Review by GWEN ANSELL October: The story of the Russian revolution China Mieville Verso, 2017 The Last Days of New Paris China Mieville Picador, 2016 “There is a brand of naive anticolonialism,” China Miéville has said, “that falls back into the ‘Noble Savage’ narrative; that simply replicates a notion of beautiful natives and a place […]
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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 […]
NATIONAL HEROES ACRE II & III
National Heroes Acre II Photographs by Jekesai Njikizanava National Heroes Acre II by Brian Chikwa Sometimes you take off because you don’t want to still be around when people come back to their senses. Knock-kneed, I was never built for running, but I knew that you run faster when racing other people than when running […]
KÀDDU- THE ECHO OF DISSONANT DISCOURSE
Ibrahima Wane Translated by David Leye When it was published by Présence Africaine in 1954, Cheikh Anta Diop’s Nations nègres et culture acted as a trigger for many black intellectuals, particularly young African students in France. Recognizing their own significance, leaders of the Federation of Black African Students in France (FEANF) distributed Diop’s research on […]
CHEIKH ANTA DIOP – AN AWAKENING
Ayesha Harruna Attah recounts a voyage of discovery that begins from a point of ‘cultural envy’ – a realisation of how little African writers know of their myths, the rich archive of knowledge of the continental pantheon – and ends in an understanding of a ‘shared continuity’ over millennia of African cultures, histories and philosophies. […]