CONTRIBUTORS

Abigail George

was educated in Port Elizabeth, and Swaziland. She is the Contributing Editor for African Writer Magazine based in New Jersey, and an editor at Mwanaka Media situated in Zimbabwe. Her poetry has been anthologised in Voices: A Poetry Collection about the ongoing genocide in Palestine. Her latest release is the poetry collection Songs For Palestine: Struggle Poems (Publisher: Tendai Rinos Mwanaka of Mwanaka Media and Publishing, Zimbabwe).In 2025, South African Abigail George was shortlisted for the Erbacce Prize. She won the 2023 Sol Plaatje European Union Poetry Prize. She is a Pushcart Prize-nominated short story writer who believes that writing is both therapeutic and healing. She writes about the feminine mystique, the spiritual and divine, mental health topics and the loneliness of the human condition. She also blogs at Mentally Sound.

Adam Broomberg

(b. 1970, Johannesburg) is an artist and educator. He currently lives and works in Berlin. Broomberg is professor of Photography at Istituto Superiore per le Industrie Artistiche (ISIA) di Urbino and Practice supervisor on the MA in Photography & Society at The Royal Academy of Art (KABK), The Hague. His most recent work “Anchor in the Landscape” a large-format photographic survey of olive trees in Occupied Palestine was published by MACK books and exhibited at the 60th edition of La Biennale di Venezia. His activist work includes having co-founded Artists + Allies x Hebron (AHH), an NGO whose recent project “Counter Surveillance” entailed installing surveillance cameras in olive groves in Hebron, Palestine and broadcasting the livestream to numerous international cultural institutions.

Adli Yacubi

is a Cape Town-born writer, designer, and activist working at the intersection of spiritual memory, social justice, and visual poetics. Shaped by South Africa’s resistance culture and the Cape Muslim tradition, his work weaves ancestral storytelling with present-day protest. His scrolls and writings speak to the wounded, the remembered, and the silenced – in Gaza, in the Cape, and beyond.

Aldano

is a collective of artists, making music, visual art and literary texts since 2005. The various members of the collective do different things in life but are bound by creativity. Representing the collective on ‘Withhold’ are Jammy-Lee and Riggs. Aldano’s music explores the nature of living in Cape Town, intones darkness and light, reflects on being Southern African, screams about violence, is hit by losing friends to emigration, hopes for belonging, reaches for well-being and sings Hope. The collective has finished work on its second studio album, ‘Home or Away’.

Allan Boesak

is an award-winning South African theologian and political activist known for his participation in the anti-apartheid movement alongside Desmond Tutu and Nelson Mandela. Boesak was born in Kakamas, Northern Cape province on the eastern border of South Africa on February 23, 1946. At the age of 17, he enrolled in the University of the Western Cape’s Dutch Reformed Mission Church Theological Seminary, and in 1968, became the youngest ordained minister in Paarl. In 1970, he left South Africa to study at the Protestant Theological University in Kampen, the Netherlands and in 1976 he received his Doctorate in Theology. Almost immediately after receiving his doctorate, Boesak returned to South Africa where he joined the African National Congress (ANC) and began his anti-apartheid activities. Boesak was the first African and youngest person ever elected as president of the World Alliance of Reformed Churches, serving from 1982 to 1991.

Allan Kolski Horwitz

was born in 1952 in Vryburg, South Africa but grew up in Cape Town. Between 1974 and 1985 he lived in the Middle East, Europe and North America, returning to live in Johannesburg in 1986. Since then he has worked as an organiser and educator in the trade union and social housing movements. He is a writer in various genres as well as being a songwriter and singer. Since leaving full-time employment in the trade unions in 2009, he continues on an ad hoc with his work as an educator and activist. He is a member of the Botsotso Jesters poetry performance group and of the Botsotso Publishing editorial board.

Amira Hass

is the Haaretz correspondent for the Occupied Territories. Born in Jerusalem in 1956, Hass joined Haaretz in 1989, and has been in her current position since 1993. As the correspondent for the territories, she spent three years living in Gaza, which served of the basis for her widely acclaimed book, Drinking the Sea at Gaza. She has lived in the West Bank city of Ramallah since 1997. Hass is also the author of two other books, both of which are compilations of her articles.

Andrea Rolfes

makes stuff, taps away at her computer keys, plays with paint and other things. Gazes out of the window and dreams and is part of the herri team.

Annemi Conradie-Chetty

is an artist, curator and lecturer in History of Art and director of the research niche, Visual Narratives and Creative Outputs (ViNCO) at the North-West University. Conradie-Chetty’s research focuses on (re-)appropriations of cultural heritage and archival material in contemporary South African art and design. Her artistic practice includes performance, installation, and mixed media works. The latter are made from discarded textiles, packaging and old prints that are cut, folded, sewn and embroidered. Through these works and practices of making, she investigates themes such as consumerism and environmental degradation, the afterlives of historical images and beliefs, and the memorialising of the everyday.

Anni Kanafani

is the widow of the Palestinian author Ghassan Kanafani. She says:
“Self-sacrifice, within the context of revolutionary action, is an expression of the very highest understanding of life, and of the struggle to make life worthy of a human being. The love of life for a person becomes a love for the life of his people’s masses, and his rejection that their life persists in being full of continuous misery, suffering, hardship. Hence, his understanding of life becomes a social virtue, capable of convincing the militant fighter that self-sacrifice is a redemption of his people’s life. This is a maximum expression of attachment to life.”

Aryan Kaganof

is publisher, editor and curator of herri.

Ashraf Hendricks

is a photojournalist, documentary photo and videographer based in Cape Town, South Africa. He contributes regularly to GroundUp News, a local non-profit with a focus on social justice and activism.

Ashraf Kagee

is Distinguished Professor of Psychology at Stellenbosch University, co-Director of the Alan Flisher Centre for Public Mental Health, and a member of the Academy of Science of South Africa. His research has focused on common mental disorders among persons living with HIV, psychological and structural factors influencing adherence to antiretroviral therapy, and public mental health. Ashraf teaches cognitive psychotherapy and research methods in the Department of Psychology. He serves on the Board of Trustees of the Trauma Centre for Survivors of Violence and Torture in Cape Town and does capacity building work at the Gaza Community Mental Health Centre in Gaza, Palestine.

Atiyyah Khan

is a journalist, cultural worker, DJ and sound archivist originally from Johannesburg but based in Cape Town. For the past 17 years, she has documented arts and culture in South Africa and her work has been published in several major publications. Common themes in her work are spatial injustice, untold stories of apartheid, jazz history and underground art movements. She co-founded the Future Nostalgia collective in 2013 with a few other music lovers as a way to come together and listen to records. Atiyyah has headed up several podcasts, radio shows, sonic lectures and other sound-related work on home soil and internationally. She has hosted a monthly radio show on UK-based Worldwide FM for two years and currently runs a short monthly show on J-Wave in Japan. She has also experimented with making zines; her latest one titled Bismillah, which references Islam and music in Africa. Atiyyah is a vibrant member of the Editorial Collective of this issue of herri.

Branko Marcetic

is a staff writer at Jacobin magazine and a 2019-2020 Leonard C. Goodman Institute for Investigative Reporting fellow. He is the author of Yesterday’s Man: The Case Against Joe Biden.

Candice Breitz

(born in Johannesburg, 1972) is a Berlin-based artist. Her moving image installations have been shown internationally. Throughout Breitz’s career, she has explored the dynamics by means of which an individual becomes him or herself in relation to a larger community, be that the immediate community that one encounters in family, or the real and imagined communities that are shaped not only by questions of national belonging, race, gender and religion, but also by the increasingly undeniable influence of mainstream media such as television, cinema and other popular culture. Most recently, Breitz’s work has focused on the conditions under which empathy is produced, reflecting on a media-saturated global culture in which strong identification with fictional characters and celebrity figures runs parallel to widespread indifference to the plight of those facing real world adversity. In 2022, she completed  The White Noise Trilogy , a trio of multichannel video installations that includes Love Story (2016), TLDR (2017) and Whiteface (2022).

Charles Leonard

is a journalist, editor, broadcaster, DJ and record collector. For more than 30 years, he has edited and written for a variety of South African publications and broadcasters, including the Mail & Guardian, Business Day, SABC, Vrye Weekblad and the Sunday Times, as well as Channel Four News in the UK. He coordinates the mid-year postgraduate honours radio journalism course at the Wits Centre for Journalism.

Cheryl Damon

is an autodidact, fascinated to learn about new industries, sports, business and universal access. Volunteering for Tape Aids for the Blind during my student days, made me aware of my privilege and the need to advocate for universal access and design. I write about my life experiences, indigenous knowledge systems, character sketches, opinion pieces about the links between poverty and gender-based violence, and blog posts about mental wellness and bodily autonomy. Storytelling is an integral part of passing down oral traditions, sharing experiences and living an authentic life.

Chris Hedges

graduated from seminary at Harvard Divinity School and worked for nearly two decades as a foreign correspondent for The New York Times, National Public Radio and other news organizations in Latin America, the Middle East and the Balkans. He was part of the team of reporters at The New York Times who won a Pulitzer Prize for their coverage of global terrorism. Hedges is a fellow at the Nation Institute and the author of numerous books, including War is a Force That Gives Us Meaning.

Chris Thurman

is a Professor in the English Department and Director of the Tsikinya-Chaka Centre (School of Literature, Language and Media) at Wits University in Johannesburg.  He researches, he writes, he teaches: mostly at the intersection of Shakespeare and South Africa. He is lucky enough to be a part-time arts critic and occasional current affairs commentator too.

Christina Hazboun

is a writer, artist-researcher and practitioner within the spheres of text, sound, radio and music morphing through sonic spaces, striving to increase the volume on the whispered, silenced and erased. Her chapter “Sonic Strategies in The Palestinian Struggle” appears in the Silver Press publication “BODIES OF SOUND: Becoming a Feminist Ear”. Her texts and audio/radio works endeavour to document Palestinian music and soundscapes, while also focusing on the global south. Her texts appear scattered in the digital universe including Stegi Radio, Radio Al-Hara, Culture Resource, Bandcamp, The Guardian, The Quietus, Bloomsbury Press and the upcoming Trigger issue. Her chapter “Sonic Strategies in The Palestinian Struggle” appears in the Silver Press “BODIES OF SOUND: Becoming a Feminist Ear” and Transcript Verlag’s “Beyond Molotovs”.

Cole Meintjies

is a PhD candidate at the University of the Witwatersrand, situated in the African Literature Department and the Wits Institute For Social and Economic Research (WiSER). Cole’s work is situated between philosophy, psychoanalysis and Black studies and considers questions of the ethico-political. Cole has been involved in political organising and has worked in the field of social research. Cole is also a member of the Editors Collective of this issue of herri.

Craig Mokhiber

is an international human rights lawyer and former senior United Nations Official. He left the UN in October of 2023, penning a widely read letter that warned of genocide in Gaza, criticized the international response and called for a new approach to Palestine and Israel based on equality, human rights and international law.

Dean Hutton

makes trouble. Working at the intersections of trans media visual culture, performance and community action, their practice bridges genres of documentary, fiction and fantasy to produce radical queer counter narratives, and experiences for repair and resistance. Their strategy of simple disruptive actions share moments of soft courage, affirming the rights of all bodies to exist, be celebrated, and protected. An artist-in-residence at the University of Johannesburg, their research embraces collaborative praxis and embodied play to produce new forms of artWork – sculptural objects made from sustainable materials and living biomatter that works to support ecosystem health, and build cultural and ecological value for local communities. *Genderqueer is a non-binary transgender identity. Please use They/Them gender-neutral pronouns.

Deon Maas

is a South African filmmaker, writer and journalist. He is best known for directing the critically acclaimed documentaries such as Punk in Africa, Jam Sandwich and Dis Rugby!.

Deon-Simphiwe Skade

is the recipient of the 2010 CPG award for his debut book,  A Series of Undesirable Events. The award is presented by the Centre for the Book (part of the National Library of South Africa) for outstanding manuscripts. His work has appeared in several journals, including Botsotso, New Coin and Pomp 09. He is currently writing a full-length novel.

Diana Ferrus

Internationally renowned South African poet, writer, and activist for marginalised groups, Diana Ferrus, was born on 29 August 1953 in Worcester. Ferrus attended the Dutch Reformed Mission School before going to Esselen Park High School, where she matriculated in 1972. Ferrus began writing poetry at the age of fourteen. Her poems focus on personal, political, social, and historical themes. Her poem, I’ve come to take you home, is a tribute to Sarah Baartman, the Khoi woman who was taken from her country of birth (South Africa) under false pretences to be displayed as a freak show attraction in 19th century Europe. Ferrus wrote the poem while studying at Utrecht University in Holland in 1998. Feeling incredibly homesick, she started thinking about how Baartman must have felt being in a foreign land far away from her home and this prompted her to start writing. The poem became a catalyst for the return of Baartman’s remains to South Africa, persuading the French government to finally transport her remains back to her home country after 192 years. It was so impactful that it was included in the bill that allowed for Baartman’s remains to be repatriated, and was thus published in the French law (a first in French history) that made it possible for her remains to be returned. Ferrus, along with a delegation from South Africa, left to collect Baartman’s remains and in early 2002, Baartman arrived in Johannesburg, Gauteng, and was at last laid to rest on 9 August 2002.Ferrus has read at various public occasions, rallies, and community celebrations all over the world.

Dima Orsho

(b.1975) is an established and seasoned performer, recorded artist, and collaborator with renowned international musicians. Dima holds an M.M. in opera performance from The Boston Conservatory, and B.M. in Voice & Clarinet from the Damascus High Institute of Music. Having learned clarinet as a second instrument; she brings an instrument player’s sensibility to her vocalizations, adding to the magic of her performances. Her approach to music is culturally nuanced, forging together diverse influences—from classical, to jazz, to Middle Eastern music. Dima’s musical interests and explorations are not limited to performing alone; she has also composed for TV, Radio, Theater and Cinema since 1993.

Donato Francesco Mattera (Muhammad Omaruddin)

(29 December 1935 – 18 July 2022) has been celebrated as a journalist, editor, writer and poet. He is also acknowledged as one of the foremost activists in the struggle for a democratic South Africa, and helped to found both the Union of Black Journalists, the African Writer’s Association and the Congress of South African Writers. Born in 1935 in Western Native Township (now Westbury) across the road from Sophiatown, Mattera can lay claim to an intriguingly diverse lineage: his paternal grandfather was Italian, and he has Tswana, Khoi-Khoi and Xhosa blood in his veins. Yet diversity was hardly being celebrated at that time. In one of apartheid’s most infamous actions, the vibrant multicultural Sophiatown was destroyed in 1955 and replaced with the white suburb of Triomf, and the wrenching displacement, can be felt in Mattera’s writing. Writing was certainly not an obvious conclusion to his youth, which had been characterised by gangs, violence and jail. Partly under the influence of Father Trevor Huddleston, Mattera began wielding a pen rather than a knife, yet with equal facility; using the struggle as his subject, he went on to produce a series of poems, stories and plays of force and originality. The authorities responded by raiding his house, imprisoning, torturing, and banning him for ten years. Mattera is the holder of several prestigious literary awards as well as numerous humanitarian citations, including the South African Presidential Order of Ikhamanga – Silver (2007), the South African Department of Arts & Culture Literary Lifetime Achievement Award (2007), the Crown of Peace Award (Korea and Washington – 2004), the Ambassador of Peace Award (Kenya – 2001), the World Health Organisation’s Peace Award from the Centre of Violence and Injury Prevention (1997), and the French Human Rights Award for the We Care Trust. He has also been awarded an honorary PhD Literature, from the University of Natal.

Eugene Skeef

(FRSA) is a South African-born percussionist, poet, composer, and educator. He has lived in London since 1980. Skeef is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts.

Fatima Hendricks

lives in Cape Town and is an Occupational Therapist, Author & Educator. A mother of two and cancer survivor, Dr Hendricks advocates for justice through non-violent action and global solidarity. Her work highlights the devastating impact of oppression on health, education, and family life, while inspiring awareness of the Palestinian right to live freely and peacefully.

Finn Daniels-Yeomans

is an Associate Lecturer in Film Studies at Birkbeck University of London and an Honorary Research Fellow at the University of St Andrews’ Centre for Screen Cultures. He is on the editorial board of Open Screens, as Book Reviews editor, and manages the Playlist Initiative. Published in various forums, his research is primarily focussed on the (de)colonial politics of documentary on continental Africa, and is broadly concerned with rethinking documentary from within a decolonial framework.

Frank Armstrong

is the author of ‘Beef with Potatoes: food, agriculture, and sustainability in modern Ireland’ for The Proceedings of the Royal Irish Academy Vol. 115C, Food and Drink in Ireland (2015). Prior to setting up Cassandra Voices his writing was published in the Irish Times, the London Magazine, the Dublin Review of Books, Village Magazine, and the Law Society Gazette, among others. He previously taught a course on the History and Politics of Food in University College Dublin, and tutored at a number of Oxford colleges and in Anglo-American University in Prague, as well as delivering papers at academic conferences in Dublin and Berlin.

Frank Meintjies

has several decades’ experience in development work and has worked in government, civil society and corporate change management. He’s been employed as a journalist in the mainstream press as well as for struggle-era community newspapers. In the field of arts for soclal change, Frank has made extensive contributions via writers’ organisations and the worker culture movement as well as through his creative and analytic writing.

Frank Scheffer

(1956, The Netherlands) graduated in 1982 from the Dutch Film and Television Academy. Before that, he studied at the Academy for Industrial Design in Eindhoven and followed courses in Experimental Film by Frans Zwartjes. Scheffer has a long-standing reputation as a maker of over 40 experimental documentaries about musical masters of the 20th century. He has received many awards and was honoured with a retrospective at the MoMA New York. He works with prominent post-war composers like Luciano Berio, Pierre Boulez, John Cage, Elliott Carter, Karlheinz Stockhausen and Frank Zappa. In his films, image and sound are orchestrated to offer the audience a unique sensory experience.

Garth Erasmus

is a visual artist and an activist-musician for South African First Nation Rights. He constructs and plays instruments based on Khoisan indigenous knowledge systems and is a founder member of the Khoi Khonnexion. Garth is an important artist in the free jazz and free improv scene in Cape Town, playing his self-made instrumenbts but also saxophone and electronics.

George King

spent 43 years at Unisa teaching musicology, several of them as Chair of Art History, Visual Arts and Musicology. During his last decade at Unisa he helped restructure a BMus curriculum that included innovative compulsory modules introducing students to a variety of musics, such as African compositional resources, jazz, music and gender, and music in religion. Until his retirement from his post as music director at Christ Church Arcadia in 2019 George had been actively involved in choral singing for almost half a century. He established solo vocal ensembles with repertoire stretching over nine centuries, and for several years coached choirs in South Africa and eSwatini in preparation for regional and national choral competitions.

George Steiner

who died in 2020 was a polymath devoted to an ideal of literacy as private reading and to exploring the relationship between the Holocaust and civilisation. Read his obituary here.

Goodenough Mashego

is a widely published poet, independent political analyst, cultural activist, and all-round artist who has produced three volumes of poetry: Journey With Me, Taste of My Vomit and Just Like Space Cookies. He is a literary adjudicator for the Sol Plaatje EU Poetry Award and the South African Literary Awards (SALAs). His poetry has appeared in New Coin, Timbila, Botsotso, Afropoetry, Green Dragon, Baobab, and many other anthologies worldwide as well as on online platforms LitNet and Badalisha Poetry Exchange. He has authored a collection of essays, How To Sink The Black Ball, and a highly experimental satire, Diary of St. Peter. He was the 2016 winner of the National Heritage Council Voice of Heritage Award.

Gwen Ansell

is a freelance writer, researcher and trainer. She writes about jazz for The Conversation, the Financial Mail, M&G Friday, and reviews books – mainly science fiction & fantasy. As a Research Associate of the Gordon Institute of Business Science, she has researched and published on jazz and music policy in the creative and cultural industries sector. She trains journalists and  academic and organisational writers, and consults on music industry policy, organisational communication and training policies as well as curriculum design. A former Louis Armstrong Visiting Professor at the Center for Jazz Studies, Columbia University, she is the author of Soweto Blues: Jazz, Politics and Popular Music in South Africa.

Dr. Haidar Eid

is Associate Professor of Postcolonial and Postmodern Literature at Gaza’s al-Aqsa University. He has written widely on the Arab-Israeli conflict, including articles published at Znet, Electronic Intifada, Palestine Chronicle, and Open Democracy.

Heidi Grunebaum

is a writer and scholar at the Centre for Humanities Research, UWC where she is acting director. Grunebaum’s work examines aesthetic and social responses to war and mass violence, and the politics of memory in South Africa, Palestine/Israel and Germany. She is author of Memorializing the Past: Everyday Life in South Africa after the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (2011), co-editor of Uncontained: Opening the Community Arts Project Archive (2012), Athlone in Mind (2017), and the poetry chapbook Book of the Missing (2019). With Mark J. Kaplan, she made the documentary film, The Village Under the Forest (2013). She is currently working on a collection of essays on nonpartitioned aesthetics and a documentary film on the politics of race, racism and Jewish memory in contemporary Germany.

Hein Willemse

studied Law and Afrikaans literature at the University of the Western Cape. He has earned the following qualifications: BA (Hons) (Cum Laude), MA (Cum Laude), MBL and D.Litt. He has published widely on Afrikaans language, literature and orature studies. Willemse is a Professor of Literature in the Department of Afrikaans, University of Pretoria and the current editor-in-chief of the multilingual African literary journal Tydskrif vir Letterkunde. His books include the award-winning More Than Brothers — Peter Clarke and James Matthews at 70 (Kwela, 2000) and Aan Die Ander Kant — Swart skrywers in die Afrikaanse letterkunde (Protea, 2007).

Hiba Kamal Abu Nada

(Arabic: هبة كمال أبو ندى, listen 1; 24 June 1991 – 20 October 2023) was a Palestinian poet, novelist, nutritionist, women’s rights activist and Wikimedian. Her novel Oxygen is not for the dead won second place in the Sharjah Award for Arab Creativity in 2017. She was killed in her home in the Gaza Strip by an Israeli airstrike in the Gaza genocide.

Huda Fakhreddine 

is a Lebanese-American literary scholar, translator, writer and political activist, known for her work on modern Arabic literature, particularly Arabic poetry. She is currently an Associate Professor of Arabic Literature at the University of Pennsylvania.

Imraan Coovadia

is a writer and scholar who has been director of the University of Cape Town’s Centre for Creative Writing since 2011. His writing include a history of political poisoning in southern Africa, The Poisoners: on South Africa’s Toxic Past (Umuzi, Random House, 2021), a study of non-violent thought, Revolution and Non-Violence in Tolstoy, Gandhi, and Mandela (Oxford, 2020), a collection of essays, Transformations (2021), which won a South African Literary Award for Creative Non-Fiction, and a number of novels, including A Spy in Time (2018), shortlisted for the Nommo and John W. Campbell Award, Tales of the Metric System (2014), winner of the prize of the National Institute for the Humanities and Social Sciences, The Institute for Taxi Poetry (2012), which won the M-Net Prize, and High Low In-between (2009), winner of the Sunday Times Fiction Prize and University of Johannesburg English Literary Award. He has also published a scholarly monograph, Authority and Authorship in V.S. Naipaul (Palgrave, 2009). Coovadia, who holds a bachelor’s degree from Harvard and a doctorate from Yale, has written for leading publications including The New York Times, The Boston Globe, The Los Angeles Review of Books, The Independent, The Mail and Guardian, Times of India and Sunday Independent.

Ingrid Orit Hurwitz

the founder of Takdīr, is a frequent international conference speaker and has just submitted a transdisciplinary Ph.D. that bridges  Cognitive Science, Psychology and Wisdom Studies. Her core expertise is in executive coaching and programme design and delivery. She does this as the director of an International Coach Training School, one of three International Enneagram Association Schools in Africa.

Insurrections Ensemble

started from a series of questions: Can you create music that finds a home on both sides of the Indian Ocean, beyond the cliché of ‘fusion’? Are Indian forms compatible with their African Counterparts? Can song and the spoken word in a variety of languages make sense? Is there a soundscape lodged in the tonalities of string instruments that can find a new resonance? In particular, what excited the artists was the relationship between word, voice, expression and sound around shared social and political concerns in India and
South Africa.

Jackson Mac Lowe

Poet, performance artist, and composer was born in Chicago and began studying music as a child. After completing coursework at the University of Chicago, he moved to New York City, where he earned a BA in Greek at Brooklyn College. His early work as an etymologist and reference book contributor laid the foundation for his fascination with the possibilities found in units of sound and sense. Influenced by his studies in Buddhism and philosophy, Mac Low frequently composed poems as scripts for performance that rely on the mechanisms of chance rather than the conventions of syntax or intention. His work explores the intersections of language, structure, and music by systematically shuffling and silencing found and fragmented text. A founding member of the avant-garde group Fluxus, whose work he and coeditor La Monte Young presented in An Anthology of Chance Operations (1963), Mac Low served as an influential figure in the Language poetry movement.

Jannike Bergh

holds a master’s degree in Languages and Cultural Studies from the Université de Franche-Comté (France). Her research interests include postcolonial cultural analysis, art history and sociolinguistics. She has worked in cultural diplomacy, translation and music promotion. In her free time, she enjoys writing about South African music.

Jennifer Kestis Ferguson

is a South African singer-songwriter and political activist, and former member of Parliament for the African National Congress. She recorded her first two albums of music through Shifty Records and was part of a burgeoning political music, theatre and cabaret scene in Johannesburg during the late 1980s. Under Apartheid, Ferguson was known for her blatant support for the then-banned ANC from the stage, which saw her targeted by security police. In 1997 Ferguson resigned from Parliament and started to split her time between South Africa and Sweden.

Jesús Sepúlveda

is a Chilean poet who teaches Spanish composition, creative writing and poetry at the University of Oregon.  He is the author of eight collections of poetry and three books of essays, including his green-anarchist manifesto The Garden of Peculiarities (2002) and his book on Latin American poetry Poets on the Edge (2016). His collection Hotel Marconi (1998) was made into a film in Chile in 2009. Sepúlveda’s work has been published in more than twenty countries and partially translated into ten languages, leading him to participate in many poetry festivals and poetry readings throughout the world. Dr. Sepúlveda holds a PhD in Romance Languages.

Jurgen Meekel

is a multi media artist who studied audio-visual art and sculpture at the Rietveld Academy of Fine-Arts in Amsterdam where he graduated cum laude in 1989. In 2018 he recieved an MAFA with distinction from Wits University. He works and collaborates on contemporary art installation pieces, sculptures, animation, motion graphics, film and video work that he exhibits/broadcasts nationally and internationally. He currently teaches Post Production at the Wits School of the Arts in Film & TV in Johannesburg. He is also part of the design team of herri.

Keenan Ahrends

is a jazz guitarist and composer based in Johannesburg, South Africa. Ahrends started playing the guitar at the age of fifteen and completed his undergraduate degree in jazz performance at the University of Cape Town and the Norwegian Academy of Music in 2009. He received his Honours degree in performance at the University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, in 2019, and in 2024, he completed his Master’s degree through the University of Stellenbosch. This recent research detailed the compositional processes of five contemporary South African jazz musicians and presented an auto-ethnographic reflection on Ahrends’ own compositional process, fused with the interlocutors’ approaches. In 2017 Ahrends released his debut album ‘Narrative’ (featuring Romy Brauteseth, Claude Cozens, Sisonke Xonti, Nicholas Williams) to critical acclaim.

Liesl Jobson

writes from Zeekoevlei, a freshwater lake on the Cape Flats where hippopotamus once roamed freely. Her work appears in The Southern Review, New World Writing, Slush Pile Magazine, The Common, Lichen, Adanna, Quick Fiction, Schuylkill Valley Journal, Cutthroat and 13 Tracks. Her collection of prose poems and flash fiction, 100 Papers, won the 2006 Ernst van Heerden Award and was translated into Italian as Cento strappi. She is the author of a poetry collection (View from an Escalator, 2008), a short story collection (Ride the Tortoise, 2012), and three children’s books published and translated into many languages under the Book Dash banner. Liesl is a freelance bassoon and contrabassoon player who enjoys making music with various southern African orchestras.

Liz Savage

Liz Savage BA from Oxford, also has a Masters in Linguistics from University of Amsterdam. And PGCE from Leeds. She worked for 40 years as a teacher of English and Teacher Educator in The Netherlands. Jan – August 2016 worked as Teacher Educator on the EfECT project at Mandalay Education College. She is now retired and spends her time exploring local history in London.

Lowkey (Kareem Dennis)

is a British rapper and activist from London.

Mahmoud Al Shabrawi

his wife, and their daughter — are currently displaced in Gaza City, after fleeing Jabalia Camp due to evacuation orders and bombardments. Mahmoud is a student and freelance journalist, and his situation is particularly vulnerable.

Mai Khalil

is a Syrian born singer-songwriter. She was born in Syria and came to London when she was ten where she began to write. She is best known for her collaborations with rapper Lowkey on songs that have gathered millions of views on YouTube and elsewhere.

Makhosini Mgitywa

was Head of Communication and Spokesperson at the Ministry of Human Settlements, Water & Sanitation, RSA from 2019-2020. He was Manager, Corporate Affairs at the National Federated Chamber of Commerce & Industry (NAFCOC) from 2014-2016. He was Communication & Public Relations Head at the Department of Public Enterprises from 2011-2012. He is currently an independent Political Commentator and Media Consultant.

Malaika Mahlatsi

is a researcher with the Institute for Pan African Thought and Conversation at the University of Johannesburg, South Africa. She is a PhD in Geography candidate at the University of Bayreuth, Germany. Her best-selling books include Memoirs of a Born Free and Corridors of Death.

Malika Lueen Ndlovu

is an internationally published South African poet, playwright, performer and arts project manager. For several years, she was the live festival and online curator / presenter for the Africa Centre’s Badilisha Poetry X-Change which pioneered an exclusively African poetry podcasting platform. As a founder-member of Cape Town-based women writers’ collective WEAVE (1998–2004), she co-edited WEAVE’s Ink @ Boiling Point: A selection of 21st Century Black Women’s writing from the Southern Tip of Africa. Her poetry collections include Born in Africa but (1999), Womb to World: A Labour of Love (2001), Truth is Both Spirit and Flesh (2008), Invisible Earthquake: A woman’s journal through stillbirth (2009), and CLOSE (2017). Her published plays are A Coloured Place (1998) and Sister Breyani (2010). She features prominently in Our Words, Our Worlds: Writing on Black South African Women Poets, 2000–2018 (UKZN Press, 2019), edited by Makhosazana Xaba. Via her poetic memoir, Invisible Earthquake: A woman’s journal through stillbirth (Modjaji Books, 2009) Malika has also become a passionately vocal advocate around pregnancy-related loss, bereavement support and maternal health.

Mariam Jooma Çarikci

is a South African-Turkish independent researcher, writer, and geopolitical analyst focused on Africa–Middle East relations, Muslim communities, and decolonial narratives. She is the author of Kurdistan: Achievable Reality or Political Mirage.

Maryam Abbasi

is a Post-doctorate candidate of Anthropology, Institute of Cultural and Social Anthropology, Faculty of Humanities, Social Sciences, and Theology, Friedrich-Alexander-Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg. Maryam completed her master’s and bachelor’s degrees in social anthropology from Tehran University. In 2010, she started doing fieldwork with a private anthropology institute in Tehran, focusing on traditional medicine in south Iran which later became the subject of her Ph.D. thesis. The focus of her doctoral thesis was on the Zar ritual as an expression of gender identity in the Hormozgan province of Iran. Zar is a community-based activity that is used to treat people who are considered to be possessed.

Matiyin

is a full stack web developer specialized in making custom web experiences. He has more than 30 years of IT experience, working in the fields of 3D animation, art direction and executive management of video games before switching to web development more than 15 years ago. With roots in Amsterdam, Matiyin is a free roaming world citizen and based everywhere the web goes.

Michael Sfard

is Israel’s premier human-rights lawyer, tireless in his support of those challenging the Israeli government’s oppressive regime or falling foul of its arbitrary, oppressive and often illegal interventions. He set up the Michael Sfard Law Office in 2004 and the author of the Hebrew-language book “Occupation from Within: A Journey to the Roots of the Constitutional Coup.”

Michael Taussig

recently retired from his position as Class of 1933 professor of anthropology at Columbia University, represents a unique figure in his field in part due to his experience in the late 1960s as a physician in Colombia. There, he encountered conflicting cultural narratives in the struggle between guerrillas and paramilitaries that triggered his early writings. A prolific writer, his books and essays have become widely reading by anthropologists, but reach beyond to a wider public, in part due to their literary and political scope.

Mike Van Graan

is an award-winning playwright with 40 plays under his belt. His current works are TO LIFE, WITH LOVE (premiered at Artscape on 4 February 2025), I CAN BUY MYSELF FLOWERS (premiered at the Drama Factory on 6 February 2025), SO OVER THE RAINBOW and THE GOOD WHITE. Mike also has a scripted dialogue – ABRAHAM’s PROMISES – that takes the form of a panel discussion sparked by the question ‘Are Jews safer today than they were on 6 October 2023?’. In addition to writing plays, Mike has extensive experience in cultural policy, building artists’ networks both locally and across the African continent, and in advocacy. He has served as the Secretary General of Arterial Network, as the Director of the African Arts Institute and the Coordinator of the Sustaining Theatre and Dance (STAND) Foundation. Mike is currently concentrating on building a sustainable theatre practice as a writer/producer while also engaged in activities related to the Palestinian Arts and Culture Solidarity Collective (PACSOC), an informal network that seeks to support the Palestinian creative sector at this time when Palestinians as a whole are facing the most brutal existential assault by Israel and its liberal democracy enablers.

https://mikevangraan.co.za/

Mphutlane wa Bofelo

is a poet, essayist, playwright, and political scientist whose work bridges personal, political, and spiritual themes. His academic research focuses on governance and political transformation, sociopolitical mobilisation, worker education, and political communication.

Mussolini Soga Mlandu

oversees municipal administration by day but by night he writes short stories. Now, the King Sabata Dalindyebo (KSD) councillor has been invited by Rhodes University’s Institute for the Study of English in Africa (ISEA) to be Mellon Writer-in-residence for three months. Mlandu, who is a member of the mayoral committee and chairs the public safety portfolio committee, last year published his eighth book titled Tell Me Again Stories. His four manuscripts include a collection of English essays titled A Brave Woman and other Essays and a collection of poems called The Loud Whispers . The Xhosa manuscripts feature a collection of short stories like Ezingekabaliswa (Stories that have not been told) and an anthology Izwi Leembongi (the voice of poets), which he coauthored and edited. Mlandu said he was passionate about African literature, but: “My problem is that Africans do not want to read their own languages.” His books are mainly used in schools.

Nathan Trantraal

was born in Cape Town in 1983. Stormkaap: Drome kom altyd andersom uit, a graphic novel, was published by Tafelberg in 2008. His debut collection, Chokers en survivors, was awarded the Ingrid Jonker Prize for Poetry (2015) and an ATKV Woordveertjie for poetry (2014). He is married to Ronelda S. Kamfer. Alles het niet kom wôd is his second poetry collection. He is currently a lecturer in the MA in Creative Writing programme at Rhodes University.

Nathi Ngubane

is a South African-based writer and illustrator. He grew up in Chesterville, a small township in Durban, KZN. After graduating with a diploma in Graphic Design from The Durban University of Technology, he landed his first freelance gig as a political cartoonist for The Daily Vox. In 2015, he was approached by The Citizen News with a position in political cartooning. In 2018, he resigned to focus on his brand, Think Ahead Comix. His work has been featured in Al Jazeera, BBC, Daily Maverick, New Frame & others. He is the illustrator behind From the River to the Sea, and Malcolm X in Gaza, both of which are educational colouring books.

Ngoma Hill

also known as Baba Ngoma Osayemi, is a spoken word artist, performance poet, and multi-instrumentalist. He is also recognized as a paradigm shifter, using culture to raise socio-political and spiritual consciousness. Ngoma Hill is known for weaving poetry and song that explores social issues and seeks solutions for a just and peaceful world. He was the Beat Poet Laureate of New York for 2017 and at 80 is this issue of herri’s most seasoned contributor.

Nicholas Mirzoeff

is Professor and chair of the Department of Media, Culture and Communication at NYU. Among the founders of the interdisciplinary practice of visual culture, he has published a dozen books and many articles. His book How To See The World was published by Pelican in the UK (2015) and by Basic Books in the US (2016). His book The Right to Look: A Counterhistory of Visuality  (2011) won the Anne Friedberg Award for Innovative Scholarship from the Society of Cinema and Media Studies in 2013. In 2023, he published White Sight: Visual Politics and Practices of Whiteness. A frequent blogger and writer, his work has appeared in The Nation, Hyperallergic, Frieze, the New York Times, the Guardian, Time and The New Republic.

Nikhil Singh

is a key figure in the Witch House scene, reported in Rolling Stone. His novel Taty Went West is an African novel, but not what you might expect. It’s not clear that it’s set in Africa. It’s not clear that there is a single black character in it—except a panther who is also a healer. What is clear that the author morphs between Lewis Carroll and William S. Burroughs, with a heavy undertow of sex, drugs, and rock and roll.

Niklas Zimmer

completed his Honours degree in Fine Art (sculpture) at the University of Cape Town in 1996, and his research MA(FA) on jazz photography (which interconnected reflections on Fine Arts, Social History and Music) in 2012. He also has a BA in Education from University of Cologne. He worked for three years as an art teacher, heading the Visual Arts Department at the German International School in Cape Town. After being employed by the Centre for Popular Memory (UCT) as an audio specialist and digitisation manager, he was Head of Digital Library Services at UCT Libraries. Zimmer has performed, exhibited and published in the fields of visual art studies, theory of photography and sound studies, most notably as drummer of the DAD sound improvising outfit As Is.

Olu Oguibe

who was born in 1964 in the southern Igbo city of Aba, received his first artistic experience from his father, a preacher, a former school teacher, a wood sculptor, and a sign painter. As happened to so many other of his countrymen, Oguibe’s life was disrupted by the Biafran War of 1967-70, but his family survived intact, and the artist later took part in traditional artistic activities in his home Igbo community. Oguibe attended the University of Nigeria (1981-86), received his bachelor’s degree, and undertook graduate work (1987-89) before he left for England due to the unsettled political situation in Nigeria. He remained in London for six years, where he earned his doctorate degree in art history from the School of Oriental and African Studies at the University of London. An acclaimed poet, Oguibe has published three volumes of his writings, with the best known being A Gathering Fear (1992). He is also a respected scholar and historian of contemporary African and African American art.

Phillippa Yaa De Villiers

is a writer and poet who teaches creative writing at Wits University, Johannesburg, recently graduated with a PhD in Creative Writing. She studied theatre at the Jacques Lecoq School in Paris, and worked in theatre in South Africa and internationally for ten years. Phillippa has written for television and theatre and published three collections, one of which won the SALA award. In 2023 she edited Keorapetse Kgosistile Collected Poems 1969-2018 with Uhuru Phalafala for the African Poetry Book Fund.

Rodrigo Karmy Bolton

has a Ph.D. in Philosophy from the University of Chile. He is Professor and researcher in the Center for Arab Studies of the Faculty of Philosophy and Humanities, University of Chile. He is also professor of the seminar “contemporary Arab world” in the undergraduate program of international relations at the University of Santiago, Chile. His research interest includes Averroism and Averroes thought, political theology and modernity, following the work of Michel Foucault, Giorgio Agamben, and others.

Roshan Dadoo

is currently Coordinator of the SA BDS Coalition and a member of Palestine Solidarity Campaign (PSC). She previously worked for a South Africann refugee and migrant rights organisation and the Department of International Relations and Cooperation (DIRCO) where she served in the Middle East section at the South African Embassy in Algiers. Prior to this Roshan grew up in exile and was an activist in the Anti-Apartheid Movement and PSC UK.

Ruth Margalit

studied English Literature and History at Tel Aviv University and earned a master’s degree in journalism from Columbia University. She is a contributing writer to magazines and newspapers including The New York Times Magazine, The New Yorker, The New York Review of Books, Columbia Journalism Review, Harper’s, Haaretz, Tablet and Slate.

Prof Salim Vally

holds the University of Johannesburg Research Chair in Community, Adult and Worker Education (CAWE). He is also a visiting professor at the Nelson Mandela Metropolitan University. He completed his doctorate at UKZN and studied at Wits and York universities. His scholarly interests include educational and social policy as they relate to human rights, democracy and socio-economic justice.

Samar Hussaini

is a Palestinian fine artist based in New Jersey, known for her captivating artwork that blends various layers of mediums and techniques. She graduated with a BFA in Art History and Studio Arts from the University of Maryland before pursuing a Master’s degree in communication design from Pratt Institute in New York. In 2022, Hussaini achieved international acclaim for her participation in the Venice Biennale collateral group exhibit, “From Palestine with Love,” sponsored by the Palestine Museum.

Shari Maluleke

is an intersectional activist and writer. Pronouns are they/she or them/her. They believe in dismantling all systems of oppression. As the co-founder of the Menstrual Project, they believe that menstruation safety should be accessible for all. “We live in a world that deprives many of basic needs for profit, and to allow people to live without basic resources should be considered a crime against humanity.”

Sindre Bangstad

is a Norwegian social anthropologist based in Oslo, Norway. The author of ten books and edited volumes in English and Norwegian, he was awarded the 2019 Anthropology in the Media (AIME) Awards from the American Anthropological Association (AAA). He was a Stanley Kelley Jr. Distinguished Visiting Professor in the Teaching of Anthropology at Princeton University in the USA from 2022-23. Bangstad did his PhD on Muslims in Cape Town, South Africa (2007).

Dr. Síona O’Connell

is a research affiliate for Centre for Curating the Archive. She is a Trilateral Reconnections Project Fellow and a BIARI (Brown Internal Advanced Research Institute) alumnus. Her work around archives and curation seeks to shift frames from aesthetics to restorative justice to open up questions around representation, freedom, trauma and memory in the aftermath of oppression. She has produced and directed five documentaries using the exhibition and documentary film as the entry point into conversations on ways of life after apartheid. She now lectures at the University of Pretoria.

Skumbuzo Phakathi

Slovo Mamphaga

is one of the most talented contemporary visual artists in the country, whose work’s impact is yet to be fully appreciated. His main medium is drawing. Though one would have love to see him exhibiting more in mainstream galleries, Slovo prefers to be independent, a formula that seems to be working, as he is slowly building a base of private collectors who speak to him directly instead of through a gallery.

Stephen Clingman

is Distinguished University Professor Emeritus of English and former Director of the Interdisciplinary Studies Institute at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. He was Chair of the English Department from 1994-2000, and was founding Director of the Interdisciplinary Studies Institute (and its earlier incarnation, the Interdisciplinary Seminar in the Humanities and Fine Arts) from 2001-2017. Stephen was born and grew up in South Africa where he studied as an undergraduate at the University of the Witwatersrand. He won a scholarship to Oxford University, where he received his doctorate in 1983. He has held fellowships at a variety of institutions internationally, including Yale University, Cornell University, the Stellenbosch Institute for Advanced Studies, and the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars.

Steven Robins

is a Professor in the Department of Sociology and Social Anthropology at the University of Stellenbosch. He has published on a wide range of topics including the politics of land, ‘development’ and identity in Zimbabwe and South Africa; the Truth & Reconciliation Commission (TRC); urban studies and most recently on citizenship and governance.

Thandi Gamedze

is a PhD student at UJ’s Centre for Education Rights and Transformation. Her PhD explores the idea of churches as sites of struggle and the manifestation of this in contemporary South Africa.

Tshepo Madlingozi

is Associate Professor and the Director of the Centre for Applied Legal Studies at WITS University. He has master’s degrees in both law and sociology and he received his PhD degree from Birkbeck, University of London. He is a Research Associate at the Chair for Critical Studies in Higher Education at Nelson Mandela University. He is the co-editor of South African Journal of Human Rights and part of the management team of Pretoria University Law Press. He sits on the boards of the following civil society organisations: Centre for Human Rights, University of Free State; the Council for the Advancement of the South African Constitution; and the Rural Democracy Trust. For thirteen years he worked with and for Khulumani Support Group, a 120 000-strong social movement of victims and survivors of Apartheid.

Vonani Bila

The fifth in a family of eight children, Vonani Bila was born and grew up in poverty-stricken Shirley Village, Limpopo, where he walked 14 kilometres daily to Lemana High School in Elim. He went on to study at Tivumbeni College of Education and hoped to join Umkhonto we Sizwe until the death of his father necessitated a change of plans. Bila is the founder of the Timbila Poetry Project, which has published a series of poetry collections and the literary journal Timbila. A poet writing in English and Tsonga, Bila has performed in Belgium, Sweden, Holland, Ghana and Brazil, and has authored eight storybooks in English, Northern Sotho and Tsonga for newly literate adult readers. In 2005, he was nominated for the Daimler Chrysler 2005 South Africa Poetry Award. Bila is outspoken about the cult of mediocrity that he perceives in local performance poets who mimic US ‘thuggery’ at state and corporate functions, and the commodification of poetry in general in the new South Africa. He sees himself as a patriot, even – and especially – when he is speaking out about the injustices in South Africa. “Some poets are happy to be commissioned to write about brands and labels,” he says, “I’m not such a clown.”

Zeenat Adam

is a former diplomat, International Relations analyst and political opinion writer. She currently serves as Deputy Executive Director of the Afro-Middle East Centre, the only research-based entity
in South Africa to focus on the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region. She concurrently serves on the Advisory Board of the Thabo Mbeki African School of Public and International Affairs. Guided by her strong
moral compass and ethics, Zeenat has years of experience in international human rights advocacy and humanitarian affairs.

Zeinab Shaath

is a Palestinian-Egyptian singer-songwriter. She is known for the song The Urgent Call of Palestine, released in 1972.

Zukiswa Wanner

is an award winning South African author, curator, editor, and publisher. She is the author of the novels The Madams (Oshun, 2006); Behind Every Successful Man (Kwela, 2008), Men of the South (Kwela 2010) and London Cape Town Joburg (Kwela, 2014). She has also written two works of nonfiction, Maid in SA (Jacana, 2013) and Hardly Working (Black Letter Media, 2018). Zukiswa won the K Sello Duiker Award at the South African Literary Awards for her London Cape Town Joburg in 2015; she was shortlisted for the same award in 2007 for her debut novel The Madams. In 2020, she became the first African woman to be awarded the Goethe Medal, a German state award for her contribution to cultural exchange.