Accordion Cowboys
Tseliso Monaheng explores famo, a popular form of accordion music that blends storytelling, spoken word and rapid-fire rap styles to reflect the lives of ordinary Basotho. Famo has spawned several successful musicians, but it has also promoted rivalries among groups and individual players in Lesotho – some of them deadly. The story of Lesotho’s traditional music scene […]
AF 888
AF 888 – a letter from above the Mediterranean Sea by Christian Botale Molebo* Air France Flight 888: Paris-Kinshasa, 29 August 2013, departure time: 9:45. A Congolese woman is being deported. I am in seat 36J, economy class. The deportee looks to be 30 or so. She is escorted by French police in civvies and armbands: a woman […]
Palestine Journey
In February 2005, Ishtiyaq Shukri’s novel The Silent Minaret, won the first European Union Literacy Award for first novel by a South African writer. The novel ends at Israel’s Apartheid Wall in Qalqilya. Here, in his first essay following the award, Shukri travels to The Wall in Palestine to see the fact that informed his fiction. London, Sunday 11th September 2005 […]
The Meaning of Being Numerous
A Letter from Beirut by Lina Mounzer. The man who sets up the bomb is long gone before it goes off. It is a standard, 50kg TNT explosive, fitting neatly into the trunk of a car. If the car is heavy enough – a 1982 Mercedes, blue-green, say, like this one – the slight heaviness of […]
L’impossible n’est pas Camerounais!
Kangsen Feka Wakai traces personal lineage, and the often blurred and disputed spaces, spoken tongues and hybrid forms in which national identity is claimed, contested, co-opted and celebrated in the country of his birth. The wrinkled folds that encircled my maternal grandfather’s eyes did not divulge much – they thickened when he smiled, but assumed a […]