Becoming Chimamanda’s Boy
by Oris Aigbokhaevbolo. I was part of the 2014 Farafina Creative Writing Workshop (FCWW), by which I mean I became Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s boy – an appellation which, made any time before 2013, might have meant the famous writer and I were good and jolly friends. That harmless definition has been made impossible after Cocoyam-gate – […]
All That is Solid Melts into PR
Mark Fisher, author of the book Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative? and the blogger known as k-punk, speaks to Bongani Kona about the social, economic and cultural totality of late capitalism, the pervasive cynicism in which we seem to be mired, the omnipresence of PR and the possibility of countering it all by re-igniting a belief in […]
Operation Protective Edge
by Paul Wessels. The Goldstone Report: The Legacy of the Landmark Investigation of the Gaza Conflict Adam Horowitz, Lizzy Ratner, Philip Weiss (Eds) Nation Books, 2011 On Thursday 24 July 2014 I held a readathon of the abridged version of the “Goldstone Report”, at Rhodes University. I sold it as a Mandela Week event to get […]
The Undeveloped Intellectual in Zombie-land
by Ibrahim Farghali. This is Rakha’s second novel after his début, The Book of the Sultan’s Seal: Strange Incidents from History in the City of Mars, in which he addressed the identity crisis created in Egyptian society by Wahhabism, which was imported into the country by Egyptians who went to work in Saudi Arabia in the […]
Men and their Dogs
by Gwen Ansell. Leonardo Padura is perhaps best known outside his native Cuba for his series of prize-winning, Havana-set detective novels, The Four Seasons, featuring the maverick cop and aspiring writer Lieutenant Mario Conde. The weightier and more ambitious Man Who Loved Dogs – it took Padura, he says, more than five years to write – also features an […]