Is Biko’s legacy being besmirched?
In October 2002, 25 years since Stephen Bantu Biko‘s death, poet James Matthews penned a letter questioning the segregation and infighting amongst political parties and “groupings” who professed “to hold true to his commitment.” We reread his missive, more than ten year later, as battles over Biko continue to rage. This letter first appeared in […]
Monica Maxwell and Samson Botsotso
Scamming the scammers? Though a buzzing of charades, of tall tales, of puns, insinuations, accusations, lamentations, epistles, epigrams, bank statements, lawyers letters, Christian gospel choirs, ejaculating hallelujahs, political tracts, polemics, Afrikan Soul Rhetoric, violent sweats, the gnashing of teeth , circling vultures, woes that stun the souls of the living, the agony of balls and […]
Notes Towards A Question of Power
Pieces, notes really, fragmentary speculations,remnants, a sense of the feminine under assault, and the drive to love…. Along with her novel A Question of Power, Bessie Head‘s letters and correspondences pose the toughest, most vital questions concerning race, class and gender, the troubled paths of the poetic imagination, and on the tangled, fraught (and yes, […]
50 Years Ago: Zeke in Nigeria
Es’kia Mphahlele and the Anti-Apartheid Association of Nigeria Moritz Isaac (Manu) Herbstein was born in 1936 in Muizenberg in the Western Cape. He graduated from the University of Cape Town with a B.Sc in Engineering in 1958. From 1959 to 1970 Herbstein lived and travelled extensively in England, Nigeria, Ghana, India, Zambia, and Scotland. He […]
The Forest and the Zoo
The Forest and the Zoo* (Aryan Kaganof with Johnny Mbizo Dyani) * Johnny Dyani Interview: 22-23 December 1985 I was 19 years old when I left South Africa to avoid being conscripted into the apartheid army. My great passion was music and I had for a number of years been the head reviewer of the New […]