TO REFUSE THAT WHICH HAS BEEN REFUSED TO YOU
Fred Moten and Saidiya Hartman sit down to talk about the temporal and traditional in the age of refusal – of movement, of citizenship. They offer up a different way of thinking, a pathway to another understanding of community as well as the possibility of harnessing fugitivity as a creative empowering strategy*. Saidiya Hartman: One […]
HIKIMA – a letter from Zaria
by Yinka Elujoba One evening, while escaping the rain on campus in Ife, I stopped for cover under the walkway beneath the Senate Building. Standing there was a girl in a blue hijab. Her phone rang. I thought I recognised the ringtone: it was Trane of course. It had to be Trane – the tremor […]
OF TOTEMS, HISTORY AND POLITICS
In Shona cosmology, people are understood to be more than the sum of their material or physical parts. The metaphysical and spiritual makeup of people is manifested through totems – revered animals – that expand one’s identity to include milieu, behaviour and way of thinking. Robert Machiri (drawings) and Mike Mavura (words) offer a brief […]
THINKING TOO MUCH
Silence and dark humour seem like the most authentic way for people in Zimbabwe to deal with cross-generational trauma and mamhepo, the winds that carry misfortune. On a visit home to her ailing grandmother, Florence Madenga reflects on the silences that live in the folds of family – the “tying of ends that don’t want […]
NONE BUT OURSELVES
The history of reggae in Zimbabwe echoes far beyond Bob Marley’s historic concert in the earliest days of the country’s independence. Percy Zvomuya crawls the web of influences that makes up not only the sonic cartography of a revolution fuelled by chimurenga music and reggae, but which are the very groundations of today’s Zimdancehall. Sometime […]