Magazine
While blackness, as an imposed reality, that creates a certain field around the subject, has come to be acknowledged as such, little has been done to problematise intersubjective relations between black people.
Poet Makhafula Vilakazi is tired of living in the shadow of Shakespearean poetry. Born Matodzi Ramashia in Chiawelo, Soweto, Makhafula has created a brand of poetry that sees him delivering his rap inspired lyrics in township slang.”
Nomaza was the kind of woman every wife on the street resented. Her honey skin reminded other women that their dark skin would never make men stop mid-sentence when they passed.
As a matter of fact, it was Khaya’s political activity that landed Biko in trouble when the two were arrested at school and detained. I recall how Bra Bisto, as Khaya was known, related to us as AZASCO members in 1995 how happy he was when Biko was arrested. This was because Biko was indifferent to political activity until that arrest.
My first impulse when I picked up Hauntings the Anthology was, “I hope I won’t be visiting another femicide/GBV trauma ward, as a Black woman who is cursed to have this history of events as their everyday lived experience”.
In response to the tragic events that have scarred the ideology of a rainbow nation, Afro Arts extended the Department of Sports, Arts, and Culture’s Long Night of the Poets initiative with a critical moment of introspection and interrogation into the Black condition.
As a response to the fatigue of everyday mass media statistics about both the infections and mortality rates, conspiracy theories pertaining vaccines, spats regarding the origins of this pandemic and the discomfort caused by global lockdown regulations; Musa Nxumalo curates this exhibition with an intension to bring to the fore the ideas that are explored by contemporary visual artists who are actively exploring ideas and producing work during this complex moment of our lifetime.
The campaign supports talent by providing funding, production and mentorship for creative individuals or collectives to make their ideas come to life. From 20 July until 13 August, Johannesburg based creatives can apply for a one-week residency this autumn.
Bantu Biko, the Founding Father of the Black Consciousness Movement, warned us that apartheid employed a Divide & Rule strategy where the sections of the black community would be placed in separate concentration camps and oppressed in “varying degrees”.
Squint your eyelids even tighter and you’re bound to hear the last remaining echo of the neighbourhood gossip: whose son, just yesterday a tottering tot, has gone rouge and robbed the Somali’s spaza shop, which spinster is shacking up with whose philandering husband, whose daughter was spotted disembarking a Nigerian mogul’s car and who owes the mashonisa for the weave his girlfriend is busy posting selfies in, while their two children go hungry in some drought-ridden village the couple only visit on Christmas!
The starting point of the analysis is that the architects, agents and beneficiaries of racial-capitalism have so much to gain from the maintenance of the apartheid economy and apartheid geography and so much to lose from the dismantling of racial-capitalism and the rolling back of the legacies and continuities of colonialism that they cannot risk even the slightest possibility of a revolutionary turn to the left in South Africa – whether initiated by the ruling African comprador bourgeoise or imposed on them by pressure from below.
A highlight for collectors is the creative response of photographers to the Covid 19 pandemic. This includes dramatic portraits by Lamyne M from the Ivory Coast, theatrical imagery by Jabulani Dlamini and Marc Shoul’s social documentary interventions.
