Achebe The Native Intellectual
There Was A Country, Chinua Achebe’s autobiographical account of the Nigerian Civil War, raised a dust storm of reaction in Nigeria. Jeremy Weate suggests the books controversy and power lies outside the simple tectonics of ethnicity. There Was A Country, Chinua Achebe’s autobiographical account of the Nigerian Civil War, has raised a […]
Unchain the art
Gwen Ansell maps the distance between words and music, fiction and autobiography, subversion and submersion through an epistolary review or two books that operate at the limits of language and song. “According to my records there was something/More…mind bringing African control on the corny times/of the tunes he would play. There was Space/And the […]
The anti-art of Kongofuturism
In the multidisciplinary lifework of Bebson Elemba, Eléonore Hellio discovers the mind and matter that inspire ‘ephemiral architectures’, radical folklore and emancipation from the post-colonial present. Bebson de la Rue is one of central Africa’s most unique sound and visual artists. A musician and a singer, a rapper, performer and bricoleur extraordinaire, he […]
Reading Fred Ho
A jazz suite in the key of red Gwen Ansell and Salim Washington celebrate the revolutionary life, language and hard-ass leadership of an unconventional saxophonist, composer and generous collaborator. Reading the text Prelude: Home is where the violence is “Everything I create starts with the music … [and music]… like any conscious human activity, can […]
Call for an Archive of AfroSonics
The collective improvisations of black America – and their profound impact on poetry and sound – are near impossible to find in the annals of US academe. In fact, their absence is as stark as the control of archiving is white, writes Harmony Holiday. Since the 1950s, jazz music and the literary imagination have […]