“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…
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Strange Fruit by Lewis Allen
Jah Hills is alone in the Kwafindoda bush, waiting for the elders to come, burn ibhuma and deliver him home when he is tricked, captured and turned into isithunzela. A creature trapped in a wardrobe by day and only freed at night, to move between the realm of the living and the dead. One night, he narrowly escapes and finds his way back. But home is no longer home.
Set between Kwafindoda, where the nature is alive and ghosts exist even before someone is dead, and South Africa's gritty urban townships, Jah Hills explores the conflict between life and death, folklore and philosophy, the extraordinary and everyday so as to write the Unlanguaged World of today.
A breathless journey, at once fevered, visionary and breathtakingly alive, it invites the reader to find wilderness and brutality in the banal, the beautiful in the bizarre and to seek answers, not in the sum, but in the derangement of its many seething parts.