The Making of Mannenberg
By John Edwin Mason On a winter’s day in 1974, a group of musicians led by Abdullah Ibrahim (or Dollar Brand, as most still knew him) entered a recording studio on Bloem Street, in the heart of Cape Town, and emerged, hours later, having changed South African music forever. Together, they had created “Mannenberg”, a song […]
The Way I See It: We Need New Myths
By Shabaka Hutchings Probing the musical narratives of jazz and hip-hop, saxophonist and composer Shabaka Hutchings plays outside the time signatures common to diasporan interpretation and orthodox analysis. Moving beyond the value systems and invisible hierarchies that shape understanding and impose context, he imagines another sonic architecture. A phrase from Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, “moving the […]
Thinking of Brenda
[hr] By Njabulo Ndebele [hr] I first heard Brenda Fassie sing on a languid, sunny, spring Saturday morning in the Roma valley of Lesotho. It must have been in 1984. It was one of those mornings when the world demonstrates the notion of slowness. There was the blue haze in the horizon, rural smoke rising […]
The University of Soweto
[hr] Frank B. Wilderson draws from his memory of student protests in 1993 at Vista University in Soweto, a “historically black” institution created in the early 1980s and run, in no uncertain terms, by the long arm of Afrikaner establishment. [hr] From July 1992 to February 1993 I’d worked at Khanya College in a […]
Reform and Revolution at the University of Lovanium
[hr] In this essay on the gestation, articulations and manipulations of student politics in 1960s Congo, Pedro Monaville explores the ways in which one particular massacre on a campus in Kinshasa ignited protracted protests and responses from the state that echo to this day in the physical and intellectual decay of the country’s tertiary institutions. […]