God Has Written a Miracle Into My Body
By Wendell Hassan Marsh “Do you believe that Islam is the truth?” a taxi driver in Dakar asked me one afternoon, sounding like a protestant proselytiser casting a net. The corpulent man was leaning close to me in the passenger seat with a glimmer in his eyes, making it clear that he was more interested in […]
The Upper Room
By Florence Madenga 4pm: Opening Prayer We are waiting for Apostle Debbie Banda-Viggs, a Malawian evangelist living in McKinney, Texas. None of us have ever seen her in person, but she will come to us through the small speakers my father has plugged into his laptop. The five of us – me, my 12-year-old brother […]
The University of Soweto
[hr] Frank B. Wilderson draws from his memory of student protests in 1993 at Vista University in Soweto, a “historically black” institution created in the early 1980s and run, in no uncertain terms, by the long arm of Afrikaner establishment. [hr] From July 1992 to February 1993 I’d worked at Khanya College in a […]
The Papers
In a place — geographically, mentally, physically — where everything is guided by violence, international humanitarian aid organisations seem to do little more than catalogue, file and ultimately silence the voices of those most affected. Writing with unrestrained anger and deep sadness, Joséphine Imani’s* job application cover letter, addressed to the humanitarian aid industry, challenges […]
The Mission of Forgetting
Joshua Craze offers a sobering analysis of the fantasy that is the United Nations mandate and presence in South Sudan, where civil war is the order of every day. The organisation’s peacekeeping mission, Craze argues, is based on the fundamental logic of the UN’s functioning: to recreate the image of its membership wherever it goes […]