The Funambulist

09/06/2026

"My favourite beach is “Irenie” beach in Simonstown, a beach that was reserved for brown bodies only during Apartheid. Even then it was inaccessible to me because we needed a car to get there. It has been renamed “Windmill Beach,” and is now frequented mainly by white people, especially divers. At Irenie beach, people notice me because sometimes I am the only brown body on the beach. The people of Windmill Beach ask me where I’m from and they jokingly ask me if I stole any perlamoen or crayfish from the water. I feel uncomfortable by their policing of my body. A form of white violence. The way they sit whilst their dogs run amok barking at penguins, destroying the sand dunes."

Read more in our current issue "Fifty Years After Soweto" (May–June 2026).

We were both born in the mid-1970s in Cape Town, surrounded by oceans. Despite all that liquid expanse that had brought our varied ancestors to port in a place alive with crossings of all kinds—some…

01/06/2026

During his last visit in Johannesburg, Léopold was taken north of Pretoria, to the township of Mabopane by Mpho Moshe Matheolane to visit the Odi stadium—the remarkable architectural twin of the Mmabatho Stadium, in Mmabatho on the other side of what used to be Bophuthatswana between 1977 and 1994. Mpho and Neo Maditla, who both grew up in the Bantustan, initiated together this research on these twin stadiums in 2020, using their distinct quasi-identical architecture as a way to talk about past and present politics of the Tswana region.

TEXT BY NEO MADITLA AND MPHO MOSHE MATHEOLANE
PHOTOS BY MPHO MOSHE MATHEOLANE

Read more in our current issue "Fifty Years After Soweto" (May–June 2026).

TEXT BY NEO MADITLA AND MPHO MOSHE MATHEOLANE PHOTOS BY MPHO MOSHE MATHEOLANE During his last visit in Johannesburg, Léopold Lambert was taken north of Pretoria, to the township of Mabopane by Mpho…

29/05/2026

In South Africa’s Western and Northern Capes provinces, people racialized as “coloured” represent 42% of the population. This particular racial category engineered by settler colonial authorities to designate people of mixed heritage (in particular indigenous Khoi or San, as well as formerly enslaved people from the Indian Ocean) has been used before and during the apartheid following a divide-and-conquer strategy. Today, the Coloured identity is reclaimed by groups who want to maintain this clear distinction from Blackness and profit from it. Alex Hotz contextualizes this resurgence of coloured nationalism and the paths to resist it.

Read more in our current issue "Fifty Years After Soweto" (May–June 2026).

In South Africa’s Western and Northern Capes provinces, people racialized as “coloured” represent 42% of the population. This particular racial category engineered by settler colonial authorities to…

19/05/2026

We turn to Noor Nieftagodien, whose work engages with various spatial and temporal scales of township politics. This allows us to talk about the 1976 Soweto Uprising in relation with its urban and historical contexts: how the township (and within it, the migrant workers’ hostels) materializes a spatial technology of control, and what this revolt enacted for the anti-apartheid movement, which will continue for almost two decades after that.

Read more in our current issue "Fifty Years After Soweto" (May–June 2026).

A CONVERSATION WITH NOOR NIEFTAGODIEN To begin our main dossier, we turn to Noor Nieftagodien, whose work engages with various spatial and temporal scales of township politics. This allows us to talk…

15/05/2026

The following excerpts are drawn from the essay of the same name, published in The Boston Review’s Fall 2025 issue, reproduced here with the generous authorization of the author and her editor. Panashe Chigumadzi argues that “apartheid” has become the dominant framework through which Southern Africa’s long racial history is read, obscuring the deeper and ongoing structure of settler colonialism that it merely codified. Against this liberal paradigm she traces a counter-tradition rooted in Black South African political thought—the Azanian Tradition of Pan-Africanism and Black Consciousness—that has consistently insisted the true object of liberation is not desegregation or civil rights, but the recovery of indigenous land and sovereignty. The excerpts also examine what she calls the ANC’s long civil-rights tradition and its compatibility with the liberal international order, which saw the Commonwealth actively seek to delay Zimbabwe’s land redistribution program in the early 1990s, so as not to “frighten white South Africa” and jeopardize international support for the anti-apartheid movement. For her, this history reveals a fundamental tension that persists to the present day: that liberation and the liberalism of the rules-based international order are, in the end, incompatible.

Read more in our current issue "Fifty Years After Soweto" (May–June 2026).

The following excerpts are drawn from the essay of the same name, published in The Boston Review’s Fall 2025 issue, reproduced here with the generous authorization of the author and her editor.

12/05/2026

Putting Johannesburg-based researchers uMbuso weNkosi and Zara Julius in conversation around umbilical relationships with the land was a key idea of this issue. Through ritual, sound, funerals, graves, and ancestralization, they explore time, resistance, relationality, and Black futurity amid ongoing settler colonial dispossession and catastrophe.

Read more in our current issue "Fifty Years After Soweto" (May–June 2026).

A CONVERSATION BETWEEN ZARA JULIUS AND uMBUSO weNKOSI Putting Johannesburg-based researchers uMbuso weNkosi and Zara Julius in conversation around umbilical relationships with the land was a key idea…

07/05/2026

⏳️ FROM THE ARCHIVES | ISSUE 34, "THE PARIS COMMUNE AND THE WORLD" (March–April 2021)

An internationalist issue to celebrate the 150th anniversary of the Commune, dialoguing with communal experiences in Syria, Venezuela, China, Martinique, Mexico, Tunisia, and more.

//

This issue constitutes an attempt to extract this 150-year-old revolutionary event from the imaginary of the white left to place it instead in a rhizome of similar communal experiences in the Global South. From the 1927 Guangzhou Commune (Tings Chak) to the contemporary Venezuelan (Geo Maher) and Syrian (Leila Al-Shami) communal councils, we discuss the radical change of modes of sovereignty the Commune implies. Female Communardes are placed in dialogue with women of the foundational 1870 Insurrection of Southern Martinique (Jacqueline Couti) as well as Mexican Morras (Irmgard Emmelhainz). The ceremonialized destruction of the Vendome Column that appears on the issue’s cover is discussed in relation to an ongoing decolonial rage against monuments (Joachim Ben Yakoub). The barricade, inseparable from the Paris Commune, is the object of an architecture analysis (Charlotte Grace). Last but far from least, we take a walk in Paris’ working-class neighborhoods to exhume their political layers from the Paris Commune to today’s antiracist activism (Mogniss H. Abdallah & Hajer Ben Boubaker).

In the issue’s “News From the Fronts,” Brintha Koneshachandra provides a diasporic perspective on the bulldozing of Tamil monuments in Eelam, Sidahmed Jouly writes about the struggle against the Moroccan occupation of Western Sahara, and Panos Aprahamian & Jessika Khazrik reflect on the modes of solidarity with Artsakh and Armenia under the same Israeli-made drones that fly in the skies of Gaza and Beirut.

This issue’s cover shows the Vendome Column a few hours after its ceremonialized destruction by the Paris Commune’s Federation of Artists presided by painter Gustave Courbet
on May 16, 1871.

//

This issue is currently out of stock. You can order the digital version from our website.

04/05/2026

If you are based in Southern Africa and you wish to order a copy of our new issue "Fifty Years After Soweto" (May–June 2026), please note:

- Print copies have free shipping!
- Digital copies are free!

ORDER HERE: https://thefunambulist.net/shop/65-after-soweto

01/05/2026

⏳️ FROM THE ARCHIVES | ISSUE 39, "THE OCEAN… FROM THE BLACK ATLANTIC TO THE SEA OF ISLANDS" (January–Februrary 2022)

A political history of the ocean about the legacy of the Middle Passage, Black Internationalism, the fight against nuclear colonialism, and feminisms in Oceania, and poetic perspectives on the "Indian" Ocean from Zanzibar and Eelam.

//

As many readers will be able to tell, the subtitle of this issue pays homage to Tongan Fijian anthropologist Epeli Hau’ofa’s concept of “sea of islands” that designates Oceania, as well as to Paul Gilroy and his work on the “Black Atlantic” to whom we can add the many other oceanic thinkers and poets, from Martiniquean Édouard Glissant to Zanzibarian Haji Gora Haji (as emphasized in Yvonne Adhiambo Owuor’s contribution accompanied by Shiraz Bayjoo‘s artwork).

It features a conversation about water, salt, bodies, and the Black Atlantics between Alexis Pauline Gumbs and Christina Sharpe, two analyses of the micro-societies hosted by ships (Renisa Mawani and Marcus Rediker), a long-format interview of Quito Swan about Black Internationalism from Bermuda and Africa to Melanesia (Vanuatu, Papua, and Kanaky) and Aboriginal Australia. Another interview with Talei Luscia Mangioni describes the transnational struggle against nuclear colonialism in Oceania. As for Anaïs Duong-Pedica and Sarah Pelage (accompanied by an artwork by Annabelle Wané), they articulate a short history of Kanak feminisms in the broader Oceanian context. The issue ends with a moving recollection of what was once the large Tamil Sea from Eelam to Java by Sinthujan Varatharajah.

This issue’s “News from the Fronts” talks about the noxious liberal approach to the Chicago Police Department (Benji Hart), makes the story of Armenian hero Monte Melkonian surge into the internationalist left’s imaginary (Garine Boghossian), and articulates the struggle against the two-headed imperialism of the U.S. and the People’s Republic of China (JN Chien – Lausan).

On the cover is an artwork by Maya Mihindou.

//

This issue is currently out of stock. You can order the digital version from our website.