Author · Culture & Business
Lerato Phiri
Culture, business, and ideas writer covering the intersection of economic transformation and creative practice in post-apartheid South Africa.
Based in Parktown North, Johannesburg · 4 stories for KOPJE
- Business · BUSINESS
BEE 2.0: the startup rewriting the rules
The original Black Economic Empowerment framework enriched a narrow elite. A new generation of founders, investors, and policy thinkers is building something different — broader, faster, and less reliant on the structures of the past.
17 April 2026 · 8 min read
- Culture · CULTURE
The artists building tomorrow's South Africa today
From Zanele Muholi's photographic portraits to a new generation of digital sculptors working in Cape Town and Durban, South African art is no longer explaining itself to the West — it is leading the conversation.
5 April 2026 · 11 min read
- Design & Interiors · DESIGN
When African cosmology meets the living room
A generation of South African interior designers is drawing on Ndebele geometry, Zulu beadwork colour theory, and Sotho textile traditions — not as decoration, but as structural design language.
23 March 2026 · 8 min read
- Culture · CULTURE
Kwaito is having a second act
Thirty years after it first broke, the genre is back in clubs from Braamfontein to Berlin — and it sounds nothing like nostalgia.
28 February 2026 · 13 min read
