Memoirs of a Born Free: Reflections on the Rainbow Nation

Memoirs of a Born Free

Memoirs of a Born Free is a journey back through the life of Malaika Wa Azania as she recounts the experience of growing up through the end of apartheid and South Africa’s transition into a democratic nation. She was not born during the times of constitutionalised apartheid but is still a product of an epoch of systematic individualised apartheid. Her story is not a reflection of freedom; it is an epitome of the on-going struggle for liberation and emancipation from mental

slavery.

Book Launch: A Renegade Called Simphiwe

Simphiwe Dana is nobody’s darling

By Siphokazi Magadla, Thought Leader, 23 September 2013 

“Part of what makes Simphiwe Dana so compelling for me, part of why I had to write this book, is that she is almost impossible to govern,” writes Professor Pumla Dineo Gqola in her latest book, A renegade called Simphiwe. This book is a “creative-intellectual portrait” of the public (and private) life of the musician. In this country where our imagination of political liberation has largely focused on the soap-opera like manoeuvres of politicians, Gqola carefully recasts our eyes by showing us the intersection between the creative and the political. While we have been accustomed to colourful politically focused book titles fit for Hollywood blockbusters fromEight Days in September to Mangaung: Kings and Kingmakers, Gqola dares and goes against the grain in this book.

Feminist Biko – From Dana to Gqola

Simphiwe Dana

by Hugo Canham, Identities in Flux

The recently published A Renegade Called Simphiwe is as much about the supremely talented Simphiwe Dana and its author, leading feminist scholar, Professor Pumla Dineo Gqola. As she cautions the reader on more than one occasion, this book is not a biography, so readers who want an expose’ of Ms Dana may be a little disappointed. In Gqola’s words, this is a book by “a writer in conversation with the ideas in another artists work”. However, this book will go down as a cornerstone in South African feminist works on a public figure. Gqola is not a silent author putting forward sanitized ‘facts’ to an unimaginative readership. She is part of the story that she tells and she pushes readers to participate in the narratives that she weaves. At various points we as readers are asked to explore our own complicity in misogynous, patriarchal, anti-creative and anti-intellectual discourses.

Marikana was the uprising of the poor

by Siphiwe Dana, The Sunday Independent

And they mowed them down with automatic guns. Just like in the movies… except, there were no sound effects. No slow motion for emphasis. Just dust. It sounded like fireworks going off. A thunder of explosions that could excite or terrify. Fast and gritty. A memory snatched by time amid the recollection of a dream. It was a dream, so quickly was it over. I blinked and it had never happened.

Twitter Wars

by Benjamin Fogel, African Socialist

Sometimes it seems almost universally accepted among my white peers that whites can dictate the terms and conditions of the black experience of racism. Take the counter-trend which emerged in response to the tweet story over Zille’s “professional blacks” comment, #capetownisawesome. The fact that you as a white South African have not personally witnessed racist incidents in Cape Town does not prove anything. It is revealing. The only time I really encountered blacks growing up deep in the Southern suburbs of Cape Town was in the form of domestic workers and gardeners. In my matric year at Reddam House Constantia there were only 5 students of colour out of 120 students.

A Response to Simphiwe Dana on Taking African Languages Seriously

by Pumla Dineo Gqola, Loudrastress

Although I have written about this topic in the papers before, several years ago in the Mail and Guardian, this post is motivated by Simphiwe Dana’s courageous opinion editorial in this past weekend’s Sunday Times. There are a few aspects of Ms Dana’s argument that I disagree quite strongly with, but I do share many of the concerns that she articulates.