Musicians worldwide have been placing their tracks with global streaming platforms such as Spotify for many years. South African musicians, however, have reported only sparse earnings from streaming music online. When our 2020 survey revealed this, we wondered if part of the reason was inexperience. At the time, COVID lockdowns had made live performances impossible, […]
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The latest film by director Gina Prince-Bythewood, The Woman King, is about a legendary all-woman African army in the 1800s, the Amazons of Dahomey. It takes place in what is today the Republic of Benin in west Africa. It wasn’t filmed in Benin, but in South Africa, in the KwaZulu-Natal and Western Cape provinces using […]
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There are some writers you wish you had encountered years ago. There are some authors you only discover – for many reasons – years after their death. The Afrikaans writer Koos Prinsloo is one such, for me. He wrote during the last violent decade of apartheid – a system of forced racial segregation implemented by […]
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Asake’s first commercial releases, beginning with the song Lady in 2020, didn’t really portend a seismic shift in Nigeria’s teeming Afrobeats scene. The 27-year-old genre-blending Nigerian singer and rapper has a tongue-in-cheek delivery and jocular persona. He writes nonsensical, self-deprecating rhymes with hip-hop influenced consumerist themes and could easily be mistaken for a less threatening […]
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Born in 1957, Simon Tseko Nkoli had just turned 41 when he died, in 1998, of an AIDS-related illness. In his short life, the South African activist fought against different forms of oppression. He fought for those downtrodden because of their “race”. He stood up for those ostracised because of their HIV status. His greatest […]
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Many football lovers hope an African team will finally win the men’s 2022 Fifa World Cup. The world has been waiting for this since the great Brazilian player Pelé predicted (in the 1970s) that an African country would win before the year 2000. That didn’t happen, but it didn’t stop Patrice Motsepe, president of the […]
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South Africa is a country that experiences a very high level of gender-based violence. During the UN’s annual international 16 Days of Activism Against Gender-Based Violence campaign, the country’s news media coverage of violence against women and children increases. As well-intentioned as this may be, studies have exposed several shortcomings in the coverage, noting that […]
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