Angelo Clyde Louw

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Angelo C. Louw
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Louw talking at the United Nations Right Here, Right Now Climate Conference in 2022
Born
Angelo Clyde Louw

(1987-03-17) 17 March 1987 (age 37)
Johannesburg, South Africa
EducationUniversity of Witwatersrand
Occupation
  • Activist
  • Author
  • Columnist
  • Film-maker
  • Journalist
Years active2006–present
Websitehttp://www.angeloclouw.co.za

Angelo Clyde Louw[1] (born 17 March 1987) is an award-winning South Africa author, filmmaker and activist. He began his career as a journalist for The Natal Witness and Playboy — and soon became the youngest editor-in-chief of a national print publication (loveLife South Africa’s UNCUT) at age 25.[2] He has since served editorship at two other publications — including South Africa’s first magazine for queer people of colour, Gayle.

Early life

Louw was born on 17 March 1987 in Johannesburg, South Africa, to a Coloured father, Gregory Louw, and a South African Indian mother, Vanessa Pillay. His grandfather Sgt Edward Louw co-founded the first firearms association for Black people in South Africa.[3] They resided in the racially segregated township (South Africa) Bosmont until he was 5. He said in his 2023 book:

“As a child, I would tiptoe barefoot across a back alley covered in a kaleidoscope of broken glass from the beer bottles my father and his friends smoked mandrax in. Seeing him and his posse cough up lumps of yellow gill as he’d reach into his pocket for the two bob [twenty cents] I’d always asked for, was as normal to me as seeing your uncles gathered around a smoky braai [barbecue].

This was what 4-year-old me knew; it was what I was used to. I had no other point of reference to decipher that this was a highly toxic and harmful environment.”

— An excerpt from Louw's book, "The Problem with Black People"[4]

Louw’s parents divorced in 1992, when he and his mother moved to Lenasia, a racially segregated township for Indians under the apartheid government. Despite the racist regime ending in 1994, Louw noted his experiences of racism as a child:

“I didn’t look like other children (despite being half Indian) and while I noticed this difference, I never quite understood just how different I was to the other kids until, one day, my Coloured counterpart told me that we needed to stand together because we were ‘the only ones in the school’.

It suddenly made sense to me why I had so few friends; it made sense why I was always the last to be chosen on a side when we played or why I was never invited over to hangout on the weekend. Also, it made sense why Indian teachers never bothered pushing me academically the way they did their own kind; and why I was always the one in trouble with teachers, even if we were all doing the same exact thing.”

— An excerpt from Louw's article, Joey Rasdien: blasphemy, bigotry and the other b-word[5]

Louw reflected on his experiences of homophobia and anxiety around becoming homeless due to his sexual orientation in a 2020 Greenpeace video: “I grew up in a really conservative neighbourhood. My grandfather was a pastor, and our household was pretty traditional. As a gay person, there was always this sense of feeling insecure. I don’t think I ever felt safe.”[6]

He also began to understand the influence of the media in achieving social change, and decided that he would pursue a career in the media to fix the rot in his community. Advocacy|url=http://spii.org.za/wp-content/uploads/2017/11/SPII-TALK-NEWSLETTER-ISSUE-25-PRINT-2.pdf%7Cwebsite= Studies in Poverty and Inequality Institute |access-date=9 October 2023}}</ref>

Louw hoped to gain writing experience by volunteering for his high school newsletter, but the publication was shut down because the school's management didn’t like his first article.

Career

2006–2011: Entertainment writer

Louw began his journalism career as a regular contributor on Sunday Times (South Africa) citizen journalism platform Reporter.co.za in 2006. An undergraduate student at the time, Louw recalls being paid only $2 per article while trying to build up a portfolio at the website.

Writing for the website soon established Louw as one of the few multimedia reporters in Johannesburg at a time when the media landscape was moving toward digital.

By the time Louw graduated in Media Studies and International Relations at the University of Witwatersrand in 2007, he was offered three bursaries to continue an honours degree in Journalism. He opted for the Media24 magazine scholarship programme, which afforded him a two year contract at Africa's largest publishing house. Upon graduating with his second degree, Louw won the 2008 Wits Journalism Award for Best Publication with Supersport presenter Elma Smit, which recognised their excellence in production management of the campus weekly, Vuvuzela.

That same year, Louw began his first office job at South Africa's oldest daily newspaper,’’ The Natal Witness’’. Louw says it wasn't long before he started noticing the racist realities of the South African media. "I started at a newspaper people nicknamed the ‘Whiteness’ because while people of colour did all the heavy-lifting there, we very seldom made it into the paper for anything good."[7]

It was also here where Louw started experimenting with film-making, creating multimedia stories for the newspaper’s website. “I spent weekends trying to make videos for their website. I wasn’t trained and would struggle for hours trying to figure out the software. Looking back, I wasn’t very good at it, but if I hadn’t pushed on, I’d have never known what it felt like to have people all over the world watching and enjoying my work.”[8]

He quickly established himself as an entertainment writer, covering events and celebrity profiles. When the time came for the next part of his internship, Angelo was deployed to tvplus – an entertainment weekly based in Cape Town. It was here that he experienced incidents of sexual harassment he had endured by a colleague throughout 2010. "When I would say no, they’d cause problems for me the next day. I'd called in for disciplinary hearings… How do you go to HR with that when you think that they won’t believe you."

He began working at Playboy South Africa once his contract at tvplus was terminated. "I ended up where a lot of people desperate for money end up: on the pages of Playboy… It wasn’t all good and it wasn’t all bad. They were very exploitative. They’d agree to pay you a certain amount of money and end up only paying 30% of that. I also got a chance to do some really cool things like interview Stan Lee."

It was during this time that Louw reflected deeply on his career, and the impact he would have on the world. When Louw won the 2019 TYI SADC Top 100, he said that he “started off as a journalist, but became very despondent after realising that most newsrooms operated like corporations, as they cared more about the bottom line than their responsibility to society”.[9]

2012–2016: Editorships and activism

Louw with Academy Award-winning actress Charlize Theron in 2014. At the end of 2011, Louw responded to a job advert on Facebook for a writing position at UNCUT magazine from loveLife South Africa, the country's largest HIV prevention intervention. After a year at the magazine, he was tasked with editorship of the magazine and subsequently promoted to Head of Print and Digital at the organisation. Louw’s editorship at UNCUT magazine made him the youngest editor of a national print publication at the time. Essays of Africa wrote: “Young, dynamic and daring; these three words sum up this print and digital editor whose no-holds-barred approach earned him the title editor-in-chief of South Africa’s top performing youth publication by the age of 25.”[10]

His time at loveLife deepened Louw’s involvement in activism circles. He championed several digital campaigns focused on addressing the surge of gender-based violence[11] and hate crimes against LGBTQIA+ people[12] in South Africa. His thought-provoking digital campaigns won him recognition at the 2013 New Generation Digital & Social Media Awards and the 2014 Nelson Mandela Community Leadership Awards.[13]

His groundbreaking 2014 article about male “corrective rape”, which debuted in the Mail & Guardian[14] ahead of its UNCUT release, featured in numerous academic studies[15][16] and was highlighted as a case study at the United Nations UN High Level debate on Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender and Intersex (LGBTI) issues that year.

He reflected on the psychological impact of writing the story in a 2018 Mail & Guardian article: “[Y]ou don’t want to seem overly affected by things. Especially as a journalist, I just felt as though saying I was affected by it would undermine what I was trying to expose.”[17]

During his tenure as the editor-in-chief of UNCUT, Louw helped start South Africa’s first online magazine for LGBTQIA+ people of colour, Gayle magazine.[18]

In 2016, he took on a new role as Advocacy Officer at the Studies in Poverty and Inequality Institute (SPII) before being awarded the Hubert H. Humphrey/Fulbright Fellowship.

His legacy at the organisation was sparking public debate and then driving the media campaign that would lead to South Africa’s adoption of a National Minimum Wage.

2016–2017: Coming to America

Louw relocated to the United States in late 2016 to begin his fellowship, where he focused on how digital communication could service groups marginalised in the mainstream media. During his time in the country, Louw became a regular columnist for MTV Staying Alive and the NNPA. He was also appointed the Assistant Editor of Tagg Magazine, a magazine for queer women.

2017 onwards: Climate justice, filmmaking and book

Upon his return to South Africa, Louw became a columnist at Huffington Post.[19] He also began climate justice work at Greenpeace. He initially headed Greenpeace Africa’s online activism project, but eventually veered into filmmaking with his directorial debut GUTTED: The Fight of Kalk Bay Fishers [20] and his sophomore film CRUDE: Wentworth Community vs Big Oil. Both documentaries focused on multinational exploitation of the South African Coloured community.

Louw reflected on his debut film: “I understood something about this community that many filmmakers would not necessarily see. Like many Kalk Bay residents we interviewed, I am a Coloured South African. I remember saying to Malcolm [Rainers] when we started I wanted him to capture the bursts of colour throughout the community. Despite facing many hardships, we remain vibrant and tenacious.”[21]

In 2023, Louw collaborated with nonprofit publishing house Afrostory.org on his literary debut, "The Problem with Black People", an anthology of his thought leadership dealing with issues around racism.

Honours

In 2013, Louw was shortlisted for the Best Low Budget award at the New Generation Digital & Social Media Awards and won the Young Leadership Award at the 2014 Nelson Mandela Community Leadership Awards the next year.

Louw was awarded the Hubert H. Humphrey/Fulbright Fellowship in 2016.[22]

The trailer for GUTTED: The Fight of Kalk Bay Fishers was a runner-up at the 2019 Cape Town International 1-Minute Film Festival, where the documentary premiered. The film also took the Best Documentary Award at the Kaduna International Film Festival and was a semi-finalist at the Nukhu Awards.

Louw reflected on the success of GUTTED: The Fight of Kalk Bay Fishers: “The movie won several awards at movie festivals from Nigeria to New York. But for me, it was when it was shortlisted for the Jozi Film Festival that I was most proud because it was the hometown and I got to go with my best friend.”[23]

In 2019, Louw won the Healers category of The Young Independents (TYI) Southern African Development Community (SADC) Awards. In 2021, he was also listed in the Mail & Guardian 200 Young South Africans.[24][25] 

CRUDE: Wentworth Community vs Big Oil won Best Story at the 2022 Joburg 1-Minute Film Festival, where it premiered. In 2023, it won the Best Documentary Short Award at the Silicon Valley African Film Festival, and made the official selection at the Oxfam Africa Human Rights Film Festival.

Documentaries

Year Title Director Writer Producer
2019 GUTTED: THE FIGHT OF KALK BAY FISHERS Yes Yes Yes
2022 CRUDE: WENTWORTH COMMUNITY VS BIG OIL Yes Yes Yes

References

  1. ↑ "Angelo Louw, 34". Mail & Guardian. Archived from the original on 25 June 2021. Retrieved 9 October 2023.
  2. ↑ "#aTypicalInterview: 'People think I hate white people - that's not true' - Angelo Louw". The Star, South Africa. Archived from the original on 16 July 2023. Retrieved 9 October 2023.
  3. ↑ "Grandson to the co-founder of South Africa's first Black Firearms Association donates his archive". News24. Archived from the original on 11 May 2021. Retrieved 9 October 2023.
  4. ↑ Louw, Angelo (2023). "The Problem with Black People". AfroStory. ISBN 978-0-7961-1329-0.
  5. ↑ "Joey Rasdien: blasphemy, bigotry and the other b-word". South African Human Rights Commission. Archived from the original on 26 July 2017. Retrieved 9 October 2023.
  6. ↑ "How the climate crisis is perpetuating hate crimes in South Africa". Greenpeace International. Archived from the original on 2 August 2022. Retrieved 9 October 2023.
  7. ↑ "Filmmaking Duo Wins Silicon Valley African Film Festival Award". Bruinou.com. Archived from the original on 20 October 2023. Retrieved 23 October 2023.
  8. ↑ "Films with meaning". Get It Magazine. Archived from the original on 29 January 2021. Retrieved 9 October 2023.
  9. ↑ "TYI's SADC Top 100 of 2019: Angelo Louw, Healers". The Young Independents. Archived from the original on 28 November 2019. Retrieved 9 October 2023.
  10. ↑ "Editing the Youth". Essays of Africa (2016).
  11. ↑ "New response to gender violence". Independent Online. Archived from the original on 10 December 2012. Retrieved 9 October 2023.
  12. ↑ "Dance group V.I.N.T.A.G.E assaulted at Bree taxi rank". The Sowetan. Archived from the original on 2 October 2013. Retrieved 9 October 2023.
  13. ↑ "Literary Personnel Jozisbbf2017". Jozi's Books and Blogs Festivities. Archived from the original on 11 June 2017. Retrieved 9 October 2023.
  14. ↑ "Men are also 'corrective rape' victims". Mail & Guardian. Archived from the original on 11 April 2014. Retrieved 9 October 2023.
  15. ↑ Qambela, Gcobani (6 March 2015). ""When they found out I was a man, they became even more violent": Autoethnography and the rape of men(2016)". Graduate Journal of Social Science. GJSS. 12 (3): 179–205. ISSN 1572-3763.
  16. ↑ Dayal, Deepesh (12 October 2022). "The Paradox of Constitutional Protection and Prejudice Experienced by LGBTQI People in South Africa(2022)". Gender Violence, the Law, and Society. Emerald Publishing Limited: 105–120. doi:10.1108/978-1-80117-127-420221009. ISBN 978-1-80117-130-4.
  17. ↑ "Slice of Life: 'We're told to be cold'". Mail & Guardian. Archived from the original on 6 July 2018. Retrieved 9 October 2023.
  18. ↑ "Publications". Gayle Magazine. Retrieved 9 October 2023.
  19. ↑ "Huff Post's Hot & Bothered". Huffington Post. Archived from the original on 15 June 2018. Retrieved 9 October 2023.
  20. ↑ "An interview with the directors of GUTTED: A documentary on the harmful impacts of industrial fishing on Cape Town's communities". Greenpeace. Archived from the original on 11 September 2020. Retrieved 9 October 2023.
  21. ↑ "An interview with the directors of GUTTED: A documentary on the harmful impacts of industrial fishing on Cape Town's communities". Greenpeace. Archived from the original on 11 September 2020. Retrieved 9 October 2023.
  22. ↑ "Humphrey Alumni: Sub-Saharan-Africa/". Humphrey Fellowship. Retrieved 9 October 2023.
  23. ↑ "Local documentarian is honoured". Midrand Reporter. Archived from the original on 28 July 2021. Retrieved 9 October 2023.
  24. ↑ "TYI's SADC Top 100 of 2019: Angelo Louw, Healers". The Young Independents. Archived from the original on 28 November 2019. Retrieved 9 October 2023.
  25. ↑ "Angelo Louw, 34". Mail & Guardian. Archived from the original on 25 June 2021. Retrieved 9 October 2023.

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