Which Africa Are We Talking About?
In the era of rapid globalisation the exemplary novelists seem to be those who successfully transcend their homelands and emerge in a place where their work can acquire a universal relevance. In many ways Jamal Mahjoub personifies this condition. He was born in England, raised in Sudan, and has lived in London, Liverpool, Khartoum, South Wales, […]
Shooting From Point Blank Range
Moses Serubiri turns on the television and watches the news unfold, in living and often riotous contradiction, in a programme that has viewers from Kampala to Kansas hooked on the hilarity, the spectacle and the harsh reality of Ugandan politics. In an episode of Point Blank, police officers join in watching a carnival of rioting […]
Beneath the Underdog
Fighter, soldier, poet, arguably the PR-unit and embodiment of the Economic Freedom Fighters – he is the current holder of the People’s Poet Chair of South African politics. Kwanele Sosibo meets the Bigg Dogg. In the track “Asijiki Remix”, Bigg Dogg, the Mzwakhe Mbuli of our time, runs through a breathless castigation of the Gupta […]
Shifting Gulfward
The apparent demise of the millennia-old Arab cultural centres and the rapid growth, in their place and across all genres, of Emirates-based investment are raising some questions. Is oil money alone fuelling the contemporary art boom, and in whose interests is the cash being flashed in the name of Arab cultural renaissance? Marcia Lynx Qualey […]
African War Machines
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 […]