On Wednesday morning, 21 October, student protests for #FeesMustFall had finally arrived at the campus of Tuks. Several hundred students gathered peacefully and started walking in an orderly fashion along the inner circular road of the Pretoria main campus – despite all official campus activities suspended in a somewhat surprising precautious measure announced by the […]
Waves of still ongoing protests (it has morphed from #FeesMustFall to #NationalShutdown) have brought to a halt several universities in South Africa – Wits University, University of Cape Town, Fort Hare, Rhodes and Stellenbosch have all been affected and students from other universities are joining the movement every day. At last count fourteen campuses were […]
Dreadful news and shocking pictures have filled my monitor over recent days as South Africa experiences another wave of attacks against foreign nationals residing on its soil. This time, the riots are coming on the heels of remarks Zulu King Goodwill Zwelithini made a few weeks ago in which he urged “all foreigners to pack […]
Christal Spel is a researcher at Nordic Africa Institute’s Urban Dynamics Cluster. The 2014 World Cup ended few months ago and one cannot forget the thrills and the chills, the winners and the whiners, the flying men and the floppers. And the drama continues with some countries suing the football administrative body (FIFA) for perceived […]
Sara Nilsson is Master’s student in Cultural Anthropology at the University of Uppsala. At the foot of Table Mountain lies the beautiful campus of the University of Cape Town (UCT). It is recognized for its history of opposition against apartheid and currently presents itself as a cosmopolitan melting pot of cultural diversity. However, uncomfortable remnants […]
Once upon a time – tonight actually –, I went to see “The Lord’s Children” a new French documentary on the atrocious deeds of Joseph Kony, the leader of the Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA), a guerrilla group operating in Central Africa, (in)famous for kidnapping children and turning them into child soldiers. It was close by […]
Much has been said about what will happen to South Africa after Nelson Mandela dies. While all is not well in the Rainbow Nation, there are reasons to counter the portrait of a country on the highway to hell. As I wrote in June, the idea that a South Africa in crisis will erupt and […]
Jesper Bjarnesen is a researcher at Nordic Africa Institute’s Urban Dynamics Cluster. Let’s go to Wassakara, my son sleeps in a villa… There are more of us than there are plates in the house Soap, we use it to wash, we use it to wash the dishes Didn’t you say you have come for two […]
As international and national news media are preparing for the death of an icon, the debate about what will happen when Nelson Mandela dies has again resurfaced. Without dismissing the enormous significance of Madiba the questions about South Africa’s political demise following the future loss of the man are unwarranted. South Africa and the world […]
The idea of gentrification as the real enemy of livable cities began haunting me in mid-March after a movie at the CinemAfrica festival in the charmingly dilapidated movie theater Zita in central Stockholm. “Twende Berlin” is a funny and moving documentary of a group of Kenyan artists travelling to Berlin and performing a number of […]
Annika Teppo, Urban Anthropology 