“…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
Slave Trades and an Artist's Notebook by Ari Sitas (Deep South, 2000)
In 1874, aged 20, the visionary poet Arthur Rimbaud abandoned poetry and left France for Africa.He spent some years in Cyprus and Aden before settling in Ethiopia during the reign of kings Menelik and Makonnen. He became a trader in coffee, guns and hides, and toyed with the idea of trading in slaves.
Ari Sitas' long poem Slave Trades is an attempt to express the voice of a cynical Rimbaud, his Ethiopian "wives", the voices of the marketplace, priests, poets and kings. These voices form a fugue of vivid images of early colonial brutality and African resistance, both political and spiritual: "I hope still, therefore I am".
Artist's Notebook, the second part of this volume, is a fictional account for the same terrain set in the 1990s. Ethiopia is war-ravaged, and a group of disaffected people, some of them descendants of the characters in Slave Trades, are puzzling out their roots and their identities.