Vuka Zulu is the sound of an artist reaching maturity. This is a coded way to say that an artist has plateaued. Vuka Zulu is many, many, many tracks that all sound eerily similar, an inoffensive Café del Mar-esque background track played in a South African-themed eatery in Copenhagen. Vuka Zulu is a relentless flow of sort-of amapiano, two-step, kwaito, soulful progressions that remind one of music but never quite get there. Each track is a very competent album-filler track. Only “Umvuko”, the opening track, has any trace of earlier Umlilo releases, and precious little trace at that.

What has always stood out in the music of Umlilo, from Shades Of Kwaai to Mpumi, was a chaotic mélange. Here there is just mélange: a stifling benignness wearing the sounds of freedom. There is not a single track that isn't some form of pleasant.

Lyrically, many tracks seem conceptually revolutionary enough, but just enough. You can quite imagine white people dancing to it, at a braai, in a gated complex, with the one black guy from marketing conceding that this is better than Prime Circle. It is the soundtrack to a Lay's commercial. The LLM set somewhere between Mango Groove and Simunye.

The whole of Vuka Zulu just sounds too easy. It does not live dangerously.

Reviews · → Silas en die Ysbeer

by Roger Young

“White crosses on the church yard, I want to smash them all” – Against Me.

On Saturday 26th of September Ernst Roets, of AfriForum fame, under his new supervillain designation, Lex Libertas, an international advocacy project for Afrikaner rights, will be planting 3,000 white crosses on the National Mall in Washington. These crosses symbolise the deaths of white people by violent crime in rural areas and farming areas of South Africa. Lex Libertas says each cross will carry the name of a victim, and its preliminary list contains more than 2,203 names. The event is being staged in partnership with the New York Young Republican Club, following a conference at the National Press Club on Friday the 25th. There will be no black crosses.

In a similar period there were Black farm workers, farm dwellers and other rural residents among those killed in farm attacks. Police Minister Senzo Mchunu has also said that Black people have historically made up the majority of victims of farm attacks, although the available official statistics do not provide a continuous racial series for the period in question. Race based statistics are available through AfriForum.

Meanwhile according to the Guardian UK white people are being turned down for refugee status for various things such as a partner’s marijuana conviction; a shooting during a security job in 1995, despite the applicant being acquitted; and other cases involving criminal records, misclassified information or incidents that US immigration authorities interpreted differently from the applicants themselves. The rejection notices themselves did not give specific reasons and could not be appealed. It seems that America only wants a certain class of refugee.

And in Ohio, where 206 Afrikaners had initially settled, the cash assistance runs out after four months and the onerous requirements, bureaucratic and financial, mean that getting a driver's licence can take up to nine months and cost around $500. The new rules require eight hours of driving-school lessons, 24 hours of classroom instruction and 50 hours of supervised driving before applicants can take the driving test. And you need a licence and a car to get to work. Resettlement agencies said roughly half of the 206 Afrikaners who had settled in Ohio had subsequently left the state, with the licensing requirements a major factor. White man, you are on your own.

Since the genocide visa was announced, more than 13,000 South Africans have been “settled” in the United States under the refugee programme. Some have found low-wage jobs, while others remain unemployed or dependent on the shrinking refugee assistance payments and food banks. Recently it has been reported that a family of these refugees is unable to return to the USA after visiting South Africa to use their medical aid. A dream deferred.

Amerikaners was established in 2025 by white South Africans following Donald Trump’s executive order creating a refugee pathway for Afrikaners, and was subsequently designated as a referral partner for the US Refugee Admissions Program. It assesses prospective applicants who say they face racial discrimination in South Africa and refers eligible cases into the American refugee system. They explicitly state in their documentation, “returning can undermine the basis of the refugee claim.”

Meanwhile the Institute of Race Relations is running its Ticking Boxes campaign, arguing that South Africa should stop using the apartheid-era racial classifications — Black, Coloured, Indian and White — to determine who qualifies for jobs and business opportunities. The IRR says race should be replaced by disadvantage as the basis for economic empowerment, and wants BEE replaced with what it calls Economic Empowerment for the Disadvantaged. The Institute of Race Relations seems to exist to make itself redundant.

While the administrative quagmire of B-BBEE has been used as a shield for tenderpreneurship, nepotism, corruption among other things, it is hard to reason that it is not conceptually necessary. Any white person that was educated during apartheid has a significant educational advantage over any Black person educated under the Bantu system. These advantages have generational consequences. A white parent is better equipped to help their child with their homework. The larger structural inequalities of 400 years of colonialism will take generations to redress. Slavery ended 161 years ago in America and its legacy is still being grappled with. Let us not forget that apartheid was, essentially, slavery. B-BBEE is, in this way, less about the immediate economic redress and more about the education of white people into the material and conceptual realities of Black lives. That B-BBEE is badly administered is a separate issue. Structural inequality continues to exist.

The United States has recently announced visa restrictions on South Africans responsible for or complicit in policies that enable uncompensated land seizures, race-based discrimination or the incitement of imminent violence against minority ethnic or racial groups. America is now offering Afrikaners refugee status because it says they are victims of racial discrimination, while threatening visa restrictions against South Africans involved in policies intended to redress racial discrimination, and they have arrived at this amidst pressure from groups such as AfriForum, and the Fox News timeline, who use race-based discrimination to represent an alternative reality, a non-existent genocide, that has been debunked so often that it is now boring.

AfriForum has spent years documenting alleged racial discrimination and farm attacks and lobbying internationally on behalf of white Afrikaans speakers. We must remember here that Afrikaans is not only a white language, many of its words and formulations come from Indonesian, Malay, Khoi, San and East African languages, picked up on the farms, the stables, the road crews, and in kitchens where the Dutch and French put their slaves to labour. The earliest identified book written in Afrikaans was a Cape Muslim religious text, written in Arabic script. Afrikaans is by die kombuis langs.

Institute of Race Relations, AfriForum, Amerikaners, Lex Libertas, none of these organisations could exist without ongoing racial or cultural conflict. These are realities they have to construct, concepts made real by repetition, alternative timelines, in order to pay their salaries. They exist to sow division. And the material reality in the USA does not seem to be better for them than it is in South Africa. Bittereinder, jy word aan die neus gelei.

Consider this picture from the AfriForum website, taken in Klerksdorp. It shows Samuel Temboer, Reinhardt Bögershausen, George Thamsanqa Latha and Johan Taljaard, the road crew fixing potholes as part of AfriForum’s Ons Doen Dit Self campaign. It is a photograph of men standing in a break from their work, men of different races, including two black men, one of them wearing an AfriForum shirt, smiling before returning to labour in building the white enclave.

Disclaimer: I am not an eight-year-old child.

Silas en die Ysbeer is a fantasy set in a world where a single mother can afford a two story apartment in Higgovale on a firefighter's salary.

Oh, shit, I mean...

Silas en die Ysbeer is a film made “for all our children”, which is why it explicitly refers to a time when the Cape was Dutch and there are no black people in it.

Whoops, no that’s not it...

Silas en die Ysbeer in no way borrows, neither musically nor by stealing a scene wholesale, from Where the Wild Things Are.

Whoops, again, no...

Silas en die Ysbeer stars Neil Sandilands as an ageing artisanal burger restaurant where all the cool kids used to go to do cocaine. There is a distinct lack of hats designed by Crystal Birch.

No, maybe, um...

Silas en die Ysbeer is a film about a young child processing the death of his grandmother through a series of dreams, who learns that parables and imagination are a way through trauma.

Or...

Silas en die Ysbeer is a beautifully hand-crafted parable of a film, filled with childish wonder, solid performances, charming music and a tender message. The gentleness with which it carries an expertly understated lesson of grieving is remarkable. Filled with humour and playfulness (and fart jokes), yet managing at the same time to ground itself in an ordinary realism.

I wish I was a child again.

Reviews · → 1977

1977 is an ambient bromance a decade in the making. The first major work for Laband since Deaf Safari (at best The Soft White Hand often felt like outtakes from that album), this duet soundscape with Derek Gripper, the guitar master of transposition, is just fucking gorgeous. Perhaps collaboration is what Felix Laband has always been searching for. Sparse and filigree, 1977 is deft in simplicity. Two musicians playing their instruments in a room recorded to tape, no tricksy looping from one to the other, Gripper's delicate acoustic string reworkings of Bach, Sissoko, et al, are intertwined with Laband's restrained sonic soundscapes, interspersed with muted vocal samples of readings from news presenters, political agitators and a reading of statistics, and even these are sonically under the surface, seeping into the brain. At first listen this might resonate as bubble-bath ambience, but it is not.

Gripper's always remarkable rejection of standard song forms seems to have given Laband permission to expand without clutter. Birdsong, echoes of Madrugada Eterna, over and under flutters of strings, forget the source of the sound. A wind gathers from the river to the sea.

Silas en die Ysbeer ←· Reviews · → Landmyn

by Roger Young

Let's just call it what it is: Kevin Fraser performs blackface with his character Gladys, has been doing so for a long while – which is what this “best” of tour is all about. You would think, since Schuster's films were pulled from Showmax in 2020 amid a review of racially insensitive material, that Fraser would read the room. In his defence, that's hard to do from Australia.

In a reel dropped today on his socials the standup influencer, promoting his South African tour, you know the South Africa he loves so much that he moved to Australia, brings out his old favourite Gladys for a paid spot for Amazon.

Gladys is Kevin performing his domestic worker for lols. He doesn't go full Schuster and put on the old boot polish, but he does do the funny black accent thing, so hilarious. See how backward my domestic workers have been, so lolzies.

Kevin sits on his couch expressing anxiety that the delivery driver is stopping somewhere. Traffic amirite? Lolz. The package arrives and Gladys, in her pink uniform and feather duster – cleaning up, LOLZ, peeks around the door. Kev opens his package. The doorbell rings again, who could it be? Gladys doesn't hear it because she's comically working with headphones on. Ah the worker takes joy in her work, how funny. But wait it's not just that she is enjoying it, she is waggling her bum, you know, like “the blacks” do it? Lolz. Kev really understands “the blacks”, he speaks Zulu you know.

Kevin brings Gladys her packages, so many packages, what could she possibly have ordered, such conspicuous consumption! Oh lol those funny domestics, all Kev ordered was a wagyu beef wrapped in lettuce, probably.

Gladys says, Amazon has something for everyone, Kevin. She means that Amazon has lawyers for everyone, from consumers in Australia being charged extra to escape ads they didn't sign up for, to the indigenous fighting for their land in Cape Town, to suppliers being locked into contracts so they cannot sell their products elsewhere, yay Amazon!

And then Kev asks the question, the real question, How are you going to get all of this home? Silly Gladys, SHE DIDN'T PLAN HER TRANSPORT! LOLZ! These domestic workers, so unable to manage their resources, what would they do without us? Kev then gives her a ride home, but she takes sooooooo long to do up her seat belt! Kev's time is IMPORTANT there is WAGYU TO EAT!

If only Gladys had all of this stuff delivered to her own home, does Amazon even deliver to wherever the fuck she lives? How irresponsible of Gladys, but you know, Yoh! Then Gladys says, Asembeni and the reel helpfully provides a subtitle to tell us what she means. KEVIN AS GLADYS SPEAKING IN ZULU, LOOK HOW NOT RACIST KEVIN IS, you at home might not understand.

Ever since the good old days of Pip Freedman, white South African men have used funny accents to make light of the habits and nuances of other cultures and peoples in South Africa, crossdressing always a bonus. It happens worldwide, but South Africa has a very rich tradition of it: Freedman, Uys, Schuster, Die Antwoord, the Cape Town Fish Market, Outsurance, Kevin “Amazon” Fraser. When comedians such as Noah, Taylor, Lottering, or Naraghi do it, they either work on an equal power dynamic, or they expose the power relationship, the absurdity of the dynamic. When Fraser does it, he entrenches stereotypes, entrenches power.

Schuster used to claim he was an equal opportunity offender, he mocked everyone regardless of how they felt about it, or whether they were able to answer back. Gladys is Mama Jack without the boot polish. A consumer-friendly racism performed to shill products for a company that rides roughshod over indigenous rights. Lolz.

It's only funny if you find “the blacks” to be funny as a concept.

Observational comedy generally works when it reflects the comedian's current experiences. Fraser would have such rich material if he was to examine how people who flee to Australia (or gated communities) perpetually misread what is going on back in South Africa. Because that's already funny.

Note: The wagyu bit is an assumption, because assumptions... lolz.

by Roger Young

“She’s deformed because of all the drugs and things.” – Helen Zille, who does not have a medical degree.

Roughly a month ago, on August 15th, the DA’s municipal campaign posted a video to its social media channels, with a viewer advisory warning for graphic content. The warning was warranted as the video showed Helen Zille potentially violating the privacy of an at-risk infant, and showing contextual details, as well as shoddy masking of the faces of the child’s alleged parents and other people struggling with substance dependency and in extreme poverty.

The manner in which Zille referred to these humans, dismissively, without addressing them directly, as “drug addicts,” does nothing but shame and stigmatize them. Zille exclaimed that the conditions were dire, and that “no child should have to grow up like this.” Very few would disagree with that statement, but under the outrage there is a worldview.

It is almost impossible to know what that worldview is, but we do know that Zille did not rescue that child, as the video implies. It is apparent in the video that she hands the child over to a social worker, who took the child to a place of safety, doing exactly what social services are meant to do in that situation. And Zille did exactly what a person should do in that situation: she reported it to social services. Did the pressure of the camera force social services to act faster? This is a possibility. Can Helen Zille rescue every child in precarious circumstances on camera? Probably not. And why are the parents of the child not deserving of rescue?

It's worth noting that Zille and her social media team were in Reiger Park to visit a family whose child had taken their own life, and were diverted by this, possibly more aesthetically amenable, situation.

Helen Zille has the right to speak about anything she likes in any tone that she desires. I want to make this explicit: I am not tone policing Helen Zille. I am linking her tone, her way of speaking about people, to the actual outcomes of DA policies in the City of Cape Town (COCT). This is a campaign video, and a campaign is a series of promises.

In no way do I mean to imply that the ANC are successfully managing the infrastructures of municipalities and national government. What I mean to ask here is what we can expect from the DA should they win a majority and Zille becomes mayor.

In Cape Town, where Zille was premier and the DA runs the City of Cape Town, management of the city is business centred. The homeless are managed and displaced, but there are no sustainable interventions to the long-term problems of the unhoused, children at risk, or the ravages of spatial displacement on the larger sections of the population. Instead the focus is on making the city work for business, which further drives displacement. Out of sight out of mind economics. What the eye doesn’t see the heart doesn’t feel.

One of my favourite DA campaign videos is Zille talking nostalgically about the well-maintained Orange Grove of her youth, you know, during apartheid.

In the DA’s campaign manifesto there is an explicit promise to reclaim hijacked buildings; there is no stated strategy for the people who live in those hijacked buildings. There is a promise to stop the rot, which includes getting the water and electricity working and making the CBD a safe space for businesses, but where do the inconvenient unwashed go? If it’s anything like Cape Town, the answer will be away from the business district, making it hard for those people to access the opportunities of a revitalised business district — opportunities they could realistically access if there were actual interventions such as harm reduction, skills training, housing grants, and so on. It could be argued that these are not the ambit of a municipality, but that is merely convenient.

To make a city work, one has to ask who it is being made to work for. And it is so much easier to reclaim buildings and stigmatize the suffering than to actually meaningfully address the current social issues. You can’t just harken back to the golden times of apartheid and spirit people away.

The ANC is demonstrably now a party that is not aligned with the welfare of the people it is elected to serve. The DA is demonstrably a party that predisposes business interests over people. These should not be the binary.

There is also the DA’s management of its social media spaces, or rather the noticeable lack of it.

“If you can’t feed your children, you shouldn’t be allowed to breed.” – Facebook comment.

When a comment like this surfaces on the Reiger Park Facebook post, there is no visible response by the DA team. The endorsement is implied by allowing it to remain unchallenged. This comment is but one example of the kind of viewpoints that are in support of a business-friendly city. A city working for business, with the poor invisible, somewhere else, in another place that is not this place. A two-party-state solution. Separate but equal.

On a Reddit thread I posted about the issues around the child and its parents, in all the debate the child and the parents were never mentioned by a single redditor. Mostly the comments were all in the “Better Than The ANC, What Choice Do We Have” range. One of my favourites: “I would vote for Darth Vader if I thought he would make the city work again.” Be careful what you wish for.

When Helen Zille dismisses the vulnerable as drug addicts and points to their inability to care for their child as disgusting, she is ascribing that inability as agency, without any concern for the agency available to those parents. When Zille decries the lack of social workers and then successfully engages with one who actually does their job, Zille claims this as her own victory. When the DA manages the less advantaged of the Western Cape, any failure of them to comply with the conditions of help is relegated to personal failure on the part of the disadvantaged. If they can’t feed their children, they shouldn’t breed. Ah, the White Utopia of my youth.

Zille made claims that she got the child into a safe space with the help of a social worker. Unnamed social worker. A mere cog in Zille’s white saviour narrative. This was not even the metro she is campaigning for; the DA Mayoral candidate for Ekurhuleni, Khathutshelo Rasilingwane, was also relegated to a background prop. The mechanics of the situation are different than what is presented. The social worker was alerted by a member of the public, Zille, and this triggered a section 152 intervention.

Once handed to the social worker, the infant should have entered the statutory process. The child would have been removed without a court order, placed in temporary safe care, the parents would have had to be notified within 24 hours, and the matter brought before a Children’s Court for review. The law does not simply remove the child and abandon the family; the court would have to consider whether reunification was possible, with state support, or whether longer-term alternative care was necessary. That these services are not responding adequately, on a provincial or national level, is the issue. When the evidence shows that the DA does not adequately engage with this issue themselves, claiming that mayoral intervention by social media, or even just mayoral concern, is disingenuous.

The very same video could be made in Cape Town right now. There is a huge substance dependency issue in the DA’s home city that they have failed to address adequately. Helen Zille making social media videos about one child does not help the homeless and at-risk children of Cape Town, who are subject to intimidation and removal from public spaces by a private security force every day, through policies initiated during Zille’s tenure there.

an interview with Yugen Blakrok

You should basically be ashamed of yourself for not knowing who Yugen Blakrok is. It took a Facebook post a few weeks ago to remind me that she made this deep hip-hop that made me feel like I was listening to Digital Underground, or Massive Attack, or Lovage even, but you know, on shrooms, a music that was effortless and expanding. And then I got to wondering, where the fuck is Yugen Blakrok now?

And so...

bios: Where are you right now?

Yugen: About two and a half hours south of Barcelona, in a small village between Barcelona and Valencia.

bios: Oh, have you looked across at Morocco?

Yugen: Yes. Isn’t that incredible? It’s fucking nuts. I never thought it was that close. We’ll be going in November. We’re playing at Visa For Music.

bios: Okay, listen, I’m gonna tell you now to plan a side trip to Tangier. You must visit the Burroughs house.

Yugen: That’s who I thought of. That’s the first person I thought of, William Burroughs and Tangier.

bios: He used to do these things called cut-ups. He’d cut up books, newspapers, whatever, and rearrange the pieces to create new writing. He was sampling language. Burroughs is hip-hop, man.

Yugen: We agree on that. You and I, we have this agreement. I like him for that also.

bios: The reason I discovered you, back when you put out Return of the Astro-Goth, was because you were on the same label as Hymphatic Thabs, one of the great underrated voices in South Africa.

Yugen: That’s true. He’s got the style that’s been most copied in hip-hop. He spawned this really original fucking style, and also with the accent, he has a thick Sotho accent, rolling the R’s and all of that, it’s just the most authentic. I think he showed a lot of South Africans how to be authentic in their expression of hip-hop, seeing as we relied so much on American stuff.

I remember that part of South African hip-hop where the discussion was on authenticity, and it also involved language. If you rapped in English you were sort of looked at as inauthentic, but I felt like Hymphatic represented all of it. Even though the rhymes were in English, it was a South African English with South African references. Hymphatic Thabs is one of the great voices when it comes to South African hip-hop, for sure.

bios: I bumped into Hymphatic Thabs at Kitcheners in 2014 or ’15 and couldn’t believe he was still alive because he’d just vanished. Then I went onto the label and discovered all this incredible music I hadn’t been aware of. What happens to Iapetus now that you’re with I.O.T.?

Yugen: The label still exists. The last project was maybe Zapsign Deebo, he’s dropped two projects with the label. And then with I.O.T. it was sort of like a partnership. The making of the albums... we’ve done two albums with I.O.T., Kanif the Jhatmaster and I, but the production side is still Iapetus.

From my side, how I got into it and my experience of it: it’s this big production house, really, because it’s run by artists. We were never in the system to begin with, completely independent... and everyone was kind of helping with each other’s releases. For example, Thabs is a brilliant editor, award-winning even, so with a lot of the videos there’s input from Thabs. There’s Tumi Moroka, who shot the majority of all of our videos. She’s a trained cinematographer, but she also released a book under Iapetus, Hurakan (and other short stories), which was the first book we dropped as a label. We’re more a production house than a label.

Zapsign Deebo’s first video, I remember we shot at the flat in Yeoville, at Iapetus headquarters, and we didn’t even have a smoke machine, so I was blowing weed into the frame, you know what I mean? That’s my thing, making the clouds happen.

And then there’s Kanif, who did the majority of the production. Everyone was playing multiple roles in Iapetus, in making and creating the music. We weren’t great at selling stuff, because we’re all artists, and the mentality was: really focused on making dope art, on having our voices included in this whole symphony that is South African hip-hop. That’s always just been the mission, just make the dope art, we’ll figure out the selling stuff later. We had such a guerrilla spirit. We didn’t give a fuck about doing free shows. We did so many damn free shows. And we were confident because we know we’ve got our CDs printed, and we understand the economy that we’re living in. We understand the majority of our fans don’t even have this cash.

That’s where we positioned ourselves: knowing who our market is, knowing that the industry itself tends to be very closed, very cliquey. So we said fuck all that. We’re going to go play these shows, we’re going to bring the music to the people. We were all very against the whole industry “you gotta pretend, you gotta fake it till you make it, fucking hire cars to make a video.” We did none of that shit.

bios: Fight the power, basically.

Yugen: I love Iapetus forever for pressing on even when the odds did seem against us. That people would really pull up and pull through and support each other. And there was none of that, I remember when I first came into the label as well, there were a lot of labels going out, unreleased records, and Pioneer Unit, and it was quite a lot of independent labels coming up.

bios: Yeah, Dplanet.

Yugen: And also, in hip-hop circles in general, whenever there’d be a woman coming into a crew there’d be this whole “first lady” bullshit. I never got any of that there, and I really loved that space in Yeoville, with all the books and mirrors and just constant conversations. You go support someone, maybe Robo the Technician’s playing a gig, or he’ll put me on, give me like 10 minutes of his set. Or if I wasn’t getting booked for Back to the City because of this or that issue, WitchCrAft would be playing there, give me 10 minutes of their set. Or Gin I Grimes got booked and he’s gonna put me on. That was love, man.

bios: You had some collaboration with Likwid Skillz, didn’t you?

Yugen: I had a little Sista Slash moment. Likwid Skillz, that’s my best friend. We just enjoyed rapping together. We never made a project or anything. We always just talked about it, because we’re both air signs and we can yap and yap and nothing comes of it. We just really enjoyed rapping together. And we still support each other till today. That’s really nice, man, to build a friendship.

bios: So now that you’re in Europe and you’re not in Yeoville, is there a distance? How do you feel about everyone being here and you being there?

Yugen: Dude, I am studying, you know. That’s how I look at it. I came here to see how this industry works.

Look, the folks that I came up with, we all had the same issues. We all saw the glass ceiling. We all saw how cliquey shit was. I mean people would go so far as to say, “Hey, you underground cats like to be inaccessible,” as a way to keep us out of certain gigs. And we weren’t trying to be inaccessible. Nobody... there’s no artist who’s gonna write, record, fucking press CDs, go all out and perform on stage in front of people, and then you want to accuse me of being inaccessible. You’re just covering for the fact that you want to put your homies on that you went to high school with. And the reason our industry is dying like this is because of that, small-minded folks who are more interested in getting power than helping the culture grow.

At some point when we dropped Return of the Astro-Goth we were shipping CDs everywhere, I’m talking Australia, US, and when it came to the SA side of things it wasn’t moving as much. Our stuff was up online. I remember Kanif and I going to see Musica to try and get the CD accessible in stores, and these folks would turn us down, or keep moving the finish line further. “Oh well no actually we need five different releases from the label first, before we can put your record in store.” So what, you want the Robo, you want the Thabs, you want everybody that came before me? Why not just put me on? I’m the one with the album out. Constantly moving it further.

It’s the infrastructure. It’s systemic. So I was like, no man. If we’re shipping the music out, outside of South Africa is where folks are appreciating the music for what it is. Let me go out there and see what it’s like.

That’s what inspired the move overseas. I played my first show overseas in Berlin in 2016. It marks 10 years now. And funny enough, the gig that I’m playing on Sunday is at the exact same spot. So I feel like this full-circle moment. The mission was: let me go out there, see what it’s like, meet these people who are buying my disc, who are enabling me to fucking have food on the table... outside of the “oh you’re dope, you’re dope,” because props don’t pay for the lights.

So I came out, I saw that, and I found a label to work with to do the things that we weren’t able to do. We could print the discs and we could make shows to raise the cash, but to have a team working with you is something that we’d never had. And we wanted to see what that looks like so we could emulate it, so we could bring that back in. This move did inspire a change in Iapetus, from when we started, how we rolled out even for Zapsign Deebo. I like talking about him because I feel like he looks the most like me in the crew. He’s my favourite.

bios: I.O.T. took on the difficult prospect of Dookoom for a while.

Yugen: And actually that’s how I think we met, even. We met Aymeric in 2016 as well, on that very first trip overseas. We were in Berlin, and then some guy from Marseille was doing a show, and then he said, “Hey, we hear that you’re in Europe, would you come and play a show in Marseille?” And we went to go play that show, and that’s where we met Aymeric. He gave us some Dookoom CDs and vinyls and stuff.

The first album, Anima Mysterium, Anne-Sophie was involved in, I ended up working with her on the cover. I thought it was going to be forever, but relationships change, groups change.

I thought, okay, if they’ve worked with Dookoom then they have some experience about not just working with international artists but with South African artists as well, because we’re going to need visas with our passports, we’re going to need all that type of stuff. And for me... you’re a musician, you need someone to do the admin.

bios: That’s what a label is for.

Yugen: And we wanted to learn what that entailed as well. Based in France had its own challenges, i.e. I didn’t speak a word of French when I went there. I learned it during Covid. I learned how to speak French, my man, and I’m all right with that now. I can have a decent conversation, but it’s still not good enough that I can handle a really detailed conversation, or even a legal one. There I’m still struggling, so I’ll ask to translate.

bios: What’s the most Eastern Cape, give me an Eastern Cape kind of concept that’s impossible to translate into French.

Yugen: A lot. It’s a lot. There’s too much. First of all we often say isiXhosa asitolikwa, isiXhosa is untranslatable. That’s a proverb, ironically. So I went in with that. But there were certain things I’d miss about home when I was there. And there was a time I was stuck there as well... we couldn’t go during the lockdowns and all of that. And I’d find myself personalising the French, you know what I mean. So they’ll say like oui, or ouais, and if I add an e to ouais it sounds exactly like ewe, yes in isiXhosa, no one would notice I’m just saying yes in isiXhosa. Like, whatever, a beer or whatever, e-ouais. Just squeeze it in there. Little things.

Here in Catalonia, where we have been, I find little things that are similar to how things are in isiXhosa. Folks here, I mean we’re in a pretty rural space, you hear someone say xec, or hec, at the end of a sentence, like que dius, hec, and it sounds just like het in isiXhosa. In isiXhosa you’d say het, uthini, the hec and the het are said the same way and do the same job in the sentence. I can’t explain it better than that, but they’re the same sound. So I’ll do that. I’ll say the Xhosa version instead. And it kind of makes me feel good inside, to see that there’s so many similarities.

And I’ll say the same sentence in isiXhosa and then I’ll show maybe my Catalan friends: this is how we would say it. And they can hear the melody or the rhythm of it is exactly the same. There’s so much similarity. It’s just that the words are different. I like finding things like that. I like finding proof that we are more similar than different.

bios: I don’t know if you’ve seen Sandulela Asanda’s Black Burns Fast. She’s from the Eastern Cape. It’s about two young Black girls falling in love at boarding school, and what I love about it is that there’s no misery, no angst. It’s actually fun.

Yugen: Oh, that’s beautiful. It’s enough, that view. We’ve seen enough of that misery. Let’s see the beauty of it, the humour of it, of just being.

bios: Did you see Kings of Jo’burg?

Yugen: No.

bios: So it’s like a gangster movie set in Joburg, but their secret power is that they’ve captured a mermaid from a lake.

Yugen: Dude. What? Okay.

bios: And it’s kind of like, okay, we’re going to take this deeply, I don’t want to even use the word spiritual, but this deep kind of thing, the mermaid.

Yugen: You can say mythical even. We could even say mythical at the very least, you know? Like with all the Limpopo dams with mermaids in them and all of the Mami Wata stuff.

bios: And you’re going to turn it into a gangster movie? Dude.

Yugen: The first time I heard of a friendly mermaid was that Disney slop, you know, little Ariel. Before then, I was scared of mermaids because like in our culture, you don’t mess around with those. They’re not pretty, trying to fall in love with a stupid prince. None of us. This is more closer to Pirates of the Caribbean, where they’re vicious, you know, hectic stuff.

Yeah, man. I love seeing all these South African films and series on these streaming sites as well. I get so happy, because for a long time I just felt like the world, outside of the apartheid, bloody past stuff, Nelson Mandela public-relations type thing, the world wasn’t really looking at us, all the way down there in the bottom. And once they decided to look this way, it was like, yeah, guys, we have so much going on. Once you look, I don’t think you can look away again.

bios: Often people need to see somebody else taking an artist seriously. The reason I thought to interview you was that somebody posted on Facebook, “Why are no South Africans paying attention to Yugen Blakrok?” I thought they were, and then I looked around and realised most of your interviews and coverage were international. I thought, oh, this thing again.

Yugen: Yes, it’s crazy, because the actual music lovers, the fans, they support. But the platforms, on the other hand... it looks like when I was there, working with my brethren and all of Iapetus, they made such an effort to ignore us, that after the whole Black Panther thing came out and the international players came, they couldn’t now start doing it, you know? They’re like, “I didn’t... I can’t now start doing it, after I’ve been ignoring this girl for years. I have to dig in, I have to double back.” Now, yeah, that’s honestly how I feel.

I remember, when I was still on Twitter, I’d go look at all the messages I’d send, hey, I’m doing this, I’ll be travelling to this place, maybe you would like to do a feature, maybe a little write-up? And nothing. And I look back, like, oh, okay, well, yeah, no problem. I’m not really a grudge person like that. Other people come around and they work. They come around in their own time. Maybe at that time, you didn’t have time for me. Now you’ve got time. I just keep it moving.

bios: What’s your favourite country song?

Yugen: My mom loved that song, Dolly Parton, Islands in the Stream with Kenny Rogers… a bit of Johnny Cash as well. I don’t have one favourite song, but I like to put a whole bunch of songs together when I’m thinking of my mom or missing her while doing chores. She’s a country girl. Actually, I’m thinking now I need to check on her since we heard the news about Dolly’s passing. I’m wondering how she’s taking that. I’m going to call her right after this.

bios: You were in Europe during the pandemic, right? There was this feeling that Covid might cause a shift in consciousness. Do you think that happened?

Yugen: Yes. A new level of consciousness was definitely unlocked during Covid. On the very obvious level: we had to spend time with ourselves. I think from then until now, the discussion around mental health has become stronger. It was a time of self-discovery.

There’s something, especially for me in that space, because I was learning a new language. I started really resonating with that... depending on somebody’s lips, doing a lot of lip reading to recognise these new words and sounds. We don’t have those sounds in isiXhosa, and I was very focused on language and learning because that’s the space I was in.

bios: People are scrolling all the time and there’s AI-generated music, but the one thing that can’t replace the live performance is that moment when people connect to music.

Yugen: Yes, it’s the same thing, reverting to what is real. Remember, TV, internet, videos, this is all new. There was a time where if you wanted to hear a song, someone needed to pick up an instrument or use their voice and you had to be in the same room for you to hear that.

bios: A hundred years ago if you wanted to hear a song, you bought sheet music.

Yugen: Yeah. Yeah. You know, so there is that. There will always be that live element and connection, because nobody in our history decided to make music to sing to themselves alone in a cave somewhere. It was always about community. Ubuntu, I am because you are.

I’m not scared of this AI stuff. It will never be able to replicate a human. Human beings crave connection, the human experience, and we will always want it. I didn’t see a reason or incentive to include AI in what I do because I value the human element of my artistry.

bios: A hammer is a tool. A typewriter is a tool. It’s the intention behind using the tool that matters.

Yugen: I’ve seen people use it in really creative ways without sacrificing the integrity of their artistry, and big up to that. And I’ve also heard people straight up refuse, and big up to that as well. It’s your choice.

bios: So let’s get back to where you are now. What you’re recording now, materially, where you wake up, where your studio is, how is it different from when you were doing Astro-Goth?

Yugen: I think I’ve come full circle. We’ve always recorded where we are, that’s the thing with Kanif, we’re very DIY. I haven’t recorded a single album in a big studio. All three that I’ve gotten so far are recorded in the space where I sleep and breathe and live, from Yeoville up until here. We always build a studio where we are, make the booth. I’ve gotten really good at making my little booth and isolation. I enjoy that DIY element of hip-hop because the art I make is a big reflection of me and I’m very grassroots.

When Kanif produces stuff for me, he enjoys having me there because we’re making something for me. With the music and writing, I live, I don’t write every day. Octavia Butler said something to the likes of not waiting for inspiration to write, but writing anyway. I tried that and I didn’t like it. I don’t like to write for writing’s sake because then I write crap. I like to feel inspired; it comes from an emotion. I know after this conversation I’m going to write something because I’ve had to say my thoughts out loud and look at my own beliefs.

I like to spend days living, having interactions, going home and thinking about why I said something or why I felt offended. I like to be fully involved in everything that I do.

bios: Sometimes someone will say something in a way that expresses exactly what I think, but I’ve never heard it said like that.

Yugen: Yes. The beauty of human connection. That’s what it is really. When someone verbalises or gives you the language to explain a feeling you haven’t been able to express. I love that about us. We’re all telepathic to some degree, catching the same thoughts as they flow past.

So I think the process is similar, in that I create from ownership. But how I think about things has changed from Astro-Goth. I speak like three more languages than I used to, so I know my brain thinks differently and is a bit more open.

bios: How much is the experience of learning new languages coming into the music?

Yugen: A lot. Learning French, Catalan, and Spanish has expanded my view on English. I can appreciate where its roots come from, like how much it samples other languages and cultures.

I’ll be on a call with my sisters, brother, or mother, and we speak strictly in isiXhosa. I’ll speak English at home, and then Catalan and French in the streets. Missing out on nuance and cultural references has taught me to appreciate the languages I grew up with. We lose a lot of words as we evolve, whereas slowing down and tracing the root of a word connects it back to an emotion. That’s the type of stuff that goes into the music now. I like exploring uncomfortable emotions and searching for that human connection element.

Before, I was writing just for myself. Now I’m very aware that myself is very big and includes a lot of other selves. Doing your part means really getting to know yourself as opposed to falling in line with trends. I am more convincing in my truth now versus the first album. I care even less about stupid stuff.

bios: So I hear you’re a fan of Enya. Did you know Die Antwoord did Sail Away?

Yugen: How did they do that?

bios: “Sail away, sail away, motherfucker.”

Yugen: Why did you have to tell me that?

bios: I’m sorry.

Yugen: But I get the idea of separating the artist from the art. People must do what they want. There’s always someone there to appreciate what you do. We don’t all have the same tastes, and we shouldn’t. But how you are as a human being counts. Don’t be a horrible fucking human being.

bios: Do you have a release plan for the new material?

Yugen: No, I am infamously slow when it comes to my work process. But we are in a creative space working on new material and songs. I’m going to start recording when we come back from this Berlin show. I like to write after a show when my voice sounds real nice from rehearsals.

bios: And when are you performing in South Africa again?

Yugen: I’m hoping in February. May was really nice. I’m a summer person and I miss South African summer. February, I’m trying to put something together with Cape Town as the priority, because the last time I performed there was in 2015. The last time I came home we were in Joburg and Eswatini, and all the homies from Cape Town asked why I wasn’t coming through. I realised people wanted to hear me there, so I’m going to make a proper effort to do a couple of shows there.

bios: The people appreciate you, even if Musica doesn’t.

Yugen: I won’t forget jumping through hoops for nothing. I felt betrayed because I’d considered them a South African platform putting South African music out, and I never realised how hard it was for independent artists until that moment. So, thank you, Musica, for that lesson: to always cheer for the underdog and the independent artist, because it ain’t fun and games. It’s not. And even if it looks nice on socials, there’s a lot of hard work and a lot of disappointment that’s going through there, especially for us in South Africa in particular, I want to say. And then we’ve got spirit. We’ve got spirit, you know. So, yeah. So see you in February if everything goes well. And I hope it does.

Landmyn ebbs and seethes through a winter family holiday by the beach.

Siblings Colette, Johan and Lisa, one returned from a career in London (or Scotland) apparently making coffee, the other an up and coming playwright and director (plainly the autobiographical hinge of the film – you can tell this because the other characters accuse him of being pretentious) and their younger sister, who is rebelling, presumably as she has dyed her hair red. The three of them find themselves at a beach house somewhere in the Cape, paid for by the older sister, who breaks the news that their mother is coming as well. Portent sets in. Who pays for what is where the faultlines lie.

If I am making Landmyn sound a little heavy handed, that's because it is, but just a little. Yet, it succeeds despite that, through a series of subtle performances and shifts in tone, a sense of foreboding of the mundane. The spell of Landmyn is occasionally broken by some not so subtle, on the nose, intention signaling around intergenerational views on race and sexual agency, an aunt gets out of a taxi muttering, “Nigerians,” a very hammy exchange between the mother and son about interracial dating. In its loudest moments Landmyn overexplains what is so very evident in its whispers: this is a film about young people and old people not being able to understand each other's choices, and it is unflinching on that devastation. When it strips down to bareness, winter light, wind, the family on the cold beach in the distance while a mother contemplates her choices, Landmyn grabs your heart in its fist.

Anna-Mart van der Merwe as Annatjie holds the film together, the first act setting her up to be the landmine, she spends the rest of the film revealing that the landmine is buried deeper. The bothersome mother is a product of time, misunderstanding and grief, unmoored by circumstance. At the end Nicole Holm as her sister Beth, with a corresponding grief, sees what the children, without the benefit and decay of time, cannot: people are bound by their mutual misunderstandings. Landmyn is an open wound.

1977 ←· Reviews · → Benaaihilism

by Roger Young

“Dolly Parton — love her. She nursed her ill husband till the end. She looked like a complete floozy, but she was a strong and deep human being. RIP.” — Helen Zille

After Dolly Parton’s death last week the DA leader and current Johannesburg Mayoral hopeful Helen Zille tweeted the above – in her words, a “compliment” as tribute to the star’s passing, which sparked a mild middle-class outrage.

In Zille’s defence, she was not calling Parton a floozy, she was saying that she looked like a floozy. Parton herself famously said that, “It takes a lot of money to look this cheap.” Zille was merely riffing on this famous line.

But looking “like a floozy” and looking “this cheap” are two very different statements.

Parton’s statement can be read that it’s not cheap to look cheap, that it is an aesthetic choice that is dubbed as “cheap”, because it is the aesthetic of those who are deemed as “cheap”. It is not easy to look the way Parton did, she spent a lot of time and effort and money to do so, and in doing so proved that looking “cheap” was not an accident, those without money who still looked “cheap”, had to put in time and effort to make this aesthetic choice. It was a statement that assigned agency to an aesthetic choice.

Zille’s statement on the other hand assumes that there is a whole category of personhood such as “a floozy” that is not good to look like. She looked like a floozy but that bad choice was redeemed by the fact that she was a deep yadda yadda. She looked like she was promiscuous but at least she nursed her husband.

In Zille’s world Parton nursing her husband gave her a pass on her bad aesthetic choices. In Parton’s world the aesthetic choice was triumphant.

Zille sees Parton’s agency as questionable, which is redeemed by nursing a husband. This completely misses that Parton existed within and entirely externally from those two things. What it doesn’t miss is that this is what Zille chose to see in the life of Dolly Parton. Perhaps Zille was conflating Parton with that other big-haired woman who took care of her husband – Margaret Thatcher.

Let’s talk about floozies then. A floozy by any other name would rhinestone just as sweet.

“a usually young woman who has multiple sexual partners: a woman who is sexually promiscuous — used as a term of abuse and disparagement” — Merriam-Webster

“a woman who has a lot of sexual relationships, or who wears clothes that attract sexual attention in a way that is too obvious. Synonym — slattern.” — Cambridge Dictionary

“If someone refers to a woman as a floozy, they disapprove of her because she has many casual sexual relationships.” — Collins Dictionary

To Helen Zille a floozy is a thing that exists. She was not calling Parton a floozy, but she was saying that this thing, this sexually promiscuous woman who was (clutches pearls) wearing clothes that attract sexual attention is worthy of disapproval. A slattern.

Helen Zille, unwittingly, just admitted that she categorises a whole subset of women as sluts. Not as individuals who make choices based on circumstance or agency or desire or lack thereof or despite or any other myriad confluences of, you know, life, but just plain sluts. Thank Schuster that Dolly only looked like one, she had a husband, you know.

Dolly Parton wrote more than 3,000 songs, sold more than 100 million records, won 11 Grammys and was inducted into the Country Music Hall of Fame, the Songwriters Hall of Fame and the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame. She built Dollywood, stimulating investment, tourism and employment in the Appalachians, and used her fortune to fund scholarships and educational initiatives. She donated $1 million to COVID vaccine research. Through the Dollywood Foundation, her Imagination Library has now put more than 330 million free books into the hands of children who might otherwise not have had access to books at all.

When a cover version turned Parton’s “I Will Always Love You” into one of the biggest songs in the history of popular music, Parton earned millions in royalties. She used some of that money to buy an office complex in a predominantly Black neighbourhood of Nashville, saying she wanted to be “down here with her people, who are my people as well”, and called the place “the house that Whitney built.”

Helen Zille likes explaining poverty to poor people, referring to Eastern Cape pupils moving to Western Cape schools as “education refugees”, calling Simphiwe Dana a “professional black”, and, in 2019, defining “black privilege” as “being able to loot a country and steal hundreds of billions and get re-elected”. She has said that being poor in Langa was “a hundred, probably a thousand times better” than being poor in many other townships in the country. Subtext: Your misery caused by a colonialism and apartheid and further entrenched by the DA's property ownership policies is not that bad, make better choices, etc.

In a 2011 declaration of financial interests, Zille listed a R2.5 million house in Rosebank, a R500,000 share in a cottage at Keurboomsrivier. She also has, as per a 2016 disclosure, investments in FirstRand, Reinet, SABMiller and New Gold. Her Rosebank, CT, house was a Victorian property near UCT which she sought permission to demolish and redevelop; after the demolition plans failed, it was sold in 2019 for only R5.5 million.

She has defended a property-owning model of Cape Town in which the middle class pays rates and taxes that subsidise services to poorer residents. While “admirable” this hardly shifts the material circumstances to a place where those with less resources have enough resources to allow them agency.

The same 2011 declaration listed a R750,000 house in Parklands, bought for her domestic worker, Grace Voyiya. Voyiya had worked for the family for about 17 years by then and helped raise Zille’s sons, during this period evidently not having managed to save enough money to buy a home of her own. It is a matter of public record that the bond remains in Zille’s name, and Zille has said there was a verbal agreement that Voyiya was the owner. Which begs questions about the property rights. Zille has said of her, “I certainly did not want her living in a shack.” What Voyiya would have wanted is not a matter of public record. Zille has also defended colonialism.

*“They got you where they want you There's a better life And you think about it, don't you? It's a rich man's game No matter what they call it…” – Dolly Parton – 9 to 5

In Helen Zille’s world a domestic worker needs her choices made for her, and wearing nice clothes to be sexually attractive is bad unless you have a husband.

In the press it is common to write a public figure’s obituary pre-death, so that it is ready to beat out all the other voices clamouring to use grief to gain attention.

Here is my pre-written tweet for Zille.

“Helen Zille — largely indifferent to her. She retained her property rights until the end. She looked like shit, but she defended colonialism and called women sluts. RIP.”

an interview with Boima Tucker

Boima Tucker has spent the last few years making a film about extraction, energy, colonialism and the slightly uncomfortable question of what happens when the people who need development most are also the people expected to pay for it. After Oil moves between South Africa, Kenya and Western Sahara, following communities negotiating very different versions of the same global system.

bios: You're not necessarily trying to be a spokesperson for these individuals, but you're also making a film about much larger systems — extraction, capitalism, colonialism, energy. How much did that influence the way you approached the filmmaking?

Tucker: The project was never really intended to be objective. It was about taking a stance, or presenting a perspective that we felt was missing from mainstream discourse and even from some activist discourse.

I had gone to a socialism conference in the US, and I was seeing this disconnect between the Global North's discussion about clean-energy transition and what that actually means for the Global South. The question became: how do you extend this transition democratically across the world?

Also, we ask the question: What does development actually look like?

You look at South Africa from 1994 onwards, Kenya from independence onwards, Latin America — all of these different development trajectories — and you have to ask what extraction means within those contexts. Western Sahara was particularly important because of the question of decolonial struggle and self-determination.

bios: When I first saw the poster, I thought, “Oh, this is going to be an activist film.” And that actually made me resist watching it. Do you think audiences resist that kind of decolonial or activist language?

Tucker: The target audience was activists, but I wanted the film itself to be subtle. I didn't want it to be dogmatic or pedantic. That's why Gwede Mantashe becomes this kind of fall person, but at the same time, his voice is prominent. But you're also drawn into the film through the stories and through the visual language, and this is where documentary film excels in relating ideas over other mediums.

Lastly, we turned the camera on Africa Is a Country itself. We featured our South Africa-based editor and our East African regional editor, and that became part of the process of deconstructing the fourth wall.

bios: I mean, I basically went, “Fuck, Mantashe,” when I watched it. But what I liked was that the film didn't lecture me.

Tucker: The film starts with energy because that's a way to draw people in. But then you start revealing the colonial structures that exist domestically, internationally and within cities. Nairobi was a particularly important example for that because you have this very Western-oriented middle class existing alongside communities without water, electricity or sanitation.

bios: You've got the East African editor walking through the neighbourhood, and you're hearing language that you normally hear at conferences about development. Then you've got the old woman who's afraid she'll get an electric shock from the television, and the guy growing trees. It sets your mind puzzling.

Tucker: The purpose isn't to demonise, or create an enemy. The globe is so intertwined, and we're living in this AI-driven attention economy. Changing the direction of the ship requires work, coordination, breaking social and political borders, and solidarity.

I like ship metaphors because everyone has a job on a ship. I think about House of the Dragon, where you've got the ship and all the oarspeople. Everyone has a job. The captain understands the geography, but everyone is working together to move the ship.

bios: And the Western Sahara section actually made me lose track of the energy question completely, because I got caught up in the history and the occupation. I was in Tangiers in 2015, and you can see Spain from there. I said to someone, “You could swim to Spain.” And he said, “You could walk to Spain.” I didn't understand what he meant. It was only when I watched After Oil that I understood: Ceuta. And suddenly the film became about this much larger colonial project. It made me think about how you actually deal with something that is so enormous that you can become overwhelmed by it.

Tucker: I'm American and Sierra Leonean, and there's a privilege in being able to leave Freetown, or leave Sierra Leone, that isn't available to everyone. Borders make those material differences very visible.

bios: Where do you get your visual inspiration from?

Tucker: I like vérité stuff. I studied film about 20 years ago at university, mostly from a theoretical perspective. But I've worked with film throughout my career, off and on, in media.

Visually, my aesthetic direction was informed by Latin American leftist cinema in the 1970s, Cuban cinema. There's a Bolivian film from the '60s or '70s, I believe, called La Sangre del Condor that resonated in particular. But these kinds of films, where you take rural or marginalised communities and give them the tools to tell their own story, have inspired me.

bios: Do you consider yourself a filmmaker or an activist?

Tucker: I don't see myself as an activist or a filmmaker per se. I was a musician for many years. I love film. I love photography. But in filming I depend greatly on the talents of other people as well.

On this project I started as producer and actually worked collaboratively with three different location directors. It was Ebony Bailey, who's an Afro-Mexican American director. She directed on our first visit to Amadiba, and Tsogo Kupa was her DP; Onesmus Karanja in Kenya; and Raouf Meraga in Algeria.

We worked together, and I guess my job as the director was to stitch together these three different visual perspectives. Then Tsogo Kupa was our DP in South Africa. So it was about stitching together these different visions.

bios: But if one of your filmmakers is based in Mexico, and you're in Peru — why was there no South American material in there? Was that a deliberate choice?

Tucker: We did a lot of research on different struggles throughout the continent. And actually, at first we did want to focus on Latin America as kind of a model for Africa, particularly Colombia, which had just elected a leftist president, Gustavo Petro, and his vice president Francia Márquez was an Afro-Colombian environmental activist.

But I think as it developed, we realised that a continental focus would be stronger, and Latin America has its own complications and contradictions. It was a very slow process. We started in 2020 with the concept and in 2021 with the filming. We did several shoots in the same locations over time, which allowed us to move slowly and gradually direct as we developed the story through the footage we got. The first thing we got was the court case, the week of the court case. We went back a couple of times to Amadiba. I went the last time to help show the film and discuss it with the community, and we were able to respond with changes after that.

Nairobi was obviously different because we were embedded there. Our staff was there, and the director became part of our staff. Now he's working on other projects for us, so he was fully integrated into Africa Is a Country.

For Western Sahara, we were invited by Progressive International, which had been invited by the ambassador to the EU, who wanted to hold an invitational workshop with different activist groups to build solidarity and awareness around the world. We were initially going to focus on Morocco, but then the opportunity came to go to Western Sahara.

I would get footage back. I'd watch it. I'd give feedback. I'd say, “Can we go do this? Can we grab that?” People had a lot of autonomy in terms of filming. Then I chose the images based on what came back and gave direction: “Okay, we need to cover this.”

One of the last shoots we did, which wasn't in the initial screenings, was in eMalahleni, the coal-mining community. That was something where we realised we really needed the perspective of people who were working in the energy and old fossil-fuel industry as labour — not just corporate and government development people.

bios: When you see the Amadiba stuff at the start of the film, my immediate feeling was: oh god, this again. I know this form of activism, I know how necessary it is, but we've seen it so much in South Africa, and we've seen it fail so often, that whenever I see that kind of thing on screen I flinch a little.

But then there's this question of privilege. We're able to make films and communicate across continents through WhatsApp, while there are people living in communities where the only solution they can see might literally be planting trees.

Tucker: South Africa is this unique situation, right? The Constitution is so young. I grew up in the US education system, and we venerate the Constitution. Obviously, the cliché now is that the US Constitution is this document that can't be changed and blah blah, and it's so perfect. It's a piece of shit.

The South African and Brazilian constitutions are much more progressive constitutions and much more indicative of the modern world that we live in. The US Constitution was made when transatlantic slavery was at its peak, right? When they actively engaged in eradicating indigenous peoples at their borders. So it can't be — there are good ideas in it about democracy and organising society, but it's not addressing our modern world.

The Brazilian Constitution since the '80s and the South African Constitution since the '90s are much more equipped to do that. Now the question is: how do you enforce the document? In Brazil, which I know more intimately, there are many ways to circumvent it. It's difficult to live up to the ideals of a document in everyday life. And then there's the question of how do you apply that to other contexts?

The ability for South African activists to win is important because Amadiba won. As we just found out in August, they won the court case in the Constitutional Court, and so not every country has the pathways to contest in this way. So that was why the comparative thing is important. It's not just about one place and one struggle. It's about looking at the different ways that communities have to contest to live a life — to live, period.

The activism and the courts are one way, and it's beautiful that South Africa has that because many places don't. Many places are forced to do it through armed struggle, or through other ways, or don't have the ability. They're jailed. Journalists are jailed. Activists are jailed. People disappear. People are murdered. South Africa is very lucky to have such a beautiful democratic process through which to contest.

The judgement is beautiful because it recognises the past while also recognising that we're dealing with this future, that climate change is real. So I understand the tiredness of it, but also recognise the importance of it. It's beautiful that it exists, I guess you could say.

bios: So what happens next with that judgement? They've essentially outplayed and outlasted Shell. What's Shell going to do next? Is that something you think you'd want to go back and cover?

Tucker: With these things, you just have to monitor it. We might not be the ones who have the ability. The hope is that it will inspire the next activist to take this on, or the next organisation to take it on.

And I think something that comes up in the film — Nonhle says it, and it's in the judgement — is that this judgement could be an example for the rest of the world. Nonhle comes back to her community and says that the work they've been doing has many cases like this pending, and this can be a reference. That's part of how the judicial system works.

So it's just always kind of being a fish and reacting to the currents. Or a ship, and learning how to steer — learning how to re-steer in turbulent conditions.

How To Build A Just Green Future – An Interview With Thea Riofrancos – A Latin American perspective