Myriad factors determine people’s choice of dress for any particular occasion, but when the event is a musical performance in a short-lived stage appearance, or in a music video meant to be viewed widely and possibly eternally, what to wear becomes a significant decision.
Category: Feature
“These Girls’ Fashion is Sick!”: An African City and the Geography of Sartorial Worldliness
They are the noble savages, staring out from coffee table books. Africa Adorned. The Last Nomads. Backdrops and extras for Vogue fashion shoots. Stock ingredients for tourist brochures … They are the myth of tribal splendour. Everything about them is foreign … Their “timeless culture” is the stuff of children’s books, of Western fantasies. They…
Contesting Beauty: Black Lesbians on the Stage
Introduction The 1995 publication, Defiant Desire: Gay and Lesbian Lives in South Africa (Gevisser and Cameron, 1995), pioneered a new field of study that is yet to be fully recognised in South Africa. This rich collection, written by South Africans across the country, assembled a wide range of gay, lesbian and, although unnamed, transgender experiences.
African Women Do Not Look Good in Wigs: Gender, Beauty Rituals and Cultural Identity in Anglophone Cameroon, 1961-1972
“Nebuchadnezzar lived in the bush and his nails became so long that they looked like claws of cats, following a punishment from God for his disobedience,” runs a May 1964 letter to ‘Women’s Special,’ a dedicated women’s advice column for the English-language newspaper, the Cameroon Times (Isuk, 1964:4).
Nudity, Protest and the Law in Uganda
The human body is itself a politically inscribed entity, its physiology and morphology shaped by histories and practices of containment and control. Susan Bordo (1993: 21) I view law(s) as an authorized discourse — as a language constituted by a series of symbols that is located in not merely the realm of the ‘ideal’ or the…
Reflections on Feminist Organising in Angola
Context In the contemporary postcolonial history of Africa, Angola is known as the site of one of the most treacherous conflicts that has ravaged the continent. After independence from Portugal in 1975, the 27-year civil war among the three leading liberation movements — the Popular Movement for the Liberation of Angola (MPLA), the National Union…