This is a pigment of my imagination
Looking like a ‘Negro’ in India and searching for a connection has provided Joshua Muyiwa with a language that is understood neither by those closest to him, nor those with whom he shares the texture of his hair. In college, all those stories I had meticulously filed away for 18 years finally had an ear. Abhishek, my femme-on-the-street-butch-in-the-sheets […]
How Kenya Exploded In My Heart
A letter from Harare by Petina Gappah I once lived in a European city that had so few black people that I was most people’s only encounter with Africa. I was the Africa expert, giving little seminars on the genocide in Rwanda and the promises of South Africa’s rainbow nation. Throughout that time, I felt […]
XXYX Africa
by Nick Mwaluko On the subject of voicing that inner scream that is your song… LGBT Africa held two truths: you fuck, you die. Both truths were intimately interwoven, like tapestry spun by a wild heart against an overreaching national government bracketed from the world, answerable solely to itself and wielding unmolested corrupted powers. If you were caught, the government had every […]
Buru Buru
Billy Kahora reflects on the state of the ‘estate’ of his Nairobi childhood and finds its decay symptomatic of the malaise of a middle class that’s lost its mind. My younger brother, James, tells me another Buru Buru Phase 5 story when I make my habitual Saturday phone call and ask him what’s happening in the old neighbourhood. My question is […]
The Case of Sipho Mchunu
by Bongani Kona In her brilliant review of Didier Fassin’s book, When Bodies Remember: Experiences and Politics of Aids in South Africa, Hilary Mantel quotes how the history of this country, steeped as it is in centuries of racial brutality, is not to be found at the Vootrekker Monument or at the Apartheid Museum but is warehoused in the body, in “words and […]