A Secret History of Mr. George Weah
Writing with a view from Yaoundé, Kangsen Wakai tracks football star George Weah’s journey from Monrovia’s marshland slums, through a little know stint with Cameroonian club TKC, to the summit of world football, and finally the presidency of his country of birth, to tell a pan-African story of football, national identity, politics and power. Among […]
A master of bling with feline style
Writing just after the 2011 Africa Cup of Nations, Achille Mbembe* looks at what makes Samuel Eto’o so lethal He is not yet 25 years old, but he is already one of the finest attackers in the world. His football culture is a mix of raw, unfettered talent (the kind that comes along once every […]
Keorapetse Kgositsile on Johnny Dyani
Jazz was crucial to South African poet Keorapetse Kgositsile‘s most influential idea: his sense of a worldwide African diaspora united by an ear for a certain quintessentially black sound. He wrote of the black aesthetic he pursued and celebrated: “There is nothing like art—in the oppressors sense of art. There is only movement. Force. Creative […]
Staffriding the Frontline – An Essay by Lesego Rampolokeng
May 2008 Down from a couple years beyond 30/30. it was the age of cerebral haemorrhage. The oppression monster was thirsty. YET tabloids were in flight on slaughtered chicken-wings, darkest science witchcraft… Could only track rites of human sacrifice… caught between bullet & gullet, turn to what? It came from that time when the mind […]
Culture And Resistance In South Africa
by Keorapetse Kgositsile Keynote address from the Culture and Resistance Symposium (1982) held in Gaborone, Botswana A few years ago a fellow South African writer asked me to explain to him how people like la Guma and I could be in the Movement but still manage to write novels and poems. And I replied, with […]