How to write about Africa
by Boniface Mongo-Mboussa Serpent à Plumes’ republication of Yambo Ouologuem’s Le Devoir de violence has given this novel a new lease of life. Christopher Wise’s preface insists on the novel’s place in the history of African literature, highlighting the author’s biographical details and situating the book in the historical context of pre-colonial Mali. It also confronts the first publisher’s (Editions du Seuil) […]
In Suburbia
Suburban South Africa is glowing. The sun is up, the trees are in bloom, the lawns are magnificent, and if you ask nicely, you might even get a windowless room. Tanya Pamplone writes about the blessed and the damned, a home she likes and would also like to leave, and painfully assesses the situation of […]
The Chronic – mapping the new – soon come
“In that Empire, the Art of Cartography attained such Perfection that the map of a single Province occupied the entirety of a City, and the map of the Empire, the entirety of a Province. In time, those Unconscionable Maps no longer satisfied, and the Cartographers Guilds struck a Map of the Empire whose size was […]
What Follows? The State of Black Collectivity in the Year of the Sheep
Continuing to sing a vital and urgent message of black collectivity, Harmony Holiday writes from New York critiquing the state of things now and the shape of jazz to come. Here we are at the start of the Year of the Sheep, and may we no longer be martyrs to our own following. In 1977, filmmaker Charles Burnett, wrote and directed […]
Between Worldliness and Exile Homelessness and Cosmopolitanism
With essays by Akin Adesokan, Imraan Coovadia and Ngugi wa Thiong’o bound together, Sean O’Toole examines idiosyncratic writing styles and “the intellectual nature of postcoloniality”. A young boy grows up amid the “unplanned spectacle of the expressive everyday”, a kind of ecstatic fluorescence of culture – music, films, art – that is snuffed out by a military coup. What to do? Like […]