“Mandela was not the only head of state taken in by Koagne. Le king kept snapshots of himself with many a man of power, among them Mobutu Sese Seko and Denis Sassou Nguesso […] He took Mobutu for 15 million dollars. Blaise Compaoré of Burkina Faso lost 40 million to him. Sassou, Etienne Eyadéma of Togo, several high officials of Gabon, Tanzania and Kenya, a member of the Spanish government and an ex-operative of the Israeli Mossad were bamboozled as well.” – Dominique Malaquais (Blood Money: A Douala Chronicle).
Bantu Serenade by Ntone Edjabe (featuring Nah-ee-lah) (read excerpt)
Santu Mofokeng: Trajectory of a street photographer (part1) (read excerpt)
Binyavanga Wainaina: Hell In Bed With Mrs Peprah (read excerpt)
Dominique Malaquais: Lindela (the winnie suite) (read excerpt)
Boubacar Boris Diop: Myriem (read excerpt)
Cover:
Neo Muyanga
How do we sit with the violence of erasure? What do our personal biographies tell us about what has been erased? What alternative histories and narratives emerge when we gather and when we are in community?
A Gathering is an publication by 2024 ARAK Curatorial Fellow Bulelwa Kunene which brings together the work of 13 African artists, each grappling with the complexities of their identities and histories in the postcolonial context; a landscape that is at once generative and silencing, where erasures persist in the shadows of the production of new forms of knowledge. A place to contend with absence.
Without the impulse towards filling silences, mitigating erasures and bridging gaps, A Gathering is an opportunity to sit with the discomfort of a potentially unfinished and multivocal past, present and future.
A Gathering features artworks by Ade Adesina, Bougaard, Christine Nyatho, Donald Makola, Isheanesu Dondo, Lemek Sompoika, Lynette Musukubili, Odirile Khune Motsiri, Samuel Oyebode, Tahir Carl Karmali, Tuli Mekondjo, Zenaéca Singh and Zizicelo Sifumba.