Melodious Thunk
By Geoff Dyer He didn’t like new things. Like a blind man, he preferred stuff he’d used for a long time, even small things like pens or knives, things he’d come to feel at home with. Walking with him one afternoon, we were waiting for the lights to change at a street corner near his […]
A Silent Way: Routes of South African Jazz, 1946-1978.
By Julian Jonker First, a warning. The writer approaching the intersections and digressions that comprise the history of jazz in – and outside – South Africa is confronted with the conundrum of finding a place to start. How does one tie up the mutiplicitous locations and trajectories of the jazz story and mould them into something […]
Together in the Picture
John Peffer scans the photographic styles that image a black South African self outside the Apartheid frames of negation, negativity and separation. The story is well known. As Apartheid was gradually imposed in South Africa during the 1950s, urban black families were forcibly removed from mixed-group neighbourhoods to locations far from the city centres. […]
Land Homeland
Q&A with Mahmood Mamdani Chronic: Your book Define and Rule: Native as Political Identity is a short but fascinating study on the development of key terms in colonial administration, specifically ‘tribe’ and ‘native’. You argue that these terms become important in developing indirect rule and rather than (British) colonialism depending on the strategy known as […]
Sounding the Horn on Reconstruction
The role of art and literature in countries of the Horn of Africa was up for discussion among some distinguished Somali, Ethiopian and Sudanese writers who attended Kwani? Litfest 2012 in Nairobi. Kate Hampton was there and sent this report. The absence of moderator, Yusuf Hassan, was on the minds of many who attended ‘Conversations […]