Crimson staff writer
Sazi T. Bongwe
Latest Content
Fifteen Questions during the Solar Eclipse: Maya Jasanoff on the British Empire, Joseph Conrad, and Judging The Booker Prize
The history professor talked with Fifteen Minutes during the solar eclipse about being in a family of academics, postcolonial literature, and reading.
Best Advice Giver: Matilda Marcus
The term “best friend” rolls off Matilda’s tongue often. “Best Friend” — itself a superlative — implies one chosen from many, but that definition wouldn’t do for Matilda: they use the tag for many people in their life.
‘That Class Shut Harvard Down’: The Founding of African and African American Studies
In the late 1960s, Black students's advocacy led to the creation of what is now Harvard's African and African American Studies Department. What does the campaign to found Black studies have to teach people discontented with the university, society, and world they find themselves in?
The Ghost of Susan Sontag
“The Self as a Project.” That’s what Sontag told Charlie Rose she was working on when she wasn’t writing. The grand irony is that she took that noble aspiration of the liberal arts colleges she swore off and made it hers: teaching people how to think.
Memories of a City I’ve Never Known
Where we were was the gated avenues and green-grassed gardens of Johannesburg’s northern suburbs; where we weren’t was South Africa.
Assets to Axes: How Harvard’s Land Investments Inspired Fear in Brazil’s Cerrado
Although the full extent of HMC’s former landholdings remain concealed behind a complex web of private equity firms, associated subsidiary companies and investment partners, what is clear is that HMC’s purchases contributed to a climate of anxiety, fear, and strain on Brazilian subsistence farmers.
Fifteen Questions: Valeria Luiselli on the Best Novel That Has Ever Been Written, Her Friend Crush, and the Perils of an MFA
The author sat down with Fifteen Minutes to discuss writing and teaching. “How do we reshape the view of the migrant as an inherently victimized figure or as an intruder of sorts by thinking, for example, of migration in its kind of heroic arc?” she says. “Of the migration story not as a tragedy, but as a form of epic?"
The Harvard Professor in Apartheid South Africa’s Corner
The legacy of apartheid is still apparent in South Africa; it’s a legacy that has perpetuated the conditions of racism and poverty. Part of that legacy traces all the way to Cambridge, Massachusetts — to Samuel Huntington.
What’s an Anarchist Book Fair Doing in Harvard Square?
The Democracy Center hosted the Boston Anarchist Book Fair — where, unlike Harvard, there aren’t classmates or faculty but ‘comrades,’ where the ambition isn’t to go work in the big banks but to destroy them.
Harvard and Me
I was the only person I knew of coming to Harvard from South Africa, and, in turn, I was to everyone in South Africa the only person they knew going to Harvard — which is to say, I became Harvard.