EXPLORING SA’S POWER DYNAMICS
Gender activist and awardwinning author Pumla Dineo
Gqola is set to release her eagerly awaited collection of autobiographical essays on power, pleasure and SA culture.
Reflecting Rogue — Inside the Mind of a Feminist, which hits shelves in Women’s Month, contains 14 essays that are accessible without sacrificing intellectual rigour.
Gqola, a professor of African literature at Wits University, has written extensively for both local and international academic journals. She has authored What is Slavery to Me?, A Renegade Called Simphiwe and Rape: An SA Nightmare. Reflecting Rogue is said to be her most personal book to date.
Among the essays are “On the Beauty of Feminist Rage”, which
Essays by Pumla Dineo Gqola
looks at the gender discourse in SA’S public spheres, and “My Mother’s Daughter, My Sons’ Mother”, in which Gqola explores the themes of fear, envy and resentment in motherdaughter relationships, while sharing her thoughts on how to raise boys as a feminist.
Bruno Mars is a 21-time Grammy Award nominee and multi-grammy winner, having sold more than 180m singles worldwide. Now his charttopping third studio album, 24K Magic, looks set to propel the singer, songwriter, producer and musician further into the firmament.
The album has been certified double platinum, with sales and streams exceeding 2m.
When it launched in October last year, 24K Magic marked the highest first-week debut for Mars, and it remained in the top 10 on the Billboard Hot 200 for an impressive 33 weeks. In addition, this week the album’s first two hit singles, “24K Magic” and “That’s What I Like”, marked sales and streams of more than 4m units each.
The success of these two singles means Mars is now tied with Usher for the most number one songs ever by a male solo artist on Billboard’s Radio Songs chart.
The music videos of both singles have had more than 800m hits on Youtube, with the audio stream racking up more than 130m plays on the channel.
Six award-winning shows from Cape Town’s Baxter Theatre Centre are on the bill for the Edinburgh Fringe Festival in Scotland this month.
The six dramas at the festival, which runs from August 3-27, are Lara Foot’s Tshepang: The Third Testament, Karoo Moose — No Fathers, The Inconvenience of Wings and The Fall; Sylvaine Strike’s Tobacco; and Yäel Farber’s Mies Julie.
This comes as the Baxter celebrates its 40th anniversary on August 1 as one of SA’S top venues for contemporary and classic theatre works.
The iconic theatre came into being as a result of a bequest from the late William Baxter who, in his will, bequeathed an amount of money to the University of Cape Town for establishing a theatre that would “develop and cultivate the arts in Cape Town and the adjacent districts for all artists”.
Despite the apartheid segregation laws, the theatre was always open to all people at a time when SA was hugely divided.
Commenting on both honours last week,
Baxter Theatre marketing manager Fahiem Stellenboom said: “This is such an honour and we are thrilled to present this lineup of productions at the largest and most prestigious arts festival in the world, while the Baxter celebrates its 40th birthday and especially given our history as a theatre in SA since 1977”.