"Artists not geographies should be our focus"

Every morning I wake up and look at Africa. It presents itself as something like this: in the near distance, a suburban street with cars parked nose-to-tail next to a pedestrian walkway; in the middle distance, a metropolitan skyline that includes two cranes lifting material for the construction of my home city's new tallest building; beyond that, a bay with container ships at anchor; and past that, forming a receding horizon, a corrugated landscape of hills and mountains and clouds, more Africa. There is something unreliable about this view.

Cape Town, the city I look at out my window every day, is not a South African city. At least this is what I'm routinely told, both in person and through the people I read (...)

[Read Sean O'Toole's full article]
Published by Contemporary &, December 19, 2013.