Souffles
By Toni Maraini The first issue was thin, but it responded “to an imperative demand”. Soon it reached 100 pages. Khaïr-Eddine had by then migrated to France and his name does not figure in the comité d’action, but his presence was assured by his poems. Haunted and solitary, Khaïr-Eddine (whose mother tongue was Berber) had […]
Trajectories of the Sudanese Gulf
By Michael Vasquez There is a lot of concern about how to narrate the history of the Gulf and the Sudanese. The sort of soft power of the Sudanese and their role in quietly and, in some ways, invisibly administering the state at the crucial moment of its first independent articulation is very little talked […]
Hiwar
By Michael Vasquez The journal that the Congress for Cultural Freedom (CCF) published in Beirut, Hiwar, was immediately controversial. It was founded in 1962 by a Palestinian Christian modernist poet and translator of TS Eliot – a somewhat perverse figure named Tawfiq Sayigh. Sayigh published many of his poems in his journal, including “A Few Questions […]
Qibla
Qibla leader Imam Achmad Cassiem in conversation with Khalid Shamis. “When the founder of the Pan Africanist Congress (PAC), Robert Sobukwe, came to Cape Town, specifically to Kensington and Ndabeni, he said at the launch of the branches in those areas, that Muslims are sitting on the blueprint but they’re not implementing it. Now, this is the first […]
The Pharaoh’s New Clothes
By Sophia Azeb Scene I. Arabité and its discontents The first issue of Cairo-based magazine Lotus: Afro-Asian Writings featured an extended excerpt from Léopold Sédar Senghor’s 1967 lecture at the University of Cairo, “Négritude and Arabism” (Arabité in subsequent publications). In it, Senghor asserts that Arabic-speaking Africans – the “Arab-Berber” – played an essential role […]