Ms.
@AphiweMame • 7,994 subscribers
Cultural Writer | Published Media Scholar | Cartoons & Cereal | Umgcini Wamaxesha
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🏳️🌈Pride Month 📺SABC 1: After 9 (2007-2013) After 9 arrived at a fascinating moment in South Africa. On paper, the country had some of the world's most progressive protections for LGBTQIA+ people. But as we know, what is written in the Constitution and what happens around the dinner table are often two very different things. The show understood that gap. Its characters weren't just struggling with their sexuality; they were navigating family expectations, cultural pressures, career ambitions and the performance of being the "right kind" of man. SABC+ SABC 1
Ms.551,145 görüntüleme • 11 gün önce
🏳️🌈Pride Month 📺SABC 1: Society (2007-2010) Beth and Thuli's relationship was so important in the history of queer representation on South African television. I'm struck by how quietly groundbreaking their storyline was. At a time when lesbian representation was still rare on mainstream television, SABC audiences were watching a Black lesbian couple navigate love, friendship, visibility and the courage it takes to live openly.
Ms.65,289 görüntüleme • 11 gün önce
📺City Ses’la (2005-2010) -Clever use of physical comedy -The writing; humour is sometimes dry, direct, and perfectly timed. What seems simple is actually sharp, witty writing that keeps you thinking. -Cultural coding and everyday moments, giving it that effortless “fly-on-the-wall” feel.
Ms.191,990 görüntüleme • 2 ay önce
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🏳️🌈Pride Month 📺SABC 1: After 9 (1999-2004) Many forget that one of the first Black queer stories on our screens appeared in Yizo Yizo 3 in 2004. What makes Thiza and Thabang's storyline so significant is where it was placed. Queerness emerges within the gritty township realism that defined Yizo Yizo a world of violence, economic hardship, peer pressure and rigid expectations of masculinity. It is worth revisiting Thiza and Thabang not only as television characters, but as part of South Africa's queer media archive.
Ms.20,848 görüntüleme • 11 gün önce
📽️🎶 After Robot: Kwaito Music in Johannesburg (2002) Every now and again, I return to this short doccie and each time, I’m struck by just how much the artists of the early 2000s carved out new ways of being. It reminds me of how kwaito musicians forged powerful and diverse cultural identities, even while facing systemic barriers in the music industry and a social climate that wasn’t always receptive to the “new wave.”
Ms.351,917 görüntüleme • 8 ay önce
📺The Felicia Show (1995-2004) 31 years later, South African actors and Actresses are still speaking about low pay, missing contracts, unpaid royalties, and structural exploitation. To talk about SA pop culture without talking about labour is to tell an incomplete story. What makes this show powerful is what it revealsthis system is durable. The same grievances repeating across generations point to structure, not failure. What’s unsettling isn’t the critique it’s how current it feels.
Ms.161,056 görüntüleme • 5 ay önce
📺 SABC 3: Hard Copy (2005-2017) The show functioned as a site of meaning-making, translating real national anxieties into narrative form. Including events like the 2005 Togolese protests and the Dismissal of Jacob Zuma (14 June 2005), it grounded fiction in lived reality, allowing audiences to negotiate their own interpretations of power, legitimacy, and democracy.
Ms.63,428 görüntüleme • 2 ay önce
🎥After Robot: Kwaito Music in Johannesburg (2002) So...Kwaito did in fact have visionaries lol. What we tend to 4get is that Kwaito existed within fragile post-apartheid media economies that later shifted under platformisation and commercial radio/tv restructuring.
Ms.14,880 görüntüleme • 18 gün önce
📺🧵Fun fact: when Coca-Cola Popstars was announced in 2002, we had no idea we were witnessing the start of a new era. Not just in reality TV, but in SA’s soundscape Let’s start with 101, the OG winners in 2002. The name? “101” the sum of their ages at the time. They showed us we could have an SA boy-girl group with Billboard dreams.
Ms.166,703 görüntüleme • 10 ay önce
📺 TV 1 aka SABC 1 (1995) “Operation Litter” Wits students protesting the dismissal of two campus cashiers accused of letting some customers take items without paying. Student solidarity, post-’94 the fight for justice didn’t end with democracy, it just moved to new frontlines.
Ms.127,311 görüntüleme • 8 ay önce
📺 Vuzu : Top Shayela (2011) TS walked so that vlog culture could run. Early blueprints for the attention economy where visibility itself becomes a form of currency. The show rehearsed what we now recognise as the vlog vernacular: aspirational intimacy, para-social bonds, and prosumer (producer-consumer) culture. It was a starter pack for influencer-era storytelling format migration from TV to timeline.
Ms.125,267 görüntüleme • 8 ay önce
📺 Kwakhala Nyonini (1987) One of the most striking aspects of uMfazi Wephepha (Thembi Nyandeni). Was her unapologetic nature. She was opinionated, assertive, and fiercely independent, traits rarely seen in black women characters on South African television during the 80s. Imo this iconic character not only captivated audiences with her charisma and complexity but also significantly impacted the representation of black women in SA on the small screen.
Ms.135,428 görüntüleme • 10 ay önce
📺 Isidingo: Nandipha Sithole (2000-2011) Part of a deliberate SABC public health strategy, South African television audiences were introduced to one of the most quietly revolutionary characters on our screens: Nandipha Sithole. Portrayed by the talented Hlubi Arnold, she became one of the few characters in mainstream South African TV who openly lived with HIV at a time when stigma was not just social, but deeply political. This was a critical cultural moment. South Africa was in the throes of the HIV/AIDS crisis statistics were staggering, myths and misinformation rampant. For black women, Nandipha’s story broke stereotypes. She wasn’t reduced to her diagnosis. She was smart, ambitious, flawed, loving, and resilient proof that life with HIV could be full and dignified.
Ms.123,203 görüntüleme • 10 ay önce
📺Dutch TV studios (1979) Angela Sibongile Makeba-Lee🕊️ Performing Ngoma Nkurila, I have always regarded Bongi as both inheritor and innovator. Inheritor, b/cuz her voice carried the unmistakable resonance of Miriam Makeba. Innovator, because she transformed that inheritance into something of her own, a diasporic sound, textured by exile and memory Her brief career culminating in her 1980 album, Blow On Wind, belongs to the long genealogy of women whose art carried the weight of political meaning. Sound can be lineage ❤️
Ms.91,045 görüntüleme • 7 ay önce