Crossroads
I Live Where I Like: A Graphic History
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- $9.99
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- $9.99
Publisher Description
Drawn by South African political cartoonists the Trantraal brothers and Ashley Marais, Crossroads: I Live Where I Like is a graphic nonfiction history of women-led movements at the forefront of the struggle for land, housing, water, education, and safety in Cape Town over half a century. Drawing on over sixty life narratives, it tells the story of women who built and defended Crossroads, the only informal settlement that successfully resisted the apartheid bulldozers in Cape Town. The story follows women’s organized resistance from the peak of apartheid in the 1970s to ongoing struggles for decent shelter today. Importantly, this account was workshopped with contemporary housing activists and women’s collectives who chose the most urgent and ongoing themes they felt spoke to and clarified challenges against segregation, racism, violence, and patriarchy standing between the legacy of the colonial and apartheid past and a future of freedom still being fought for.
Presenting dramatic visual representations of many personalities and moments in the daily life of this township, the book presents a thoughtful and thorough chronology, using archival newspapers, posters, photography, pamphlets, and newsletters to further illustrate the significance of the struggles at Crossroads for the rest of the city and beyond. This collaboration has produced a beautiful, captivating, accessible, forgotten, and in many ways uncomfortable history of Cape Town that has yet to be acknowledged.
Crossroads: I Live Where I Like raises questions critical to the reproduction of segregation and to gender and generational dynamics of collective organizing, to ongoing anticolonial struggles and struggles for the commons, and to new approaches to social history and creative approaches to activist archives.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Black women who led resistance to South Africa's apartheid policies tell the powerful story of their collective struggles to live with safety and dignity in this collaborative graphic work. In the 1970 and '80s, the Crossroads settlement became internationally famous as the community of between 4,000 and 7,000 people resisted the South African government's eviction orders and efforts to bulldoze their homes. Based on over 60 oral histories that Benson collected, the narrative aims to bring this ethnography into conversation with South Africans' dire need for affordable housing today. Originally published as several single-issues, the collected edition shows some rough edges, such as big blocks of backstory rendered in compressed fonts, but shines when the voices of the community members are quoted directly (such as when police plan a raid and Crossroads resident Mama Nomangezi tells the other women, "We are going to fight today, because we've got nowhere to go"). The art by the South African artists, André Trantraal, Nathan Trantraal, and Ashley E. Mara is crisp and dynamic, with rounded figure drawings that straddle comedy and pathos; the portraits of community members particularly stand out. Their voices resonate through the panels to speak to activists today—and to any reader who wants to delve deeper into the apartheid struggle.
