“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
Heart's Hunger by Karen Press (Deep South, 2024)
Heart’s Hunger spans thirty years of Karen Press’s writing, including love poems, historical, political poems, lyrics, satires and poems of place.
Karen Press was born in Cape Town in 1956, where she lives and works as a freelance editor and writer. She has published ten collections of poems, including The Little Museum of Working Life (2004), The Canary’s Songbook (2005), Slowly, As If (2012) and The Loving and Loveable City (May Not Yet Be Here): An Atlas of the Cape Peninsula (2023). In 1987 she co-founded the publishing collective Buchu Books. In 2015 she received the Literary Translators Award for the translation into English of Mede-wete and Synapse by Antjie Krog.