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 […]
PORTRAIT OF MYSELF AS MY FATHER
A CONVERSATION WITH NORA CHIPAUMIRE Born in Mutare, Zimbabwe, and based in New York, iconoclastic choreographer and experimental dance practitioner Nora Chipaumire uses her work to think through representations of the African black woman’s body – the signs that have made it legible to the world (signs, of course, are always saturated with politics) in art, aesthetics and performance. A disruptive energy courses through her […]
New Trade Routes: Soccer Cities
We make our own maps tracing the new trade routes for the export of young males bodies to the football industrial complex. This map first appeared in The Chronic: New Cartographies (March 2015). In this edition of the Chronic, we ask: what if maps were made by Africans for their own use, to understand and make visible […]
Home is where the music is
Hugh Masekela (talking to Mothobi Mutloatse) I remember we use to live on isinkwa. When we saw musicians eating fish and chips and being drunk in the streets of Johannesburg you could tell that something had been put on wax. (Laughs). We are laughing now but it’s a sad thing y’know. Gallo makes millions of […]
A Brief History of Fufu Pounding
[hr] By Moses März [hr] In July 2016, the Kumasi Polytechnic presented the K-POLY FUFU MAMA, the latest machine promising to ease the labour-heavy preparation of Ghana’s national dish. The selected audience of fufu pounders, connoisseurs and chop bar owners present at the launch covered by TV3 is shown as enthusiastic recipients of this Ghanaian […]