All around South Africa, this is a time where predominantly young people flock campuses, straight out of high school to begin the next chapter of their lives. At the university currently known as “Rhodes”, this was no different. All one could spot were groups of enthusiastic young people parading through campus attending various activities orientating […]
Gcobani Qambela
Senior Anthropologist at the University of Johannesburg and Researcher at The Oxford Research Centre in the Humanities (TORCH), Oxford University.
Co-author of the "Anti-Racist Teaching Practices and Learning Strategies Workbook" with Warren Chalklen, PhD.
Available: https://bit.ly/3huUEMP
Posted inEquality, Gender violence, News/Politics
Beyond 2015: Setting an inclusive and pro-LGBTIQA development agenda
I recently read an interesting article titled “Why gay rights is a development issue in Africa, and aid agencies should speak up” by Hannah Stoddart. Stoddart, concerned with the very high rise in state-sanctioned homophobia in Africa, shows how homosexuality in some African countries is often accompanied by a life sentence or up to 20 […]
Posted inGeneral, Media
Voices of the Drylands?
An academic colleague and I recently took our third-year anthropology students to go see the Voices of the Drylands photographic exhibition by Attie Gerber currently showing at the North West University Gallery in Potchefstroom. The students are taking a course on research methods with my colleague and one on theory and representation in anthropology with […]
Posted inEquality, News/Politics
Winnie Mandela and the misrecognition of black women
Mail & Guardian columnist Verashni Pillay in “Five times Winnie Mandela has let us down” writes that Winnie Madikizela-Mandela’s quest to reclaim the Mandela Qunu home “is another embarrassing incident to add to her growing list of failures”. Pillay says there’s “historical revisionism happening in some quarters of our nation these days that brands Nelson […]
Posted inEquality
Blackface, Khaya Dlanga and why we can’t disentangle sexism from racism
Speaking recently at Johannesburg Workshop in Theory and Criticism in Cape Town, iconic political activist and scholar Angela Davis in her talk “Anti-Racism: Transnational Solidarities” remarked that “black unity” is often a term that never fits the lived reality of many black people. She made an example of how in the “black power” movements in […]
Posted inEquality, News/Politics
David Saks and the naturalness of white contempt
In Ubuntu: Curating the Archive (edited by Leonhard Praeg and Siphokazi Magadla), Ama Biney notes in the chapter “The Historical Discourse on Humanism: Interrogating the Paradoxes” that Aimé Cesaire notably made the case that Hitler’s crime was mainly that “he applied to Europe colonialist procedures, which until then had been reserved exclusively for the Arabs […]
Posted inEquality
What does a ‘non-racial’ SA look like?
The University of California Humanities Research Institute’s Seminar in Experimental Critical Theory in conjunction with the Wits Institute for Social and Economic Research’s (Wiser) Johannesburg Workshop in Theory and Criticism kicked off yesterday at the University of the Witwatersrand. The theme is “Archives of the Non-Racial“. It began with a conversation between Ahmed Kathrada and […]
Posted inEquality, Gender violence
The problem with ’emasculating men’
“Gender activist” Mbuyiselo Botha and University of South Africa professor Kopano Ratele recently wrote an article published in the Sunday Independent titled “Capitalism has emasculated black men”. They argue that “the struggle of the mineworkers is part of the long war waged by the black working class and poor men to regain their self-worth”. And […]
Posted inEquality
Maya Angelou: A phenomenal life for a phenomenal woman
“There was no need to discuss racial prejudice. Hadn’t we all, black and white, just snatched the remaining Jews from the hell of concentration camps? Race prejudice was dead. A mistake made by a young country. Something to be forgiven as an unpleasant act committed by an intoxicated friend” writes Dr Maya Angelou in her […]
Posted inNews/Politics
How DA rhetoric propels black pathology stereotypes
“There is a kind of arrogance and racism that assumes if you are black, then you are a member of the ANC” uttered Mamphela Ramphele (paraphrased) at the Dispatch Dialogues hosted by the Daily Dispatch in conjunction with the University of Fort Hare in East London two weeks ago. These remarks were made at an […]
Posted inNews/Politics
The quiet violence of sexist language
“There will be more diplomatic language to countenance rape, torture, assassination. There is and will be more seductive, mutant language designed to throttle women, to pack their throats like paté-producing geese with their own unsayable, transgressive words …” were some of the observations made by Toni Morrison in her 1993 Nobel lecture. It was hard […]
Posted inEquality, News/Politics
Resistant whiteness: On Pistorius, Memela and the dead bodies of women
Sandile Memela recently issued an apology to “countrymen” in the form of Dr Piet Mulder, The Freedom Front Plus, The FW de Klerk Foundation “and everyone who was offended” by his article “Oscar would be a hero if Reeva were a black man”. In the article, Memela questions if Reeva Steenkamp were a black man, […]