Theatre du pouvoir AT the louvre – a letter from Paris
Kibafika Kakudji On 29 January 2018, the day after I turned 40, I went to the Louvre with the hopes of seeing an exhibition called “Théâtre du Pouvoir”. I’ve been visiting the world’s largest art museum, and a historic monument in Paris, for the past 20 years. Since I acquired my priority access card, almost […]
PORTRAIT OF MYSELF AS MY FATHER
A CONVERSATION WITH NORA CHIPAUMIRE Born in Mutare, Zimbabwe, and based in New York, iconoclastic choreographer and experimental dance practitioner Nora Chipaumire uses her work to think through representations of the African black woman’s body – the signs that have made it legible to the world (signs, of course, are always saturated with politics) in art, aesthetics and performance. A disruptive energy courses through her […]
NONE BUT OURSELVES
The history of reggae in Zimbabwe echoes far beyond Bob Marley’s historic concert in the earliest days of the country’s independence. Percy Zvomuya crawls the web of influences that makes up not only the sonic cartography of a revolution fuelled by chimurenga music and reggae, but which are the very groundations of today’s Zimdancehall. Sometime […]
THE WAY I SEE IT – National Heroes Acre I
Bongani Kona Who or what haunts you? Do recurrences draw you back in time? Are you nostalgic for lost futures? Does the present seem ghostly? These questions appear in a recent issue of the PEN America journal on the subject of hauntings, a subject I’d like to turn to in this brief reflection, because, lately […]
IN THE DEN OF THE ALCHEMIST
Cheikh Anta Diop spent much of his life in academic exile pitted against his political detractors and consequently persecuted by the academy. ‘Exit the pharaoh’ to the Centre of Low Nuclear Energies of the Institut Fondamental d’Afrique Noire (IFAN), better known as the Laboratory of Carbon 14—no ordinary laboratory—the ‘demiurge’ for a new world view, […]