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Dear Msholozi, As a nationalist and long-time supporter of the African National Congress, I am disturbed by reports that the SA Communist Party regards you as their useful idiot to help them get – and keep – their hands on the levers of state power. Are these reports...
A reincarnated Hans Christian Andersen may have painted The Spear for those denying the testimony of their eyes ‘The Emperor’s New Clothes” is one of the most enduring tales by Hans Christian Andersen. It tells the story of a fashion-obsessed Emperor who has no time...
People and the Planet. Royal Society Science Policy Centre Report. The radical ecologist Murray Bookchin once compared populationism to a phoenix, the mythical bird that periodically burns up and is reborn from its own ashes. No matter how often the “too many people”...
Eusebius McKaiser responds to The Spear's virtual death An open letter to Ferial Haffajee: A response to The Spear's virtual death Dear Ferial, You are obviously one of the country's most respected editors and perhaps even, as Peter Bruce, editor of Business Day,...
The controversy surrounding Brett Murray’s portrait of President Jacob Zuma has stirred up a hornet’s nest. On the one hand, it has elicited outrage even from people I know to have antipathy towards our head of state. On the other, defenders of The Spear feel that...
Amid the logic-destroying hysteria surrounding Brett Murray’s (now defaced) The Spear, the Film and Publications Board will sit to decide if personal dignity trumps art and freedom of expression. Eighteen years into South Africa’s democracy and our censorship system...
Mzukisi Makatse on freedom of artistic expression in South Africa The contextual and political understanding of the freedom of artistic expression in South Africa Now that the dust seems to be settling after the storm and hysteria occasioned by The Spear - Brett...
Olwethu Sipuka says Brett Murray hit the black man in the belly of his struggles "Black man you are on your own" "For the problem of the Twentieth Century is the problem of the color line", (W.E.B du Bois, 1903) The scenes that played themselves off at the Goodman...
In his book Art and The End of Apartheid, John Peffer writes about the Medu Art Ensemble: “For them a true culture of the people would be one that was not exclusive to the elite of the world of art galleries, but was seen in the streets, on T-shirts and posters (…).”...