A Brief History of Monuments
By Stacy Hardy Abbasid Caliph Abu Ja’far al-Mansur, the founder of the ancient city of Baghdad, conceived of his new seat of government as a vast, walled, circular fortification. Before it was erected, Caliph ordered his army of labourers to dig a trench along the intended city’s circular foundations. Oil was poured into the trench and set alight. Caliph watched the […]
Reviews in Brief
by Stacy Hardy. Our Lady of the Nile Scholastique Mukasonga (transl. Melanie Mauthner) Archipelago Books, 2014 In Our Lady of the Nile, Scholastique Mukasonga plunges her reader into a looming dreamscape where an elite Catholic girls’ school has become a microcosm for a society on the brink of war. Here, the jagged terrain of […]
Which Africa Are We Talking About?
In the era of rapid globalisation the exemplary novelists seem to be those who successfully transcend their homelands and emerge in a place where their work can acquire a universal relevance. In many ways Jamal Mahjoub personifies this condition. He was born in England, raised in Sudan, and has lived in London, Liverpool, Khartoum, South Wales, […]
A Brief History of Mapping
by Stacy Hardy. In 1921, the independent Polish scholar Alfred Habdank Skarbek Korzybski appropriated mathematician Eric Temple Bell’s epigram, “the map is not the thing mapped” to coin the phrase, “the map is not the territory”. In The Medium is the Message, Marshall McLuhan rehashed the argument – that all media are “extensions” of our human […]
In the Listening Room with Neo Muyanga
This Thursday (January 15), Pan African Space Station present “Revolting Songs”, a concert-lecture from Neo Muyanga which forms part of the Stories about Music in Africa series. Keeping time, we return to Neo’s listening room. Intro by Stacy Hardy. Neo Muyanga is always counting. Even when he walks. He counts his paces. He counts the steps. He keeps time. He listens to the beat of […]