South Africa
Kieron Tyler
“A complete fully translated and transcribed Obsidian Rock Audio Anthology chronicling the ancient spiritual technologies and exploits of prehistoric, post-revolutionary afro bionics and sacred texts from The Great Book On Arcanum by Supernal 5th Dimension Bound 3rd Dynasty young Kushites from Azania.”So runs the text on the back of the sleeve of the second album from Johannesburg’s Blk Jks, the belated follow-up to their 2009 debut After Humans. Helping them build from this inscrutable manifesto are guests including guitarists Vieux Farka Touré and Madala Kunene, vocalist Ali Magassa Read more ...
Veronica Lee
Loyiso Gola, twice nominated for Emmy awards for his satire show Late Nite News, has been a big star in South Africa for some years now but this show should help cement his reputation abroad. UK fans will remember his 2018 appearance on Live at the Apollo, where he guyed the audience with his views on the British and Brexit, among other things.Unlearning, a show written a few years ago but updated for this hour-long Netflix special, is rather lighter on gags than the Apollo material but is entertaining in its own way. In it he weaves a story about living in Apartheid-era South Africa, his Read more ...
Sebastian Scotney
Praise gets heaped on the already well known. And that often leaves others in the shadows. I’m not saying that Abdullah Ibrahim doesn’t deserve the accolades – notably, “our Mozart” from Nelson Mandela – but there have been other genius level South African pianists: one was Moses Molelekwa who died at just 27. The other is the very great Bheki Mseleku (1955-2008).Mseleku’s album Timelessness, recorded with a host of American jazz super-heavyweights in 1993, has been widely hailed as a masterpiece. And this newly-released solo piano album Beyond the Stars (Tapestry Works), recorded in Read more ...
Sarah Kent
Hail the Dark Lioness (Somnyama Ngonyama in Zulu) is a powerful celebration of black identity. These dramatic assertions of selfhood are more than just striking self portraits, though. South African artist Zanele Muholi uses the pronouns they and them and refers to themself as a visual activist, since the photographs are a form of protest against the prejudices faced by the queer community of which they are a part.In this series begun in 2012, Muholi ratchets up the contrast, so their skin becomes ebony black, and decks themself in mundane materials such as raffia, rope, electric cables, Read more ...
Joe Muggs
Charles Webster is one of those connecting figures who make the idea of “the underground” seem quite convincing. Originally from the Peak District but coming of musical age in Nottingham, he was inspired by Chicago house and Detroit techno music from their very genesis in the mid 1980s, and went on to make some of the finest British house music ever. Along with Notts locals like the legendary DiY Soundsystem (prime movers of the week long Castlemorton Free Festival) and Martin “AtJazz” Iveson, he pioneered an ultra sophisticated and soulful sound that forged connections with odd Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Whether explicitly or indirectly, what’s written on a master tape box can tantalise. Revealing part of a picture creates a desire to want to know more. Take the example seen above. It’s for an album by South African alto saxist Dudu Pukwana. The annotation gives a date of July 1968 and the client is Witchseason, the company run by manager/producer Joe Boyd. The recording took place at Sound Techniques, the independent Chelsea studio favoured by Boyd for his other clients. He’d worked there with Pink Floyd in 1967. Around the time of this session, Boyd had brought Fairport Convention and The Read more ...
India Lewis
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 ...
Joseph Walsh
Oliver Hermanus’ potent fourth feature Moffie certainly has a controversial film title. A homophobic slur, it can be translated from Afrikaans as "faggot". If you were to see buses with film posters emblazoned with the title in translation, there might rightly be cries of outrage.But the charged choice of title is not unwarranted. The word rings throughout the script, but without the viewer becoming desensitised to its poisonous quality. It lashes like a whip every time. The power of Hermanus’ film comes through a drama that is charged with fear and hatred. Rendered as a tense Read more ...
Joe Muggs
Londoner Shabaka Hutchings's other main groups, The Comet Is Coming and Sons Of Kemet, are pretty modernist. They incorporate dub, post-rock, post punk and rhythm patterns that recall London pirate radio sounds into the playing of his ensembles, with thrillingly adrenalised and / or cosmic results. This ensemble, though – convened in South Africa with with trumpeter Mandla Mlangeni – is altogether more true to a strictly jazz lineage. It's true, in fact, to a very specific jazz lineage: “The New Thing”, the explicitly spiritual, often fiercely political music exemplified by John and Alice Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
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 ...
Tom Birchenough
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 ...
Jenny Gilbert
The most arresting thing about Dada Masilo’s contemporary South African take on Giselle is Masilo herself. Tiny and boyishly slight, she inhabits her own fast, fidgety, tribal-inspired choreography with the intensity of someone in a trance. Costumed she may be in the familiar tight-bodiced little dress of traditional productions but her boldly shaven head suggests that this Giselle is no wallflower. And she's not going to take betrayal lying down.We first meet her at work in the fields alongside other villagers. The action, like composer Philip Miller’s electronic nod to Adolph Adam’s score, Read more ...