The Guardian has a story on the results of a study by South Africa’s Medical Research Council. The first few paragraphs: One in four men in South Africa have admitted to rape and many confess to attacking more than one victim, according to a study that exposes the country’s endemic culture of sexual violence. Three [...]
Archive for the ‘South Africa’ Category
the culture of rape in south africa
Posted in South Africa, tagged gender, Medical Research Council, rape, South Africa, violence against women on June 18, 2009 | 5 Comments »
jacob zuma and the media
Posted in South Africa, tagged Jacob Zuma, media coverage, politics, television on June 17, 2009 | 4 Comments »
About a month ago “Global Pulse,” a TV and series on US satellite channel, LINK TV, did this quick analysis of global media coverage of Jacob Zuma, before and after he became South Africa’s fourth democratic president. As Global Link shows the media hardly blinked as it went from deriding to praising Zuma without winking. [...]
white flight
Posted in South Africa, tagged Achille Mbembe, apartheid, emigration, Helen Zille, race, South Africa, whites on June 16, 2009 | 15 Comments »
Excerpt from an essay in “Le Monde Diplomatique” (you need a password) on postelections South Africa by Achille Mbembe, Johannesburg-based professor of social science and history–and public intellectual (Mbembe also made a star-turn in Jihan Al-Tahri’s excellent documentary “Behind the Rainbow“: The recent elections highlighted three long-running trends that look like making a major impact [...]
‘Apartheid is dead in South Africa’
Posted in South Africa, tagged apartheid, postapartheid, racism, Robert Jensen, South Africa on June 9, 2009 | Leave a Comment »
“… What did surprise me during my lecture tour was not the racial tension but how much discussions about race in South Africa sounded just like conversations in the United States. There was something eerily familiar to me, a lifelong white U.S. citizen, about those discussions. I have heard comments from black people in the [...]
‘I don’t like the black people, just because’
Posted in South Africa, tagged blackness, coloured identity, Democratic Alliance, elections, Helen Zille, racism, South Africa, Western Cape on June 8, 2009 | 1 Comment »
The opposition Democratic Alliance won the provincial election in South Africa’s Western Cape. As this this video blog post of the recent elections by a Belgian journalist show, the Democratic Alliance could rely, among others, on overtly racist voters to secure that majority. Though the commentary is in Dutch (or Flemish?) the comments, and including [...]
color consciousness
Posted in South Africa, tagged Afrikaans, Afrikaners, apartheid, film, Harlem, ImageNation, politics, race, Sandra Laing, television, video on May 27, 2009 | 1 Comment »
To coincide with the commemoration of the June 16, 1976 uprising in South Africa, the Harlem-based Imagenation Cinema Foundation is screening “Skin,” a fictional film based on the life of Sandra Laing, a South African woman born to white Afrikaner parents in the mid-1950s and later declared black by the authorities because of her dark [...]
surface familiarities
Posted in South Africa, tagged African cities, Cape Town, race, second class citizens on May 26, 2009 | Leave a Comment »
Princeton political scientist Melissa Harris Lacewell‘s impressions of a visit to Cape Town: “… Tourist areas reflect the power of global capitalism and cultural imperialism; making shopping for groceries and clothing entirely indistinguishable from an American shopping experience. Television and radio are completely familiar, as are brands, styles, and dining. Despite its surface familiarity, the [...]
what is a coconut?
Posted in South Africa, tagged Soweto, television, Trace TV, video, what is a coconut? on May 25, 2009 | 2 Comments »
Short video insert on postapartheid class/race politics among South Africa’s black majority. The video also doubles as a mini-profile of Kopano Matlwa, author of the novel, “Coconut.” (The novel, in summary, is not outstanding–I read it when it came out. In the interview, Matlwa actually makes it sounds way better.) By Fireworx Media for TraceTV
President Jacob Zuma’s first real test
Posted in South Africa, tagged Black economic empowerment, corruption, Jacob Zuma, politics, Sbu Ndebele, The Economist on May 22, 2009 | 1 Comment »
Did the newly elected South African President pass?
Afrikaans is way cooler than this
Posted in South Africa, tagged advertising, Afrikaans, Gazelle, language politics, Pendoring, Riaan Cruywagen, South Africa, Tidal Waves on May 19, 2009 | 4 Comments »
By Herman Wasserman
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