Nedine Moonsamy Based in 2023, South African writer Lauren Beukes’ novel Afterland captures the devastating effects of a global pandemic. A highly contagious virus, called HCV, has killed around four billion men. Society is in disrepair and, with no cure in sight, women are barred from procreation. The few males who have proven immune have become hot commodities for various agendas. And the odds are stacked against the protagonist Cole in her bid to return home to Johannesburg from America with her young son Miles – who possesses the HCV-resistant gene. Cole has lost her husband and been forced into…

This section of Lynn M Thomas’ history of skin lighteners considers Steve Biko’s role in raising consciousness and pushing the ‘Black is Beautiful’ campaign in South Africa. LYNN THOMAS Black Consciousness and biomedical opposition AT A marketing conference held in Durban in 1969, one presenter, Mr A Tiley, expressed an abiding optimism in South Africa’s skin lightener trade. Tiley explained that another business consultant, a recent immigrant – likely from the United States – had offered a “misguided” prediction: political independence elsewhere in Africa and the US Black Power movement with its affirmation “Black Is Beautiful” signaled the trade’s long-term…

Chabani Manganyi carefully reflects on black consciousness, defining it as having mutual knowledge of the thoughts, feelings and impressions of all black people, which leads to solidarity. CHABANI MANGANYI THE MARRIAGE between the words “black” and “consciousness” has in some instances led to panic and consternation in certain sections of the South African public. There have been arguments, debates and naggings. It all happened so quickly that some observers have even suggested that the bogey of swart gevaar [black peril] was suddenly becoming real. After this marriage it even became customary for some people of liberal bent to suggest that…

Achille Mbembe investigates how death structures the concepts of sovereignty and the political, theorising that the human becomes a subject by confronting death. This is an excerpt from Achille Mbembe’s Necropolitics (Wits University Press, 2019). The ultimate expression of sovereignty largely resides in the power and capacity to dictate who is able to live and who must die. To kill or to let live thus constitutes sovereignty’s limits, its principal attributes. To be sovereign is to exert one’s control over mortality and to define life as the deployment and manifestation of power. This sums up what Michel Foucault meant by…

By Stephanie Vos How does one rethink the arts journal – a publication of cultural reviews and essays – in the age of the internet and decolonisation? herri is a provocative new e-journal from South Africa that responds with vigour to both challenges. It’s named after Autshumao, also known as Herrie die Strandloper, the Khoi leader and interpreter for colonial administrator Jan van Riebeeck. It doesn’t set out to create a template of how an e-journal emerging from the south should look. Rather, it’s an exercise in principled plurality. “herri is merely one option among many,” its “about” page reads,…

It’s very rare that an intelligence operative - past or present - unmasks themselves and unveils the going-on in the dark, cloak-and-dagger lives of spies. Veteran intelligence operative and political activist Mo Shaik has done this and did it with insight and grace. Shaik’s memoir - The ANC Spy Bible - reads like a true spy thriller, full of intrigue, espionage, and the dangers associated with underground life in intelligence. It is rich in detail about his individual involvement in the ANC intelligence structures and their role in the struggle against apartheid.  The book traces the making of Shaik who…

FOR those looking from the global North, African literature is often marketed in a narrow way, comprising worthy stories of resistance, written in an uplifting and sober realist mode. Seen from the continent itself, this view has long been brushed aside by the effervescence and animation of ongoing literary experimentation and creativity. I approached literary academic colleagues from South Africa, Kenya and Uganda to choose – and share their thoughts on – one of their favourite books of African fiction. The resulting finger-on-the-pulse list offers a bookshelf that speaks to the vibrancy of both contemporary and older African literature. –…