The Scandal
by Suren Pillay During the past 10 years I have seen reports and heard anecdotal evidence of threats, attacks, victimisation and simmering tensions in respect of foreign Africans in South Africa’s townships, but it is the violence of this month that has brought the phenomena into sharp focus. This week we woke to a horrific […]
How the Attacks were Planned
by Maris Gabriela Carrinho Aragao This map features in the Burnin’ and A-Lootin’ section of Chimurenga Vol. 16: The Chimurenga Chronic (available here). Set in the week 18-24 May 2008, the Chronic, imagines the newspaper as a producer of time – a time-machine – which travels backwards and forwards, to place these events within a broader context and thereby to challenge […]
I Think I’ll Call it Morning
by Bongani Kona Penumbra Songeziwe Mahlangu Kwela Books, 2013 Sometime in the winter of 2010 when, like the protagonist of his breakout novel, Penumbra, he was in his mid-20s and unemployed, Songeziwe Mahlangu had a nervous breakdown. The episode, and everything which led to it, is revisited and placed at the epicentre of his […]
The Shifting Fortunes of a Performing Poet
Post-apartheid poetry and its makers have witnessed the commodification of the art in more ways than one. Now a veteran of the South African performance poetry scene, Vonani Bila notices his greying chin hairs, his fading allure and the fact that nothing exists outside the realm of exchange. He calls on the new generation of […]
Black Man in the White Suit
A Letter from Cape Town by Kiluanji Kia Henda. In 2008, the South African artist Ed Young invited me to take part in a three-month residence programme in Cape Town funded by two Swiss cultural institutions. I had been to South Africa twice – first to Johannesburg, where I had lived from1996 to 1998, during […]