This past summer on a rainy June afternoon, I spent a few hours interviewing Nigerian poet and critic, Odia Ofeimun. I met him while co-producing a radio documentary about Nollywood (streaming in full here). Odia has been writing about life in Lagos for the last forty years. His observations reflect many of the key tensions […]
South African poet and writer Antjie Krog recently gave a talk at the Open Book Festival in Cape Town, republished in The (UK) Guardian this week. Krog spoke alongside Njabulo Ndebele, who is seminal to discussions on South African literature not only because of his call to include, in new South African narratives, the lives […]
On Thursday, July 26, the Michael Stevenson Gallery in Cape Town had an opening: Mo(u)rning. Photographic and other works by Zanele Muholi. Muholi had lost much of her work a couple months earlier in a more than suspicious burglary, and so the exhibition was a meditation on mourning, the processes of receiving and releasing the […]
(Images by Adolphus Opara) I Dreams brought us here and we arrived With no enthusiasm for things stirring – Currents, currencies – concurrently drift us Into adamance, but we learnt before to be. Lagos: the Nigerian coastal city is shriveled up by growing population; each new government seeks newer ways to expand the territory. The […]
‘I am Malawi’ is a short documentary by Geert Veuskens and Pieter de Vos. (Part 1 above, part 2 below.) Veuskens gave us some more details about their project:
Guest Post by Lara N. Dotson-Renta Paris has always been renowned for its culture and support of the arts. Yet, as France has grown into an ever more pluralistic society, the traditional image of what constitutes art in France must evolve as well. Younger generations of artists, many immigrants of African origin, are now reconfiguring […]
At the occasion of the recent publication of Senegalese philosopher Souleymane Bachir Diagne’s book ‘African Art as Philosophy: Senghor, Bergson and the Idea of Negritude’ (originally published in French in 2007) and listening to this interview where he speaks about his new book, ‘Bergson Postcolonial’, I intended to write a short post wondering why it […]
‘Cascadura’ is a beautiful and musical spoken word poem written and performed by the late Trinidadian musician, poet, and cultural anthropologist Roi Kwabena, “visually animated using mostly archival footage and personal footage” by Canadian anthropologist Maximilian Forte, who blogs over at Zero Anthropology.
Although it was only launched a year ago, Cape Town-based Badilisha Poetry Radio is rapidly building itself an impressive on-line database of weekly podcasts featuring new voices and poetic genres. “(Their) intention is to platform who and what Africa has to say to itself and the rest of the world.” Hosted by Malika Ndlovu (introducing […]
