Black Man in the White Suit
A Letter from Cape Town by Kiluanji Kia Henda. In 2008, the South African artist Ed Young invited me to take part in a three-month residence programme in Cape Town funded by two Swiss cultural institutions. I had been to South Africa twice – first to Johannesburg, where I had lived from1996 to 1998, during […]
Pan Africanism in Katanga
In the margins of a specific history, in which land and inhabitants are held hostage by the whores of capitalist extraction, Sinzo Aanza* constructs a different reading and decries the unearthing of pan Africanism in “a mining universe that never took heed of it”. Samantha Kaj was in charge of the communications department at the […]
Becoming Chimamanda’s Boy
by Oris Aigbokhaevbolo. I was part of the 2014 Farafina Creative Writing Workshop (FCWW), by which I mean I became Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s boy – an appellation which, made any time before 2013, might have meant the famous writer and I were good and jolly friends. That harmless definition has been made impossible after Cocoyam-gate – […]
Creative Industries as Underdevelopment
Are the creative industries turning the tide against urban development in the global South, gobbling up space, agency and voice in the pursuit of distorted trends of progress? Stefano Harney and Tonika Sealy, founding members of Ground Provisions, an educational and curatorial collective in Barbados, argue that nouveau creative compradors are getting rich through cultural […]
All That is Solid Melts into PR
Mark Fisher, author of the book Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative? and the blogger known as k-punk, speaks to Bongani Kona about the social, economic and cultural totality of late capitalism, the pervasive cynicism in which we seem to be mired, the omnipresence of PR and the possibility of countering it all by re-igniting a belief in […]