Crossroads: I Live Where I Like: A Graphic History

by Koni Benson, Robin D.G. Kelley (Foreword by), André Trantraal (Illustrator), Nathan Trantraal (Illustrator), Ashley E. Marais (Illustrator)

Overview

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.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781629638355
Publisher:	PM Press
Publication date:	03/16/2021
Series:	Kairos
Pages:	168
Sales rank:	298,694
Product dimensions:	7.00(w) x 10.00(h) x 0.40(d)

About the Author

Koni Benson is a historian, organizer, and educator. She is a lecturer in the Department of History at the University of the Western Cape in Cape Town, South Africa, where she is committed to creative approaches to history that link art, activism, and African history in her work with various student, activist, and cultural collectives in southern Africa.

Robin D.G. Kelley is an American historian and academic, who is the Gary B. Nash Professor of American History at UCLA. During the academic year 2009–10, Kelley held the Harmsworth Chair of American History at Oxford University, the first African American historian to do so since the chair was established in 1922. He was awarded the Guggenheim Fellowship in 2014. Author of Freedom Dreams: The Black Radical Imagination; Hammer and Hoe: Alabama Communists During the Great Depression; Race Rebels: Culture, Politics, and the Black Working Class; Imagining Home: Class, Culture, and Nationalism in the African Diaspora; Into the Fire: African Americans Since 1970; Yo’ Mama’s DisFunktional!: Fighting the Culture Wars in Urban America; Three Strikes: The Fighting Spirit of Labor’s Last Century; and Thelonious Monk: The Life and Times of an American Original.

André Trantraal is a writer, illustrator, and translator from Bishop Lavis, Cape Town. He is the writer of the comic books Coloureds and Stormkaap. His work has been exhibited in Amsterdam, Hamburg, and Cape Town and his political cartoons have appeared in a range of South African newspapers.

Nathan Trantraal is a poet, cartoonist, translator, playwright, screenwriter, short story author, and columnist. He was awarded the Ingrid Jonker Prize for poetry, and his work has been exhibited in Cape Town, Munich, and Amsterdam. His comics have been published in various South African newspapers. He is currently a lecturer at Rhodes Universityat the School of Languages, where he specializes in Kaapse Afrikaans and the graphic novel.

Ashley E. Marais is a comic book artist, designer, and painter. With the Trantraal Brothers, he was coauthor and illustrator on the graphic novel Stormkaap and the comic book Coloureds, both of which are in the Cape Afrikaans language. Also with the Trantraal Brothers, he is joint illustrator of Safety, Justice & People’s Power, a book about the Khayelitsha Commission, written by Richard Conyngham.”

Editorial Reviews

02/01/2021

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. (May)

Publishers Weekly

11/01/2020

During South Africa's apartheid, Black men working in whites-only Cape Town endured squalid "bachelor hostels" while women and families were pushed into distant, all-Black "Bantustans." In the 1970s, women-led groups built Crossroads, an in-city shantytown where they lived with their families. But Cape Town officials objected. This title looks at the struggles for housing and social support involving the courageous women, Black male leaders, and city officials that have continued for decades.

Library Journal