With his furious docu-essay I Am Not Your Negro, Raoul Peck caused a stir in 2016. The film about African-American writer James Baldwin and the Civil Rights Movement not only put the Haitian-born Peck on the map as a director, but also made him one of the defining figures of contemporary black cinema.Since his debut Haitian Corner (1990), Peck has devoted himself to political topics, switching effortlessly between documentary or feature films to achieve a stronger factual or emotional impact. His work, he says, only serves one purpose: "I need to find a narrative, something that lasts and Read more ...

I thought I might never be able to say it’s been a great year for women artists, so forgive me for focusing solely on them.Things were kickstarted with a retrospective of Barbara Kruger (Serpentine Gallery) who uses words and images to illuminate the way language is (mis)used to cajole, bully, manipulate and lie. Having explored similar territory for 50 some years, you’d have thought the American artist would have run out of ideas. Not a bit of it. Dominating the central space was a huge screen showing Untitled (No Comment) (main picture) which explores the Orwellian soup of Read more ...

“The street I grew up in had no name and is in a country that no longer exists,” director Milisuthando Bongela begins her meditation about growing up in Transkei, a semi-fictional black nation which helped facilitate apartheid yet felt like a utopia.Bongela splices forgotten archives of polished propaganda, raw videotaped reality and painful conversation to understand her own racial reality, and how colonial scars can be complimentary yet invisible for black and white South Africans today. White hands are shown etching borders and conjuring flags, stamps and anthems as Bantustan “homelands” Read more ...

Even if you miss the play’s title and do not recognise the writer’s name with the heft of reputation that comes with it, as soon as you see the black man and the white woman speaking in South African accents, you know that the tension that electrifies the air between them is real. "No normal sport in an abnormal society” was the rally cry of those boycotting the Apartheid regime, but there was no normal love, either – until, incredibly, the mid-80s. Yes, the mid-80s.Diane Page’s revival of Athol Fugard’s Statements After an Arrest Under the Immorality Act at the Orange Tree Theatre howls Read more ...

Characterised by jarring juxtapositions of intense, appalling violence and the serene beauty of South Africa, Oliver Hermanus’ fourth feature is the story of a young man coming to terms with his sexuality against the background of apartheid and prejudice.It's set in 1981, over a decade before homosexuality was legalised in South Africa, when any expression of same-sex attraction in the military meant a trip to Ward 22, where Dr Aubrey Levin subjected his patients to inhumane "treatments". The threat of this punishment hangs over the protagonist, Nick van der Swart (Kai Luke Brummer), its Read more ...

Based on the book by former political prisoner Tim Jenkin, Escape from Pretoria is an intermittently engaging jailbreak tale set in South Africa’s apartheid regime in the 1970s, as well as further evidence of Daniel Radcliffe’s determination to run as far as possible in the opposite direction from his past life as Harry Potter. Its only problem is a troubling case of schizophrenia, since it’s not sure whether to be a pared-down thriller or a political statement.Radcliffe plays Jenkin, who with his fellow African National Congress-supporting comrade Stephen Lee (Daniel Webber) gets arrested Read more ...

John Kani’s Kunene and the King is history in microcosm. Its premiere at the RSC last year, in this co-production with Cape Town’s Fugard Theatre, coincided with the 25th anniversary of the end of apartheid, offering a chance to assess the momentous changes in South African society over that time. But if that makes you expect any sort of public action on a grand scale, think again: this two-hander is a character study of two men, one white, one black, both in their own ways alone and pondering death, the details of whose lives gradually come to speak something, sotto-voce, about where Read more ...

London's impromptu mini-season devoted to the work of Athol Fugard picks up real steam with Blood Knot, Matthew Xia's transfixing take on one of the benchmark titles of the apartheid era and beyond. I first encountered this play during its Tony-nominated Broadway engagement in 1985, in which Fugard and his great South African friend and colleague, Zakes Mokae, returned to roles they had originated in Johannesburg in 1961. Now 86, Fugard continues to proffer a theatrical call to conscience which Xia and his exemplary collaborators at the Orange Tree Theatre understand to their core. And if the Read more ...

Before we consign this miserable year to history, there are a few good bits to be salvaged; in fact, for the visual arts 2016 has been marked by renewal and regeneration, with a clutch of newish museum directors getting into their stride, and spectacular events like Lumiere London, and London’s Burning bringing light in dark times. 2016 leaves an impressive legacy of museum-building, too: Tate Modern opened its much needed extension in the summer, and the new Harley Gallery at Welbeck in Nottinghamshire provides a fittingly magnificent home for the treasures of the Portland Collection.The Read more ...

Just 22 years old, South Africa’s national “Day of Reconciliation” on 16 December has shuffled into its perplexed young adulthood. Although commemorative events abound, few people seem to know how to strike the right note for this (just) pre-Christmas holiday. It symbolically occupies a date dear both to Afrikaners - victory over the Zulu kingdom at the Battle of Blood River in 1838 - and to their erstwhile victims. On 16 December 1910, Africans protested against their disenfranchisement, while on the same day in 1961 the armed wing of the ANC - Umkhonto we Sizwe - came into being. One Read more ...

DW Griffiths's 1915 silent epic, The Birth of a Nation, became notorious for its pejorative portrayal of black people and its heroic vision of the Ku Klux Klan. For his directorial debut, Nate Parker has appropriated Griffiths's title and whipped it into a molten onslaught against America's history of slavery and racial prejudice.Arriving in an America outraged – yet again – by police violence and witnessing the rise of Black Lives Matter, Parker's The Birth of a Nation was uncannily timely, and it prompted a studio bidding war when it premiered at Sundance in January this year. It's a Read more ...

In Concerning Violence Göran Hugo Olsson has created an almanac documentary drawing on material from Swedish television archives, filmed by a number of directors in Africa, largely in the 1970s. It’s fascinating footage, covering a number of perspectives on what was happening in the continent over that decade, from the frontline guerilla wars with the MPLA in Angola and FRELIMO in Mozambique, to industrial unrest in Liberia, and apparently matter-of-fact interviews with white settlers in Rhodesia and elsewhere.But Olsson’s masterstroke, which gives this diverse material a uniting context, is Read more ...