How Kenya Exploded In My Heart
A letter from Harare by Petina Gappah I once lived in a European city that had so few black people that I was most people’s only encounter with Africa. I was the Africa expert, giving little seminars on the genocide in Rwanda and the promises of South Africa’s rainbow nation. Throughout that time, I felt […]
XXYX Africa
by Nick Mwaluko On the subject of voicing that inner scream that is your song… LGBT Africa held two truths: you fuck, you die. Both truths were intimately interwoven, like tapestry spun by a wild heart against an overreaching national government bracketed from the world, answerable solely to itself and wielding unmolested corrupted powers. If you were caught, the government had every […]
Buru Buru
Billy Kahora reflects on the state of the ‘estate’ of his Nairobi childhood and finds its decay symptomatic of the malaise of a middle class that’s lost its mind. My younger brother, James, tells me another Buru Buru Phase 5 story when I make my habitual Saturday phone call and ask him what’s happening in the old neighbourhood. My question is […]
Palestine Journey
In February 2005, Ishtiyaq Shukri’s novel The Silent Minaret, won the first European Union Literacy Award for first novel by a South African writer. The novel ends at Israel’s Apartheid Wall in Qalqilya. Here, in his first essay following the award, Shukri travels to The Wall in Palestine to see the fact that informed his fiction. London, Sunday 11th September 2005 […]
L’impossible n’est pas Camerounais!
Kangsen Feka Wakai traces personal lineage, and the often blurred and disputed spaces, spoken tongues and hybrid forms in which national identity is claimed, contested, co-opted and celebrated in the country of his birth. The wrinkled folds that encircled my maternal grandfather’s eyes did not divulge much – they thickened when he smiled, but assumed a […]