Living Dangerously in Petroluanda
António Tomás picks through the post-independence architectural ruins of Angola’s capital city and reveals a cross-section of the economies of exchange and distribution, the relationships of give, take and take again, and the vice and violence that permeate the act of securing land and home in a city greased with the “devil’s excrement”. In his […]
The Institute
Cultural institutes are considered effective instruments in foreign policy for any nation-state that can afford them. Moses März exposes the workings behind the walls of a branch of Germany’s Goethe-Institut and the pitfalls involved in the business of exporting national culture. At about 7.30am the director is already in her office. Soon, a queue of […]
Soft Power Desire Machines and the Production of Africa Rising
Alongside texts by Jesse Weaver Shipley, Moses März and Oribhabor Aigbokhaevbolo, this map features in the new Chronic. In this edition we ask: what if maps were made by Africans for their own use, to understand and make visible their own realities or imaginaries? How does it shift the perception we have of ourselves and […]
Pan Africanism in Katanga
In the margins of a specific history, in which land and inhabitants are held hostage by the whores of capitalist extraction, Sinzo Aanza* constructs a different reading and decries the unearthing of pan Africanism in “a mining universe that never took heed of it”. Samantha Kaj was in charge of the communications department at the […]
All That is Solid Melts into PR
Mark Fisher, author of the book Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative? and the blogger known as k-punk, speaks to Bongani Kona about the social, economic and cultural totality of late capitalism, the pervasive cynicism in which we seem to be mired, the omnipresence of PR and the possibility of countering it all by re-igniting a belief in […]