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Music

Hugh Masekela Claws at His Last Notes

Percy Mabandu – May 25, 2026
Four months before succumbing to his death, Hugh Masekela moved like a man determined to make his next meaningful contribution...
Art

Looking at Mary Sibande’s Crescendo of Ecstasy

Percy Mabandu – April 3, 2026
Mary Sibande’s new body of work investigates modes of liberating sculpture from its fate as a static form into a...
Music

The divine message of Good News From Africa

Percy Mabandu – January 4, 2026
Pianist Abdullah Ibrahim and the great bassist and composer Johnny Dyani got together in 1973 to create a marvellous South African...
Art

The Ongoing Musical Moment in South African Art

Percy Mabandu – December 8, 2025
Our art history has been subject to an ongoing moment; a perennial communion of artists with their eyes trained on...
Art

Art after the Sharpeville Massacre

Percy Mabandu – December 8, 2025
The Sharpeville massacre unleashed a generation of artists driven to express their moral outrage; it was more than a turning...
Art

Art and the Myanmar Protest Movement

Percy Mabandu – December 8, 2025
There is a flowering of creative activism blooming on the protest-charged streets of Myanmar. Alongside burning barricades and army raids,...
Art

Wayfinding, Portia Zvavahera in Johannesburg

Percy Mabandu – December 8, 2025
Zvavahera is presenting a new collection of paintings under the title ‘Wayfinding’. Her paintings may be understood as a reference...
Art

Which Way is East? Mongezi Ncaphayi

Percy Mabandu – December 8, 2025
Ncaphayi’s new paintings present us with boundless energy that points to crafting a cartography towards the profound and the sublime...
Art

Alphabets of Fire

Percy Mabandu – December 8, 2025
Lefifi Tladi’s vast body of work cuts across painting in the abstract expressionist tradition, figurative drawings and forays into calligraphic...
Music

Jazz dancing and pantsula perfection

Percy Mabandu – December 8, 2025
The gifted dancer as soloist improviser is a feature of black vernacular culture beyond the jazz session, though. The working...
Music

I F*ck With Every Record

Percy Mabandu – December 8, 2025
All jazz records are connected, just like the lives and stories they contain. All albums are plugged into one another...
Music

The Train and the Making of our Music

Percy Mabandu – December 8, 2025
The railroad-borne movement of the people is a grand theme in the work of Zim Ngqawana, too. The late jazz...
Other Views

Oscar Pistorius, Metaphor, and the Fear of Machines

Percy Mabandu – December 8, 2025
Oscar Pistorius has come to represent both a return to all things primal in human relations and the next stage...
Music

Jazz in the Key of Cow: Yakhal’inkomo and Jol’inkomo

Percy Mabandu – November 21, 2025
The history of jazz, like the movement of cows as wealth, is often dodgily told as the story of gifted...
Other Views

On the Art of the Obituary

Percy Mabandu – November 21, 2025
The obituary is a form of portrait, the reading of which is a performance art denied its customary audience by...