Student of Africa
Learning about Africa. Learning from Africa. I'm on the right side of history. I also exist on the Twitter mechanism under the pseudonym @tylerpaziuk.
Yvonne Chaka Chaka - umqombothi (by SunAfrica Team)
Photos of South African women protesting in the streets against the Apartheid government.
1980s.
Read more about the critical roles women played during the anti-Apartheid struggle.
(via black-culture)
Official MAFIKIZOLO ft Uhuru KHONA (by Oskido I believe)
Ding ding ding!
Does @agangsa intend to colonize #Lesotho?
An Open Letter to Winnipeg, from Johannesburg.
Indeed there is a frontline. It’s where the forces of capitalism are felt most acutely. You can see with your own eyes, everywhere you look, the detrimental effects of the system we seek to abolish. You can’t see it in Winnipeg; at least not as clearly. In Winnipeg you have to think to see it. In Johannesburg, it is everything.
In Winnipeg you could be forgiven for thinking ‘hey, it’s not all bad’ or ‘ah, they just need to pull up their socks’ or ‘nah, that only happens in Africa’. But it is happening in Winnipeg too. Look around. See the corporations putting momnpops out of business. See the temporary foreign workers doing jobs no self-respecting white settler Canadian will do, because Tim Horton himself just doesn’t want to pay people very much; he has a cottage on the Lake of the Woods, you see. There’s the city chewing on farmland so developers who are (probably literally) sleeping with the mayor to make a quick few million, building crappy houses with crappier materials as quickly as possible. Check the university graduates working unpaid internships to gain experience, when that business or organization has no intention of ever paying anyone to do that job. The list goes on…
But here in South Africa, on the frontlines, people see these things more acutely. They live it. It’s white farm-owners (as opposed to farmers - you have to actually do work to be called a farmer in my books) preferring undocumented Zimbabwean migrants because they’ll work for less than minimum wage, and if they don’t they’ll be deported back to where there are even fewer livelihood options. It’s waitrons working for no wage at all - only tips. It’s eight-foot walls with barbed wire and electric fences along the top. It’s armed response security firms. It’s men and women doing hard manual labour in Canadian-owned mines under conditions that would be scandalous in Canada, for less than I made pumping gas when I was 15. All of this stuff is obvious here. In Winnipeg, it’s not so obvious. You have to look for it.
So, that’s why I say these are the frontlines. Because this is where the battle is being fought. And it’s being fought by people you will never meet. People who will probably never be famous. But they are saving the world. Indeed they are saving Winnipeg.
#jozi #joburg #johannesburg
Lebohang Masango (aka King Nova) first performed this piece at the Word N’ Sound series. It won her the Queen of the Mic title.
When asked why she wrote “The House That We Built,” this was her response:
“I remember being annoyed with my class-privileged friends saying that I ‘worry too much about poor people’ and that I wasn’t around when Apartheid happened. This poem was written in response to the overwhelming ignorance that prevails around the South African condition and, really, the lack of compassion shown by people who are not directly affected by the sort of issues that actually imprison the daily lives of others.
This poem is a house. And in building it, I hoped that the audience would understand that South Africa belongs to all who live in it and therefore, we are all responsible for what becomes of it in future. We can only move towards better when every citizen is willing to acknowledge the role played by themselves and their ancestors in the creation of our current situation.
That means: an end to Apartheid denialism and all the denialism around white and male privilege and also for People of Colour to love themselves again without subjecting themselves to a self-imposed white supremacist gaze.”
Whoever invented or continues to profit from the production of styrofoam needs to be killed. People who just throw it on the ground need to be beaten. #jozi #joburg #johannesburg (at Bree Street Taxi Rank)
