It’s only a matter of acceleration now
by Binyavanga Wainaina 1. I am about to interview Youssou N’Dour. I am sitting in the office of his TV station. 2. This week in Dakar, you learned to manage your breathing swimming in the water of the Atlantic, the lifeguard showed you how he spends his whole day at the tiny stony beach near […]
When You Kill Us, We Rule
Audre Lorde‘s poem, “The Black Unicorn”, is woven into rhetorical charcoal drawings by Sandra Brewster, inspired by the conversation between Fela Anikulapo Kuti and Keziah Jones. “When You Kill Us, We Rule” was originally published in print as part of Chimurenga 9: Conversations In Luanda And Other Graphic Stories. Available here.
Not only our land but also our souls
Andile Mngxitama challenges historical and contemporary rhetoric that positions land theft in the realm of material dispossession. He asks us to plumb deeper to discover the narrative of loss that is the black experience*. In 1997, just three years into ‘democracy’, South African church leaders gathered in Johannesburg for a ‘Church Land Conference’. The children […]
A Brief History of Throwing Shit
by Rustum Kozain. Shit, muck, drek, kak. Faecal matter. We humans have a complicated relationship with our shit, one that dates back to long before Freud. Consider Francois Rabelais’s Gargantua and Pantagruel. The birth of Gargantua is confused with his mother’s bowel movement after she has gorged herself on tripe: birth and decay, life and shit. […]
Method After Fela
by Akin Adesokan “You reckon a guy just goes and cuts down a guy of timber. You gorra do it proper man or you won’t live to cut another log. Dead men tell no tales kid. Until that guy is sawn up and turned to a bench or table, the spirit guy is still struggling inside it, […]