THE WAY I SEE IT – National Heroes Acre I
Bongani Kona Who or what haunts you? Do recurrences draw you back in time? Are you nostalgic for lost futures? Does the present seem ghostly? These questions appear in a recent issue of the PEN America journal on the subject of hauntings, a subject I’d like to turn to in this brief reflection, because, lately […]
Third Transition
[hr] Shoks Mzolo and Bongani Kona trace the path of South Africa’s transformation from a criminal apartheid state to a criminal neoliberal state, where a handful of old-monied white capitalists still turn the screws and call the shots, while a newly monied black bourgeoisie stands to attention. The authors examine the knowns and unknowns of […]
Politics of Betrayal
Using historian and author Jacob Dlamini’s latest work as a backdrop, Bongani Kona juxtaposes acts of defiance and acts of betrayal in the protracted struggle against apartheid in South Africa. He questions, as do Dlamini and many others, if the very act of betrayal – of collaboration with the enemy, of selling out and condemning […]
Boyhood and Transit
Reliving his personal journey to developing a passion for the game, Bongani Kona reflects on the rise and fall of three Zimbabweans in South African rugby. You ask me to tell you about rugby. These are the facts: the game is contested between two opposing teams, with fifteen players and seven substitutes in each team. […]
I Think I’ll Call it Morning
by Bongani Kona Penumbra Songeziwe Mahlangu Kwela Books, 2013 Sometime in the winter of 2010 when, like the protagonist of his breakout novel, Penumbra, he was in his mid-20s and unemployed, Songeziwe Mahlangu had a nervous breakdown. The episode, and everything which led to it, is revisited and placed at the epicentre of his […]