Kaveena
In Catherine Anyango’s adaptation of Boubacar Boris Diop’s Kaveena, the boundary between nightmare and reality unravels when Colonel Asante Kroma stumbles upon the corpse of the head of state in a bunker. The discovery sends the police chief on a quest to untangle the dark secrets of a political system in which he was once a well-oiled […]
Afro Horn
Forged from a rare metal found only in Africa and South America, the Afro-horn is an instrument to open the mouths of the gods. It was invented by ancient Egyptians, who called it the Tun-tet. According to Brent Hayes Edwards’ imaginative essay on the mythical instrument, there are only three Afro-horns in the world: one […]
Yakhal’ Inkomo
An explosive bellow from the spiritual heart of the black experience, saxophonist and composer Winston Mankunku’s Ngozi’s Yakhal’ Inkomo is at once a call to action, an open letter and a prayer. Recorded in 1968, as a cry mourning the Sharpeville massacre, and reinvoked in Mongane Wally Serote’s 1972 collection of poems, it tasks us with imagining dispossessed feelings in common as the basis of […]
Major Gentl and the Achimota Wars
Set in 2020, Kojo Laing‘s 1992 dark ecological sci-fi novel envisions a condition of total war in which mutant insects, birds, fruits, animals, vegetables and the humans of Achimota City fight for the right to futurity against an overseas enemy only discernible through cyber proxies and decoys. Nikhil Singh imagines the Achimota Wars in a war of beaks, legs and antennae. “Langian […]
Time to Bleed
An extended conversation between Aryan Kaganof and Walter Mignolo What I don’t want to do, more than anything in the world, is bore anybody and scare them off with all that stuff about his being an esteemed professor, foremost authority on decolonization, blah blah shit. Fuck that. Walter’s important because of what he says […]