Posted inNews/Politics

Mngxitama and the whiteness debate

By Max Rayneard I’m a white South African, admittedly seated in a coffee shop in upstate New York where I teach African anglophone literature to American students, but wanting desperately to be home. I agree with Andile Mngxitama’s characterisation of whites “dealing” with complicity as something akin to a pastime: something one does now and […]

Posted inNews/Politics

Black middle-class, middle-child guilt

Black middle-class South Africans suffer from a wide spectrum of self-inflicted psychological ailments, which you need to be black and middle class to truly understand. Each generation suffers from its own variations of these — only black syndrome, first black syndrome, (my favourite) bad black syndrome, black guilt — often discussed with close confidants, far […]

Posted inNews/Politics

What makes you a bad black?

Once upon a time, not so long ago, a bright-eyed bushy-tailed little black Sipho was born with a defect, which doctors would later recognise to be a dictionary, in his mouth. Little Sipho was a curious little boy, reading anything he could get his tiny Zulu hands on (of course, relative to other kids his […]