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Andile Mngxitama: Sipho Singiswa thought he had found a vulnerability in my consistent Black Consciousness armour. Photo: Supplied

Right of Reply: Andile Mngxitama

We buried a young black man with heavy hearts. The two collected prizes drenched in the blood of a black man. That is what stands out in our minds when we see them. Justice for…

“White Privilege, Black Pain: The Power of Race in Democratic South Africa” by Kim Heller – published by @xarrabooks

Andile Mngxitama’s inconsistency and the politics of denigration and opportunism

I remain close to the places where ordinary black life meets the police, the farmer, the mine and the state face to face. That ground has no patience for fashionable radicalism.…

Brics and the wider multipolar shift have opened a new political field in world affairs. Photo: Ricardo Stuckert / PR

Brics, the GNU and the erasure of African consciousness

The judiciary and legal academy entrenched the same exclusion. They protected the existing order through property law, constitutional abstraction and procedural sanctity. They…

Mosiuoa Lekota was remembered as a towering figure of South Africa’s liberation struggle

Mashatile honours Mosiuoa Lekota as a giant who carried the torch of freedom

Known for speaking truth to power, Lekota’s contributions to democracy, education and social development have left an indelible mark on South Africa’s journey toward equality and…

Brigding the gap: Khaya Mahlangu belongs to a long lineage of musicians who helped shape a distinctly
South African Afro-fusion sound. Photo: Supplied

The bassists who built Soweto’s distinct sound

The story of South African jazz-fusion is incomplete without the bassists whose innovations quietly carried the music forward

Dance is music: Lighting by Oliver Hauser and set design by Willy Cesar foreground space, line and form.
Everything, Maqoma says, is architectural. Photo: Arthur Dlamini

Gregory Maqoma’s ‘Genesis’ is not an ending

The renowned choreographer returns to the Baxter not as performer but architect, with Genesis, a daring meditation on beginnings, endings and Black consciousness

A sea of blue memorial peace race participants were ferried by dozens of boats to take part in the third annual
10km run and walk hosted by the Robben Island Museum Council. Photo: Marlan Padayachee

Bittersweet return to Robben Island

For decades, the island was a towering emblem of punishment—first for enslaved labourers and lepers under colonial rule and later for the anti-apartheid resisters who dared to…

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.

Black consciousness: Liberate black people from ‘the zone of non-being’

Every person regardless of colour is affected by a system that debases blackness and elevates whiteness

Thandiswa references Black Consciousness leader Steve Biko, who was murdered by apartheid police in 1977, on her latest album.

The sonic soul of Steve Biko

Musicians have carried his ideology forward – but what would he make of today’s politics?

Steve Biko’s political thought was rooted in the climate of racism, and at the height of brutal subjugation.

Rethinking Steve Biko’s black consciousness political philosophy post-liberation

Leveraging colour as a means of progress can have a paradoxical effect of self-incarceration

Cover of It’s a continent book. Photo: Joseph Osayande

One Book, Two Takes: It’s a Continent

Astrid Madimba and Chinny Ukata’s impressive African history book by non-historians

Prizewinning architecture: This primary school in a village in Burkina Faso was designed by Diébédo Francis Kéré and built with locally sourced materials and the assistance of the villagers.

Positive spaces can help Africans realise their own agency

We must leverage local knowledge and materials to develop an architecture uniquely suited to our needs and conditions

(John McCann/M&G)

Farewell to Azania’s everyman literary icon Don Mattera

The poet, writer, artist and activist, who made rubbish of race, left his mark on all aspects of our lives

Book Review: ‘Now You Know How Mapetla Died’

Historian and author Zikhona Valela unravels the life and death of Black Consciousness activist Mapetla Mohapi, who died in detention in 1976

SOUTH AFRICA: AZAPO 9th Congress in the 1990s. (Photo by Gallo Images/City Press)

Azapo’s political relevance re-emerges

The party of socialist Black Consciousness has fresh leaders and a pact with the Pan Africanist Congress to begin working at the local level to create a viable and radical Left

Black Thoughts: Writer and activist Achmat Dangor never shied from his personal odyssey of exploring uncertain terrain. (Paul Botes)

Achmat Dangor: On writing and change

Celebrated author and political activist Achmat Dangor died on Sunday at the age of 71. Here, in a 1990 interview published in Staffrider, he speaks to Andries Walter Oliphant…

The gift of the gab: Vusi Mchunu’s literary works are varied, encompassing translations, essays and poems.  (Paul Botes)

Review: Macingwanes’s salutations to the cosmos

Pleiades: Isilimela, the latest poetry collection by Vusi Mchunu — who writes under his clan name, Macingwane — is a deeply personal meditation

Academic agenda: University of Cape Town students express their views about fees

The system in South Africa has its knee on the neck of the youth

The youth of today can learn from the youth of 1976, who rose up and rejected the Bantu education system

Road work team, 1976 (Judy Seidman)

Towards reclaiming our culture of the liberation struggle

Judy Seidman responds to Athi Mongelezi Joja’s expanded assessment of her ‘Drawn Lines’ exhibition

Drawn Lines invokes a double meaning of drawing as the prevalent medium of expression in the show, but also that of marking political demarcations. (Judy Seidman) (Delwyn Verasamy)

Pretensions of fighting for the oppressed and the totality of white power

We should be wary of taking theories of commitment and agency as self-evident; we should instead question their unspoken assumptions as we also question the motivations attendant…