CHRIS SEARLE recommends a work of love and deep admiration for a great musician
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The legacy of South Africa’s revolutionary women
ANGUS REID speaks to historian Siphokazi Magadla about the women who fought apartheid and their impact on South African society
ROLE MODEL FOR BLACK WOMEN: Ruth Mompati in the Soviet Union in 1962
[Ngaba and Mompati families/Ruth Mompati Memorial Foundation/Courtesy of Siphokazi Magadla]
KENNY MacASKILL relishes a fictionalised account of the life and death of the principled Irish anti-colonialist, executed for betraying his English imperial masters
FIONA O’CONNOR admires an ambitious first novel that loosens South Africa’s rainbow collective to examine the racial tensions within
Aussie mining corporation murder, Liverpudlian ex-cop amnesia, a naive vigilante tries to reset capitalism, and the riddle of the dead psychoanalyst
SYLVIA HIKINS is persuaded by an entertaining play that the true miracle of Lourdes would be for attitudes toward disability to change
JAMIE BRITTON recommends this fine analysis of the architectural, ecological and infrastructural destruction of the Gaza Strip
Siphokazi Magadla (Pic: Courtesy of Siphokazi Magadla)
SIPHOKAZI MAGADLA is crystal clear about the relevance of her historical work to contemporary South Africa and the wider world:
“The erasure of women’s contributions to the history of the anti-apartheid struggle is connected to the dismissal of women’s roles in the new democratic state. If women didn’t matter in how we got to be liberated, then why would their roles matter now?”
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