NONE BUT OURSELVES
The history of reggae in Zimbabwe echoes far beyond Bob Marley’s historic concert in the earliest days of the country’s independence. Percy Zvomuya crawls the web of influences that makes up not only the sonic cartography of a revolution fuelled by chimurenga music and reggae, but which are the very groundations of today’s Zimdancehall. Sometime […]
THE WAY I SEE IT – National Heroes Acre I
Bongani Kona Who or what haunts you? Do recurrences draw you back in time? Are you nostalgic for lost futures? Does the present seem ghostly? These questions appear in a recent issue of the PEN America journal on the subject of hauntings, a subject I’d like to turn to in this brief reflection, because, lately […]
kill me already – a letter from Luanda
Kiluanji Kia Henda After several years working as a visual artist with a deep interest in history and a practice rooted in social intervention, I feel compelled to express my admiration and wonder at a series of photographs produced after an online challenge went viral on social networks. “Acaba de me matar” (“Just kill me […]
IN THE DEN OF THE ALCHEMIST
Cheikh Anta Diop spent much of his life in academic exile pitted against his political detractors and consequently persecuted by the academy. ‘Exit the pharaoh’ to the Centre of Low Nuclear Energies of the Institut Fondamental d’Afrique Noire (IFAN), better known as the Laboratory of Carbon 14—no ordinary laboratory—the ‘demiurge’ for a new world view, […]
‘GO TO THE LIMITS OF KNOWLEDGE!’ MURIDISM IN THE LIFE OF CHEIKH ANTA DIOP
While French colonialism was at its zenith, the first quarter of the twentieth century in Senegal saw the emergence of charismatic Sufi leaders. Among them, one in particular, Cheikh Ahmadou Bamba, made a profound impact on Senegalese culture. Founder of the Murid Tariqa (Murid spiritual path) and of the holy city of Touba, he dominates […]