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 new book The Unaccountables: The Powerful Politicians and Corporations who Profit from Impunity is welcome for the way it contextualises corruption. It shows how politicians and bureaucrats could not implement corruption without their corporate and professional enablers – the accountants, auditors and advocates who make it all possible. The book is the result of […]
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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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South Africa is famous for its amazingly rich and diverse fossil record. The country’s rocks document more than 3.5 billion years of life on Earth: ancient forms of bacterial life, the emergence of life onto land, the evolution of seed-producing plants, reptiles, dinosaurs and mammals – and humanity. Many will be familiar with hominid fossils […]
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South Africa is famous for its amazingly rich and diverse fossil record. The country’s rocks document more than 3.5 billion years of life on Earth: ancient forms of bacterial life, the emergence of life onto land, the evolution of seed-producing plants, reptiles, dinosaurs and mammals – and humanity. Many will be familiar with hominid fossils […]
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South Africa’s President Cyril Ramaphosa faces possible impeachment in the country’s parliament over the illegal stashing of thousands of US dollars at his farm in 2020. This is not the first time there’s been a threat of impeachment of a president in post-democratic South Africa. His scandal-prone predecessor, Jacob Zuma, survived an impeachment vote in […]
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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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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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Mangrove forests are a common sight in some tropical and sub-tropical areas of the world like Indonesia, Florida in the US, parts of Brazil and Australia. They can also be found on African coasts, including South Africa’s KwaZulu-Natal and Eastern Cape provinces. These tidal forests of trees and shrubs are often talked about in the […]
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South Africa is in a state of crisis. Its current reality is necessarily shaped by historical events, not least the outcomes of the political settlement process that led to the end of apartheid in 1994. Unlike other countries in southern Africa, where political independence came after gruesome liberation wars, the leaders of the African National […]
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