How to Eat a Forest
Billy Kahora recounts a journey into Kenya’s Mau Forest, where he confronts the interface between the ideal and the real, the disputed and the disparaged. It is a schizophrenic geography as mapped, as inhabited, and as marketed by the dispossessed, the landless, the landowner and the broker. 1. How to eat a forest Almost everywhere, […]
Imagined Waters
Through the poetry of its mariners – the singers of its rivers and seas – Yvonne A. Owuor explores the geography of the vast ocean of Africa. She finds that the horizons of sky, land and water are blurred and that the shape of the past and the future is a matter of perspective, one […]
Living Dangerously in Petroluanda
António Tomás picks through the post-independence architectural ruins of Angola’s capital city and reveals a cross-section of the economies of exchange and distribution, the relationships of give, take and take again, and the vice and violence that permeate the act of securing land and home in a city greased with the “devil’s excrement”. In his […]
Neopats and Repats
This map features in the new Chronic, an edition in which we ask: what if maps were made by Africans for their own use, to understand and make visible their own realities or imaginaries? How does it shift the perception we have of ourselves and how we make life on this continent? To view […]
Reviews in Brief
by Stacy Hardy. Our Lady of the Nile Scholastique Mukasonga (transl. Melanie Mauthner) Archipelago Books, 2014 In Our Lady of the Nile, Scholastique Mukasonga plunges her reader into a looming dreamscape where an elite Catholic girls’ school has become a microcosm for a society on the brink of war. Here, the jagged terrain of […]