Kangsen Feka Wakai Can’t Breathe
Transition are calling for responses to the latest sweep of murders by police of unarmed black people in north America. Here, a contribution by Kangsen Feka Wakai. I can’t breathe because I watched the news and saw myself, crawling on a pot-holed filled street from Monrovia to Conakry by way of Freetown. I am the other. I named my last born […]
‘Let’s face it: we’re in over our heads. We need the white folks to come back.’
Renegade Cameroonian filmmaker and theorist Jean-Pierre Bekolo Obama pulls no punches about his disaffection with the state of affairs in his native country. It’s time, he argues, to quit the hypocrisy and turn off the autopilot. Chronic Q: You say that you are in favour of a recolonisation of Cameroon? Jean-Pierre Bekolo Obama: After fifty-two years of independence, the time […]
Beyond Oppression-Liberation-Maendeleo
by Parselelo Kantai It may have been the economist David Ndii who coined the term “the Chlorophyll Zone”. Recalling the tragic fallacy of centralised economic planning in Kenya in the early years of uhuru, Ndii describes how the drafters of that touchstone of economic planning in Kenya, Sessional Paper Number 10 of 1965, divvied up the country into a hierarchy of six […]
Propaganda and Politics tunnel vision history of art activism in South Africa
The important contribution of the Black Consciousness Movement to art activism in 1970s South Africa is without question, yet mainstream art history ignores it. The poet and painter, Lefifi Tladi, reflects in conversation with Percy Mabandu. With his blue beret slanting sideways to hint at his balding head, the painter-poet who became one of the creative dynamos of the […]
The New Thing
[hr] Out of the silence, the crevices, cracks and forgotten places of Cape Town, comes the thing that is jazz. Lindokuhle Nkosi listens to the language of traditions, improvisation and healing, as channelled by some gifted young South African protégés in the realm of sound. Audio accompaniment by Boeta Gee. [hr] Here is this sound, this […]