Resisting petty apartheid
The historian Premesh Lalu’s film about an apartheid-era cinema on the Cape Flats also offers a glimpse of a future beyond racism for South Africa.
13 Articles by:
Zachary Levenson
Zachary Levenson is the author of Delivery as Dispossession: Land Occupation and Eviction in the Postapartheid City (Oxford University Press, 2022).
Dispossession in the name of democracy
South Africans fight for “adequate housing,” freedom from eviction, and a government that will progressively realize both of these goals.
South Africa’s Very Own David Brooks
Jonathan Jansen channels the worst versions of average center right American ideas in debates about transforming South African universities.
This brand of non-racialism is no better than denial
A review of a documentary film about the life of Albie Sachs, a noted antiapartheid activist and later Supreme Court Judge in postapartheid South Africa.
The Politics of Postapartheid Housing
Rather than the endpoint of the post-apartheid urban crisis, deficient delivery reproduces it anew, accentuating discontent in the process.
Relegating good intentions to the dustbin
The last third or so of Director Phil Harrison’s film about Irish multinationals in South Africa suffers from needless flattening.
Why aren’t we discussing Nelson Mandela’s politics?
As much as the world wants to deify Mandela, to do so in the abstract with no reference to his actual politics is absurd.
How about booking a night in this ‘shantytown’?
A resort in South Africa’s Free State province offers guests accommodation in “a Basotho village and a shantytown.” Who comes up with this offensive stuff?
Fok Your Hood
Next time you see billboards advertising Cape Town as the “World Design Capital,” know them for what they are.
The South African Compromise
How did leftist political scientist Adam Habib end up as a South African version of Thomas Friedman?
The magical disposition
Township “Living,” white people and the limits of “empathy”
The discourse about a film
What are the politics of the briefly banned film “Of Good Report”?
Not all the news that’s fit to print
How the U.S.’s paper of record, the New York Times, “debates” South Africa’s “future.”