2019 National HELTASA-CHE Teaching Excellence Award Winner, Dr Koni Benson (University of the Western Cape), authors a critical reader based on her PhD work, Crossroads: I Live Where I Like. The Crossroads graphic history is documented and curated in ways critical for any and all feminists, pan-Africanists, history enthusiasts, comic lovers, arts practitioners, activists or for a library, school, or movement challenging histories of the city, for land, housing, water, and more.
Crossroads: I Live Where I Like is a graphic nonfiction history of women-led movements at the forefront of the struggle for the city in Cape Town, South Africa. Ten years since inception, the book is ready to go to print. Please consider pre-ordering one for yourself or as a gift for any feminists, pan-Africanists, history enthusiasts, comic lovers, arts practitioners, or activists you love. You could also order a copy for donation to a library, school, or movement challenging histories of the city, for land, housing, water, and more.
This book was drawn by the Trantraal Brothers and Ashley Marais, local political cartoonists. Drawing on over sixty life narratives conducted as PhD research by Koni Benson, it tells the story of women who built and defended Crossroads, the only African informal settlement that successfully resisted the apartheid bulldozers in Cape Town. The story follows women’s organized resistance through from the peak of apartheid in the 1970s to continuing struggles for decent shelter today. Importantly, the history was workshopped with contemporary housing activists and women’s collectives who chose the most urgent and ongoing themes they felt spoke to and clarified some of the ongoing challenges against segregation, racism, violence, and patriarchy standing between the ongoing colonial and apartheid past, and a future we are still fighting for. This collaboration has produced a beautiful, captivating, accessible, forgotten, and in many ways, uncomfortable, history of Cape Town which has yet to be acknowledged, and subverted.
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