A Geography of Times and Affects
by Marissa Moorman. An Angolan friend of mine refuses to read Ondjaki. He says the writer’s work is nostalgic for the socialist period – times he’d rather forget. I disagree. Granma Nineteen and the Soviet’s Secret is the third book (and the second translated into English, following Good Morning Comrades) that uses a child narrator […]
Miniature Metamorphoses
by André Naffis-Sahely. In his dotage, Henry Kissinger has come to resemble Emperor Palpatine from Star Wars; after five decades of insidious influence on US foreign policy, stretching from Nixon all the way to Obama, his face has scrunched into a ripple of wrinkles, but his eyes retain their wily lustre. When he enters a room, […]
The Invention of African Football
Moses März documents his fleeting orbit of the “African” football scene, from the Afcon 2008 tourney in Ghana to Angola in 2009 and the 2010 FIFA World Cup extravaganza further south. All in all it was brief, expensive, stereotypically Eurocentric and big on defeat. My short-lived career as an African football correspondent began with a […]
Short Review – The Year of the Rat
Year of the Rat Marc Anthony Richardson FC2/ University of Alabama Press, 2017 Released to high critical acclaim but scant attention last year, Marc Anthony Richardson’s Year of the Rat is a slim novel excavating the inheritance of generational trauma, violence, economic struggle, and institutional racism that defines much of contemporary life in the US. […]