Why place matters in celebrating Jo’burg’s club history

The history of clubbing in Jo’burg is less about physical space and fading memories, but about the sheer, frightful necessity of dancing

Bessie Head was forced out of South Africa after being interrogated by the Security Police. (George Hallett)

Extract: Gunning for Bessie’s head, from ‘The Terrorist Album’

Jacob Dlamini’s new book, The Terrorist Album, tells the stories of people saddled with that catch-all phrase during apartheid and how their presence on that list made them fair…

Distinguished:  Novelist Bessie Head. (Peter Kevin Solness/Fairfax Media/Getty Images)

Head’s journalism eclipsed

The acclaimed author’s newspaper articles should have been given critical attention too

Giuseppe Rava’s illustration of the Battle of Rorke’s Drift in 1879 is a reminder of how

Ethnic boxes perpetuate colonialism

The dangerous re-ethnicisation of SA politics must be stopped lest it lead to the same ethnonationalism that caused bloodshed in Rwanda and Yugoslavia

Killing Karoline is a narrative that is both shocking and subtly unsurprising

There’s life in ‘Killing Karoline’

A particularly South African kind of shame raises questions of home, belonging and mixed identity in this remarkable memoir

‘Bessie Head: Thunder Behind Her Ears’ follows the trajectory of a life rejected but ultimately

On our Lists this week: Bessie Head, the Randlords, and The Golden Girls

In between working on Friday copy, this is what the team reads, listens to and watches.