SUNGURA STORIES
Ranga Mberi travels back in musical time to the 1980s and 1990s, the era of sungura music. Dubbed the “authentic sound of Zimbabwe”, sungura weaved together Congolese rumba with Zimbabwean jiti and Tanzanian kanindo. Rooted deeply in the struggles, heartbreak and suffering of the times, but also in joy and celebration of common people – […]
PORTRAITS OF POWER
The president’s portrait holds a venerable position in post-independence Zimbabwe. Not unlike its colonial predecessor’s (and in keeping with entrenched social hierarchies and royal patronage that persist in Britain), it looks down upon the toiling citizenry, casts its gaze on every space imaginable, and frames the notion of identity. Farai Mudzingwa writes about the power […]
Traditional Intellectuals
by Koketso Potsane Art has always been used to make statements about what is happening. In his article “Reciprocal Bases of National Culture and the Fight for Freedom,” Frantz Fanon argues that extreme ways of colonial domination always disrupts [in spectacular fashion] the cultural life of a conquered people. This is made possible by the laws/rules […]
Genres of the Human
In his new book, The Sound of Culture: Diaspora and Black Technopoetics, Louis Chude-Sokei samples freely from history, music, literature and science, conjuring new meanings from dead texts, to build an echo chamber where the discourses of race and technology collide. At a time when automation threatens jobs and pits humans against machine and […]
Steal Back the Treasure
Calls for restitution African artifacts from Western museums are mounting. Against this backdrop, Nigeria’s response to the British (Second World Black and African Festival of Arts and Culture) in pirating the head of Queen Idia to use it as a logo for Festac 77 , proposes another dissonant route that challenges the very idea of the […]