“Three generations of white South African men were bound together at that table. Vermuelen was the first generation. He defined Africa, made it safe for Basson to defile. I was the last generation, the last to grow up in segregated neighborhoods. Between us was the silent photograph of Wouter Basson. Like a distant father, Basson was absent at the dining table.” – Henk Rossouw (Hole in the White ‘Hood). Also Mahmood Mamdani on Bantu Education at UCT, Gael Reagon on sisterhood, Binyavanga Wainaina on dis-covering Kenya, Gaston Zossou on African intellectuals and more…
Cover:
Strange Fruit by Lewis Allen
Archéologie des trous by Stacy Hardy ( Ròt-Bò-Krik, 2022)
The short stories of Archéologie des trous take place in a South Africa oscillating between fantasy and raw realism.
A narrator with piercing and dumbfounded eyes auscultates the holes, which are everywhere: in the bodies, the desires, the ransacked earth, the erased lives and memories, the forgotten loves and massacres.
In this hallucinated fresco, one can just as well autopsy one's own corpse, live inside a cow, foment a revolt of migrant workers, discover a fallen empire at the bottom of a wasteland, engage in the traffic of lice, exploring a black hole by digging in your garden, or being present on the day when the white people left by the sea.
Translated from English by Elisabeth Malaquais and Jean-Baptiste Naudy