“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
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