Griots Lounge • 17th March 2022

NOMAD - Romeo Oriogun

The Lambda Award-shortlisted poet’s debut, Sacrament of Bodies, was an epochal moment in Nigerian poetry, exploring masculinity and queerness. His follow-up widens his range, taking in exile, history, slavery, colonialism and postcolonialism, and contemporary politics of identity. Its narrative of seeing and surviving the world takes us through the West African countries of Benin Republic, Togo, Burkina Faso, Mali, Ghana, Senegal, and Côte d’Ivoire.

Manyano Media • 11th March 2021

Hullo, Bu-Bye, Koko, Come In - Koleka Putuma

Manyano Media is proud to announce the release of Koleka Putuma’s second poetry collection: Hullo, Bu-Bye, Koko, Come In. The title of the book is inspired by a South African phrase made famous by the legendary musician Brenda Fassie in her 1992 song, Istraight lendaba.

NB Publishers • 1st February 2021

The Big South African Hair Book - Janine Jellars

The Big South African Hair Book is a celebration and must-read exploration of our #NaturalHair community. Hilarious and hair-volutionary, this book, a first of its kind on South African shelves, is filled with advice, tried and tested tricks and tips and haircare testimonials.

Blackbird Books • 1st September 2020

Exhale: Queer African Erotic Fiction - HOLA! Collective

Compiled by HOLAAfrica, Exhale is a queer anthology wrapped in the idea of a release, a letting go, breathing out. With sexual experiences from all over Africa, this anthology introduces some exciting new literary voices and brings you some of your established favourites.

NB Publishers • 1st March 2020

Living While Feminist - Jen Thorpe

Compiled by Jen Thorpe, this collection take us from an examination of skin and hair, to an exploration of pleasure, sex, and safety. They explore our bodies and health. They examine the way that institutions can trap us and how we can trap ourselves. It remind us that feminism is dynamic, open, and ever relevant.

The New York Times • 14th April 2018

Cape Town’s New Masculinity - Lelo Zane Meslani

To cut themselves free of the gender norms fed to them since birth, young South Africans aren’t using sharp edges but rather soft fabrics and turns of phrase. Their fashion and styling choices, as well as the words they use to describe their own bodies, challenge essentialism and the notion that any of our outward characteristics are fixed.

The Johannesburg Review of Books • 2nd July 2018

Emerging from Chinua Achebe's shadow: Nigeria's first generation of post-independence writers and the literary brotherhood of Umuahia - Lebohang Mojapelo

This July marks the sixtieth anniversary of the publication of Chinua Achebe’s seminal novel Things Fall Apart. Lebohang Mojapelo reviews a book that places its author among his contemporaries.

The Mail & Guardian • 24th August 2018

Safi Faye’s eye on the everyday - Nkhensani Manabe

Senegalese filmmaker and ethnographer Safi Faye is most noted for centering her work on the experiences of the everyday. Born of the Serer people, a farming community that lives largely apart from some of the country’s larger cultural groups, Faye has a vested interest in telling stories that detail the lives of people cameras often refuse to see.

The Mail & Guardian • 14th December 2018

Proclamation 73: Forgotten people returned to history - Mia Arderne

Imagine being in your local museum, but the people represented on the walls don’t look like you.
In South Africa, for many of us, we don’t have to imagine it and a new exhibition that opened this week at the Durban Art Gallery adds its voice to the growing chorus of work correcting the error of representation.Proclamation 73 explores memory, erasure and home by drawing on the family album as a source of history.

Medium • 15th November 2019

Staying sane in a trying industry - Tseliso Monaheng

Diliza Moabi makes his son wear his pants sagging. Young Kwame, with black hair thick as sheep’s wool, doesn’t like it. He opts, regularly, to readjust them to their 'rightful' place.

The Mail & Guardian • 10th November 2017

A family’s unspoken curse - Govan Whittles

Family reunions are as rare as chicken teeth, as my aunties would say. But every time we connect, I look at my cousins and wonder who among us will be next. They used to joke when we were younger that I look just like Uncle Paul, and walked like him too. I used to play along and retort with a joke that I would end up just as “crazy” as he was.

The Mail & Guardian • 10th November 2017

My mother raised a brick house - Zaza Hlalethwa

When my mother raised me, it was as if she was building a replica of her brick house. Those looking on saw a large, stable and firm structure, adorned with perhaps too many flowers and trees for shade. Inside was a warm space where everything was brown or gold, and smelled of rooibos and cinnamon. It was the perfect home for everyone — but me.

The Mail & Guardian • 24th August 2018

​Arundhati Roy: Brilliant, troubled and troubling - TO Molefe

In the 1780s, the Dutch East India Company moved the eastern border of the Cape to the Fish River. Under European law, this act tacitly affirmed the trekboers’ claim to the land, which would plunge them and successive colonial administrations into wars for 100 years against the rightful owners, the amaXhosa and Khoikhoi clans.

The Mail & Guardian • 14th September 2018

Nomasonto shows off her Sunday best - Tshegofatso Senne

Nomasonto is striking. A teen with stunning skin and an enviable demeanour. She is without boundaries. Every move she makes is with intention. She holds your gaze and calls you in.
Nomasonto: aNguni name meaning “daughter born on a Sunday”. We are told in the first moments of a short film that she grew up in the East Rand and loves the city of Johannesburg.

The Mail & Guardian • 7th September 2018

​Pulane Kingston, a patron of Africa’s art - Nkgopoleng Moloi

Despite its emphasis on progressiveness, the art world can be a closed bubble. It isn’t often that individuals come out of the art space fully empowered, and it’s rarer when they are embraced for their contributions. Pulane Kingston is one such person.

The Sunday Times • 3rd June 2018

Digital maskandi mania: meet the artists breaking musical boundaries - Rofhiwa Maneta

"Digital maskandi isn't about pushing boundaries, it's about doing away with them completely," says Mashayabhuqe KaMamba."Everything I've ever released is just me taking all my influences and the world as I see it and putting it in the music," he continues on the other end of the phone.

The Mail & Guardian • 31st August 2018

​Silences speak of bitter times - Faye Kabali-Kagwa

“Your daughter looks just like …” Jennifer Makumbi rattles off the name of one of my aunts whom I don’t see very often. “This one is a Barlow. You wouldn’t have to say anything. You can just see it,” she says to my mother.

The Mail & Guardian • 10th November 2017

Us in the house of mirrors - Julie Nxadi

We have suffered from different stages of the same illness, my aunt and I — something akin to fatigue. I was 15, she was 50. We lived and hid in a house so small that we had to choreograph a dance of avoidance, for fear that we might crash and collapse into each other if we spoke about anything.

The Mail & Guardian • 29th November 2018

Storyteller began his journey on a ‘dark, dark night’ - Dinika Govender

Botswana storyteller Tanlume Enyatseng is becoming himself, and he will not have it any other way. This sentence won Enyatseng a spot in his school’s newsletter, its public ­noticeboard and his English teacher’s heart. He was five or six years old, too young to comprehend the beginnings of an obsession with storytelling and too perplexed by the attention he received for ­completing what was, to him, a “very simple classroom exercise”.

The Mail & Guardian • 10th November 2017

Self-care through the art of drag - Nigel Patel

“Drag is a statement of my queer imagination. It allows me to express myself in such a fearless and fierce way,” says Belinda Qaqamba Fassie, 2016 winner of the Miss Gay Western Cape drag queen pageant. An art form that is renowned for being subversive, drag’s therapeutic and healing aspects are relatively less well-known.

The Mail & Guardian • 3rd August 2018

Connecting through silence with Zoë Modiga - Sabelo Mkhabela

Silent concerts enforce a special kind of intimacy. The fact that you can only hear the music being performed live through headphones eliminates other sounds. The clinking of glasses, the buzz of the world outside and the chattering of the patrons fall away.

The Mail & Guardian • 10th November 2017

A mind map of the soul - Kwanele Sosibo

In his biography People Funny Boy, reggae producer and artist Lee Perry responds to questions about the origin of the song I Am a Madman by saying: “When I tell people to repent in Jamaica then them say me mad, so me just compete with what they say. I didn’t say I am mad, they say I am mad. So if they say I am mad, then I say yes, I am a mad man."

The Mail & Guardian • 8th June 2018

Art ‘doesn’t give a shit’ about price - Nkhensani Manabe

The Price of Everything is an engaging behind-the-scenes look at the contemporary art world that features the artists, buyers, auctioneers, dealers and curators. But be careful not to let the title of Academy award nominee Nathaniel Kahn’s documentary mislead you.

The Mail & Guardian • 10th November 2017

We cannot continue to suffer in silence - Fela Gucci

My therapist tells me that some of the good moments I experience are symptoms of being bipolar, all part of the ups and downs of my condition. Do happiness and functionality even belong to me?

The Mail & Guardian • 21st September 2018

Coolie Woman and me - Dinika Govender

Sugarcane has always been a part of my story. Fruit, vegetables and a few hundred gods, too. As the daughter of indentured sugarcane labourers on my father’s side and a farming family on my mother’s side, my very existence is a product of at least five generations of ownership and indenture, of farmhouses and barracks, of Indian blood and English morals, of Coolie-tude and Gandhi-tude, from India to South Africa.

The Mail & Guardian • 27th July 2018

Nonku Phiri reloaded - Tshegofatso Senne

The first time I heard composer and singer-songwriter Nonku Phiri was by complete accident. After some coaxing from a friend, I found myself at the relaunch of The Good Luck Bar in 2015. I’d be lying if I said I remembered much of the night but I know for a fact that it was instrumental in hooking me on to Phiri’s distinctive sound. One night was all it took for me to want to hear more from the vocalist.

The Mail & Guardian • 5th October 2018

The art and struggles of drag - Lelo Zane Meslani

Looking through the archives of South Africa’s queer history in the library at Gay and Lesbian Memory in Action (Gala) in Braamfontein, Johannesburg, is like finding the mysterious wardrobe into Narnia. We never know how much knowledge and history lies beyond the surface of icons who have laid the groundwork in liberatory movements. Leaders such as Simon Nkoli, Michele Bruno, Beverley Palesa Ditsie and Phumi Mtetwa, to mention a few, are still barely known to many.

The Mail & Guardian • 3rd August 2018

Billie Zangewa's self in a patchwork of silk - Nkgopoleng Moloi

Using the traditional techniques of tapestry, Billie Zangewa meticulously weaves silk into collages.
Born in Malawi to a Malawian father and a South African mother, the visual artist works primarily with raw silk offcuts. Her tapestries, depicting carefully constructed everyday settings, allow us to think more deeply about identity, gender and the sociopolitical landscape.

The Mail & Guardian • 27th July 2018

Durban kwaito’s Sugarman - Rofhiwa Maneta

For better or worse, Sandy B has always been an artist ahead of his time. In 1994, the Durban-based artist released Amajovi Jovi — an infectious lo-fi kwaito number with the laconic flow and thumping basslines that would go on to typify kwaito. It was kwaito before the genre even existed.