Happy Valentine’s Day
Exactly twenty five years ago today, Salman Rushdie received an unusual Valentine: a fatwa from Iranian leader Ayatollah Khomeini calling for his head. This you already know. But why did India and South Africa ban the book many months before Iran reacted, what does it mean that the book remains sanctioned in both countries today, and […]
Method After Fela
by Akin Adesokan “You reckon a guy just goes and cuts down a guy of timber. You gorra do it proper man or you won’t live to cut another log. Dead men tell no tales kid. Until that guy is sawn up and turned to a bench or table, the spirit guy is still struggling inside it, […]
Translations – A Call For Proposals
This call is published in the December 2013 edition of Chronic Books, which accompanies the print quarterly the Chronic. This edition foregrounds the politics and practice of translating Yambo Ouologuem into English, Proust into Haitian Creole, cowboy noir into Nollywood, Wordsworth into Zapotec and more. To read the books magazine, get a […]
Woza Moya
Maakomele R. Manaka revisits a soundtrack of his dreams, long and rhythmic and hypnotic across time, space and struggles. The music and wisdom of Bra Herbie Tsoaeli lives large, therein, at “the foot of memory”. Illustration by Donovan Ward. “Ba ya si biza, bathi e khaya, zi ya jabula ingana, zi ya jabula. Ma se […]
The Last Angel of History
Filmmaker, theorist and co-founder of the Black Audio Film Collective (BAFC) John Akomfrah co-wrote these words with scriptwriter Edward George in 1993-94, as a guiding script for BAFC’s The Last Angel of History. In the future, like racial memory, black futurology may be allotted rooms on the internet. Housed in cyberspace vaults marked ‘tomorrow’, coded […]