Johannesburg - The African Mirror

Oct

2020

Anxiety in Johannesburg: new views on a global south city

NICKY FALKOF, Associate professor, University of the Witwatersrand COBUS VAN STADEN, Senior Researcher: China-Africa: South African Institute of International Affairs, University of the Witwatersrand WITHIN the media and popular culture of the global north, cities like Johannesburg, South Africa, are often presented as a site of trouble. They’re the source of the immigrants, drugs, violence, poverty, disease and environmental crisis that worry nervous citizens of more “developed” cities. Even when they take centre stage in international media production, global south cities like Johannesburg are laden with fear or fantasy. Think of the films District 9 with its slavering Nigerian gangsters,…

Sep

2020

By The African Mirror

Unique project to clean streets of Johannesburg

AFRICITIES

AFRICAN MIRROR REPORTER JOHANNESBURG - one of Africa’s biggest cities that was once called “The City of Gold” - has embarked on a unique clean up project aimed at restoring it to its former glory. Through the new project, volunteers will earn money from keeping the streets of Johannesburg clean. Through the Street Volunteers Network, a project of the Clean South Africa, volunteers adopt parts of or an entire street which they will keep clean. Dalu Cele, CEO of Clean South Africa said a network of volunteers would conduct weekly cleaning-up events of the streets and open space where they…

Aug

2020

By The African Mirror

Homes to policing: Lockdown photos document South Africa inequality

COVID-19

KIM HARRISBERG A security officer holds a shotgun against his body in inner-city Johannesburg, eyeing a homeless man carrying a bag of food on his shoulders as he vacates the area. The photo captures one of a multitude of everyday inequalities that South African photographer Gulshan Khan has been documenting during the coronavirus pandemic. From heavy-handed policing to abandoned buildings-turned-homeless shelters, Khan is using her online following and recent international awards recognition to spotlight the spatial and racial divide across the country. "Race classification and segregation under apartheid demolished so much of our rich heritage and my photography interrogates the…

Jul

2020

By The African Mirror

Meet Africa’s Mr Basketball

SPORT

BOITUMELO RANTAO FOR the majority of basketball players in Africa, their only hope of creating a career out of basketball is to seek a change of scenery and travel overseas. For others, basketball can be used to better the current situation by seizing opportunities to better schools that might have not been available before. Football was known as the clear-cut favourite as Senegal’s No.1 sport, but the growing presence of basketball could not be ignored. Though hard to find the facilities, and at a time when courts were not readily available. One youngster had just received a basketball from his…