The Last Angel of History
Filmmaker, theorist and co-founder of the Black Audio Film Collective (BAFC) John Akomfrah co-wrote these words with scriptwriter Edward George in 1993-94, as a guiding script for BAFC’s The Last Angel of History. In the future, like racial memory, black futurology may be allotted rooms on the internet. Housed in cyberspace vaults marked ‘tomorrow’, coded […]
Setting The Pace is a Small Town’s Big Business
The ‘mystique’ of the Kenyan long-distance runner is to be found not among the elite on the European or North American circuits, but among the journeymen whose starting line is a T-junction in a farming community in the northwest of the country. Jackie Lebo keeps track of proceedings. It is early morning in Iten, and traffic – human and […]
Even the Dead
Jeremy Cronin reports of corrupt apartheid-era games; questioning our (in)ability to remember the politricks of the past that shape South Africa’s present. Walter Benjamin: ‘There is a secret agreement between past generations and the present one. Our coming was expected on earth. Like every generation that preceded us, we have been endowed with a form […]
You’re… Terminated
Under the parental shadow of Table Mountain, children play on the streets of inner Cape Town. From the comfort of her home, Stacy Hardy watches on. Structurally, Bo-kaap’s sort of a dead-end, the way it’s laid out, like a suburban security subdivision: streets point in, then twist up. The few drive-through streets are tourist roots. On Sundays buses run lines […]
Stickfighting Days
A good sport? Olufemi Terry summons up the spirit of (K.Sello Duiker’s) Ah-zoo-ray in his Caine Prize winning, stinging short story. Brace yourself and remember: the judge’s word is final. Thwack, Thwack, the two of them go at it like madmen, but the boys around them barely stir with excitement. They both use one stick and we […]