AfricaIs aCountry

African poets for Africa

Africa Is a Country Podcast
African Five-a-Side Podcast

African poets for Africa

By
Liz Timbs

Badilisha is rare: an African project funded by a mix of government and private art donors, facilitating media access to African poets.

Badilisha Poetry X-Change (via Wiki Commons).

Back in 2011, Badilisha Poetry X-Change was previously featured on this platform with a spotlight on its podcast, Badilisha Poetry Radio. But, there is a lot more to Badilisha than just the podcast. This is a digital poetry archive, preserving African poetry in both its written and oral forms. This dynamic archive is managed by Linda Kaoma (a poet in her own right) and is a product of the Cape Town-based Africa Centre, a pan-Africanist collective that aims to use culture as a means for social change (some other projects from Africa Centre that you might have come across include the Infecting the City festival and WikiAfrica).

Badilisha is rare, in a sense, because it is completely funded by South African donors, including the National Lottery, the National Arts Council of South Africa, and Spier Wine Farm. If you look back through most of the Digital Archive posts, the majority of African digital projects are either based in the U.S/Europe or funded by backers from these regions. But, this is an African project, aiming to broaden the access to African poets for Africans in particular who, without a forum such as this, have limited ability to be “inspired and influenced by their own writers and poets – negatively impacting their personal growth, identity, development and sense of place.” The initiative is also intended to bring African authors’ work to a wider audience, which it most certainly does.

Though this is a South African-based project, it’s content certainly isn’t limited to South Africa.  Content comes from around the world, from the United Kingdom to Senegal to Sri Lanka to Zimbabwe. You can also search for poets by language, with poems in major European languages (like English, French, German, and Portuguese) as well as African languages (like Xhosa, Zulu, Pedi, Venda, and Swahili, to name a few). You can also navigate the nearly work of the over 350 poets by theme and emotion. I lost myself in the History-themed poems for quite a while, especially “Things Fall Apart” by Hector Kunene.

Follow Badilisha on Facebook and Twitter. Explore this awesome collection and let us know what you think in the comments below. As always, feel free to send me suggestions in the comments or via Twitter of sites you might like to see covered in future editions of the series.

Further Reading

The people want to breathe

In Tunisia’s coastal city of Gabès, residents live in the shadow of the phosphate industry. As pollution deepens and repression returns, a new generation revives the struggle for life itself.

After Paul Biya

Cameroon’s president has ruled for over four decades by silence and survival. Now, with dynastic succession looming and no clear exit strategy, the country teeters between inertia and implosion.

Leapfrogging literacy?

In outsourcing the act of writing to machines trained on Western language and thought, we risk reinforcing the very hierarchies that decolonization sought to undo.

Repoliticizing a generation

Thirty-eight years after Thomas Sankara’s assassination, the struggle for justice and self-determination endures—from stalled archives and unfulfilled verdicts to new calls for pan-African renewal and a 21st-century anti-imperialist front.

The king of Kinshasa

Across five decades, Chéri Samba has chronicled the politics and poetry of everyday Congolese life, insisting that art belongs to the people who live it.

Drip is temporary

The apparel brand Drip was meant to prove that South Africa’s townships could inspire global style. Instead, it revealed how easily black success stories are consumed and undone by the contradictions of neoliberal aspiration.