“…The struggle of black people inevitably appear in an intensely cultural form because the social formation in which their distinct political traditions are now manifest has constructed the arena of politics on ground overshadowed by centuries of metropolitan capitalist development, thereby denying them recognition as legitimate politics. Blacks conduct a class struggle in and through race. The BC of race and class cannot be empirically separated, the class character of black struggles is not a result of the fact that blacks are predominantly proletarian, thought this is true…”- (Frank Talk Staff Writers in ‘Azania Salutes Tosh’ – circa 1981)
front cover:
Tosh by Steve Gordon
back cover:
Kippie by Basil Breakey
Cityscapes 7: Futurity (Africa Centre for Cities, December 2015)
The seventh edition of Cityscapes is framed around the rubric of “futurity”.
What will tomorrow be like?
It will be more urbanised. It will also, agree various contributors, bear the imprimatur of China. “Whatever the case, China has, for now, become a far more prominent actor than others in the future-making of Africa,” asserts philosopher Achille Mbembe in an anchoring essay, “to the point where Africa is now not only a planetary question … but also and more specifically a Chinese question.” Contributors Philip Harrison, Yan Yang, Tanya Pampalone and Mary Anne Fitzgerald expand and complicate this assertion.
