Mail & Guardian
Mail & Guardian

Cultural Criticism

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Mother of the nation: Winnie Madikizela-Mandela, the mother who did what she could with what she had, became something more recognisable, a stand-in for a generation of women who stayed behind.
AFRICAN DOCUMENTARY FILM

Rewriting Winnie Madikizela-Mandela through the eyes of her grandchildren

Refusing neat conclusions, The Trials of Winnie Mandela invites viewers into an uncomfortable but necessary confrontation with history, legacy, and generational trauma

  • Lesego Chepape
6 min read
Dance is music: Lighting by Oliver Hauser and set design by Willy Cesar foreground space, line and form. Everything, Maqoma says, is architectural. Photo: Arthur Dlamini
AFRICAN PERFORMANCE

Gregory Maqoma’s ‘Genesis’ is not an ending

The renowned choreographer returns to the Baxter not as performer but architect, with Genesis, a daring meditation on beginnings, endings and Black consciousness

  • Lesego Chepape
7 min read
Dear, Mom: Mombathise is an ascension song. Simphiwe Dana says it is for her late mother: ‘a song to tell her to go and rest and be at peace.’ Photo: Supplied
AFRICAN HIGH ART

Simphiwe Dana sings the room into stillness

Moya is her quiet insistence that excellence, faith and African high art can hold grief without spectacle

  • Lesego Chepape
6 min read
Blood and freedom: A memorial in the Namibian capital Windhoek to the genocide of the Herero and Nama committed by German colonial troops from 1904 to 1907. Photo: Jürgen Bätz/Getty Images
ABDULRAZAK GURNAH

Examining colonial narratives and African representation in German literature

This is an edited extract of Henning Melber’s The Long Shadow of German Colonialism.

  • Henning Melber
4 min read