I arrive at Fugard Annex 1 cradling a tumbler of red wine and find an empty seat on the second last row at the back. On stage is the host, Ferial Haffajee (editor of City Press), with her guest Maria Phalime, to talk about her memoir: Postmortem, The Doctor Who Walked Away. The room is […]
Lwandile Fikeni
Lwandile Fikeni is a Cape Town based freelance writer.
Posted inEquality, Media
A big, fat, Mzansi advertising migraine
Advertising has a way of carrying our collective cultural fantasies in nifty little 30-second bites on television and single-page print adverts in newspaper or magazines, which seem, at first, harmless and fun until, of course, they begin to illuminate the forces that inform the images we see and the consequenses of those images to our […]
Posted inEquality, General
Times are changing…
It was at a girl’s varsity residence room the morning after we had sex that I read, for the first time, Steve Biko’s I write what I like. I was lying next to her, naked, and she had a handful of books on a bedside table. I read the first few essays, which left me […]
Posted inEquality, Media
The dangerous sentimentality of Alice Mann’s ‘Domestic Bliss’
A photographic series by a white employer on her domestic worker was always going to be problematic, but I didn’t know how problematic until I was presented with Alice Mann’s Domestic Bliss. In her artist statement she says: “This series of portraits depicts black, female domestic workers in the homes of their white employers in […]
Posted inNews/Politics
EFF beret restores black pride
I live in Cape Town and not since the red berets started popping around the city have I seen the black man walk so tall in this terrifying tower of white privilege, which is this city. So sure of himself is the fighter that he does nothing but inspire confidence to those, like myself, who […]
Posted inMedia, News/Politics
The only clown here is the cartoonist
Everywhere you go, some shit word will collide with you on the wrong side of the road. — Dambudzo Marechera, The Black Insider I have a profound respect for language. Words dream us into being and knit together the world around us. Think of this passage from your trusted King James Bible: “In the beginning […]