Penpoints, Gunpoints, and Dreams: A history of creative writing instruction in East Africa[hr] From the earnest hustle of our elders in writing during the 1960s to the contemporary dreams of ubiquitous hustler writers, Billy Kahora* wonders about the place of creative writing programmes. [hr] Ngugi wa Thiong’o’s memoir, Birth of a Dream Weaver, describes a unique moment at the 1962 Makerere Conference for Literature that feels straight […]
The Agronomist
[hr] Stacy Hardy follows the path of JJ Machobane, the social visionary, writer and agronomist from Lesotho, who challenged orthodox colonial thinking about land and land use. [hr] “An employed man is like a well-fed and chained up dog.” This brief sentence, emblazoned on the back cover of Drive out Hunger, a slim monograph on […]
Survivor’s Guide to Smelling Naais
[hr] In the pre-Apocalypse, Zayaan Khan nurses the Apartheid hangover that carved up sensibilities, lives deep in the crevice of being and after more than 20 years still sticks to the roof of the mouth. To empty out the bitter taste, she sucks on fennel flowers and takes her sweetness where she can get it […]
A Brief History of Student Protests
[hr] By Stacy Hardy [hr] “Bile bums my inside!/ I feel like vomiting! For all our young men/ Were finished in the forest/Their manhood was finished/ In the classrooms/ Their testicles/ Were smashed/ With large books!” First published 50 years ago, these incendiary lines in Okot p’Bitek’s Song of Lawino capture the ongoing antagonism towards […]
Love and Learning Under the World Bank
Stacy Hardy recounts seventeen stories of the hierarchies, the anti-heroes, the hard knocks and the histrionics that have been visited upon universities as a result of decades of decidedly imperialist structural adjustment. Additional research by Oddveig Nicole Sarmiento. 1. At a meeting of African university vice chancellors held in Harare in 1986, a World Bank […]
[hr] From the earnest hustle of our elders in writing during the 1960s to the contemporary dreams of ubiquitous hustler writers, Billy Kahora* wonders about the place of creative writing programmes. [hr] Ngugi wa Thiong’o’s memoir, Birth of a Dream Weaver, describes a unique moment at the 1962 Makerere Conference for Literature that feels straight […]
The Agronomist
[hr] Stacy Hardy follows the path of JJ Machobane, the social visionary, writer and agronomist from Lesotho, who challenged orthodox colonial thinking about land and land use. [hr] “An employed man is like a well-fed and chained up dog.” This brief sentence, emblazoned on the back cover of Drive out Hunger, a slim monograph on […]
Survivor’s Guide to Smelling Naais
[hr] In the pre-Apocalypse, Zayaan Khan nurses the Apartheid hangover that carved up sensibilities, lives deep in the crevice of being and after more than 20 years still sticks to the roof of the mouth. To empty out the bitter taste, she sucks on fennel flowers and takes her sweetness where she can get it […]
A Brief History of Student Protests
[hr] By Stacy Hardy [hr] “Bile bums my inside!/ I feel like vomiting! For all our young men/ Were finished in the forest/Their manhood was finished/ In the classrooms/ Their testicles/ Were smashed/ With large books!” First published 50 years ago, these incendiary lines in Okot p’Bitek’s Song of Lawino capture the ongoing antagonism towards […]
Love and Learning Under the World Bank
Stacy Hardy recounts seventeen stories of the hierarchies, the anti-heroes, the hard knocks and the histrionics that have been visited upon universities as a result of decades of decidedly imperialist structural adjustment. Additional research by Oddveig Nicole Sarmiento. 1. At a meeting of African university vice chancellors held in Harare in 1986, a World Bank […]