I
Searching for the paradise of coffee and milk

“If only,” Hildegard sighs when I mention the non-racial ideal of what was once the anti-apartheid struggle. “Ah, the paradise of coffee and milk.” Thus sets my septuagenarian neighbour in our almost all-white neighbourhood in Brooklyn, Pretoria, the tone for this story. Because in Brooklyn Avenue not one of the neighbours feels nostalgic about South Africa’s apartheid past: a hopeful finding in these days of Trump, Brexit and Le Pen.

II
How the South African students movement was silenced

The campus with its white buildings and neat lawns is gated, in some places with barbed wire and Koketso walks around in it hesitatingly, as if she herself doesn’t understand yet why they let her in. Her T-shirt, skirt and gym shoes are low-cost as is her short cropped hair. When an older student calls […]

III
Zuma’s ‘pro poor’ masquerade

“We just have to take it!” Our old friend Mitchell’s hands claw into the air, his eyes fierce. “The companies, the land, the banks. Take it! Get rid of those white bosses! Like they did in Zimbabwe and Mozambique!” Yeah, because that worked so well there, too, I want to say, but I can’t get […]

IV
The Force against the Empire

South Africa’s Gold Reef City fun fair, a kind of mini-Disneyland built on an empty old gold mine and themed around the 19th century gold rush, -with wagons full of visitors participating in a quest for gold with no gold anywhere in sight-, is a metaphor for plunder. Gold was always only a fairy-tale to […]

V
In the trenches of the corruption

Sometimes things come to us via a detour. And sometimes it takes a while before you understand what these things are. When B. calls me from the Netherlands in early 2015, asking if I still remember such-and-such a friend from the anti-apartheid movement, a fellow activist from Amsterdam, I start reminiscing about the good old […]