contributors
Malaika wa Azania
is a Masters candidate in the Department of Geography at Rhodes University and the author of bestselling, internationally acclaimed Memoirs of a Born Free: Reflections on the Rainbow Nation
Sergio Henry Ben
is a writer-editor living his best life in one of the few remaining white areas in Cape Town – Observatory. His neighbours despise him. He is also desperately trying to write himself better. Also, he’s determined to get the land back through Grindr assignations. Posh word, neh?
Branka Benčić
is an independent curator and art historian, currently artistic director at Apoteka – Space for Contemporary art, curator at the Artists cinema screening program at the Museum of Contemporary Art Zagreb, and founder and curator of the Cinemaniac Think Film support programme of the Pula Film Festival. She curated the Croatian Pavilion at the 57th Venice Biennale (2017). Together with Aleksandra Sekulić she curates exhibitions and publishes essays on the heritage of experimental cinema, early video production and films clubs in former Yugoslavia.
Mphutlane wa Bofelo
is a poet, essayist and social critic whose work is influenced by radical humanism, Sufism and Black Consciousness. His recently published book is Transitions : From Post Colonial Illusions to Decoloniality.
Cloete Breytenbach
passed away on June 1 2019 at the age of 85 in a Cape Town hospital. The world renowned photographer was known for his emotive images and also captured historic moments since the 1950’s. These include the world’s first heart transplant at Groote Schuur hospital, capturing the spirit of the forcibly removed District Six residents during apartheid and iconic shots of the late Nelson Mandela during his incarceration on Robben Island. He also covered conflicts across Africa including Angola, Zimbabwe and Mozambique. His iconic black and white photographs of the Eoan Group are published in herri with the kind permisison of his widow Brenda.
Peter Delpeut
(born 12 July 1956) is a Dutch filmmaker and writer. Several of his films have heavily used found footage. He has won several literary awards for his writing.
Emile Engel
dreams of a socialist South Africa. He is a scientist at KTH Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm. He completed undergraduate and honours degrees at Stellenbosch University, returning a few years later to pursue a PhD in Chemistry. During his early years at Stellenbosch he served on the Prim Komittee as a resident of Goldfields, which in 1987 became the first koshuis at the University to admit “coloured” students, and in the final years of his PhD he was a proud member of Open Stellenbosch.
Inge Engelbrecht
is a part-time lecturer at the Music Department at Stellenbosch University. Her master’s research focused on documenting the life and works of three composers who have strong ties to Genadendal, the first mission station in South Africa. She is currently researching the Afrikaans koortjie tradition whhich is part of the cultural narrative of the coloured church community and is a largely unexplored field of research.
Aidan Erasmus
is a scholar of sound and other noisy matters based in the Department of History at the University of the Western Cape. His current research interests include phonography, history, and sounds in and of the south.
Diana Ferrus
(born 29 August 1953, Worcester, Western Cape) is a writer, poet and storyteller of mixed Khoisan and slave ancestry. Her work is published in Afrikaans and English. Ferrus leads writing workshops in Cape Town while working as an administrator at the University of the Western Cape. Ferrus is best known for her poem about Saartjie Baartman, a South African woman taken to Europe under false pretenses and paraded as a curiosity. She wrote the poem in 1998 while studying at Utrecht University. The popularity of this poem is widely believed to be responsible for the return of Bartmann’s remains to South Africa. Ferrus is a founder of the Afrikaans Skrywersvereniging (ASV), Bush Poets, and Women in Xchains.
Angelo Fick
is the Director of Research at ASRI. He continues to do part-teaching at universities on questions of culture, and still publishes columns at eNCA.com.
Enrico Fourie
is currently a management consultant with deep roots in the pre-democratic era as an anti-apartheid activist, teacher and unionist in the 80’s. Having grown up in and taught on the Cape flats in Cape Town, having studied piano up the grade 8 formally, and then migrated to Gauteng in the early 90’s, he was a founding member of the labour federation COSATU; coming from a musical family he plays both classical and jazz piano while retaining a profound interest in classical and modern Opera as a musical form in contemporary times. Enrico has over the years maintained the importance of musical education in our education system.
Quintin “Jitsvinger” Goliath
is an established Cape Flats-born conceptual writer, composer, guitarist, educator, musician, poet and performing artist. After the success of his debut album, Skeletsleutel, Jitsvinger has collaborated with classical musicians, jazz nominees, pioneers and legends, and has performed on stages and in festivals both locally in his home country of South Africa and internationally including Taiwan, France, the Netherlands, Switzerland and Chile. He has composed and written music for theatre productions and film, most notably Afrikaaps. Jitsvinger is a social commentator on issues concerning heritage, culture, and especially the Afrikaaps language.
Sisca Julius
is a Sol Plaatje University BA graduate. She loves writing for and about the Northern Cape (especially the dialect which is highly misrepresented in literature). She won the K&L Prize for African Literature in 2019.
Percy Mabandu
is a writer, artist and journalist based in Joburg. He works at the intersection of art, jazz and political economy, and has been writing in depth about jazz music, arts and the black experience for the last ten years. His work has appeared in various newspapers and magazines including the weekly City Press, Blaque Magazine, the Sunday Times, Mail & Guardian, Rolling Stone Magazine, Chimurenga Chronic, and many others. He is a regular television and radio commentator on art and culture issues. He also serves as a member of Friends of IFAS, The Consultative Committee of The French Institute of South Africa. Mabandu lives in Ga-Rankuwa, a township in the North West of Pretoria.
Lusithi Mali
is an aspiring mathematician who received training from Rhodes. He is a creative individual with a keen interest in the literary arts and the entire artverse. Jazz is his religion and he considers musicians prophets. In his spare time he enjoys reading (anything and everything), listening to jazz and indulging in Babylon juice which he thinks brings out the best in him.
Menzi Maseko
is a Cultural and Creative Arts practitioner whose experience has included various entrepreneurial ventures. Born in the township of Kwa-Mashu and raised in the streets of Durban, he is a Poet, Essayist, Translator, Events organizer, and aspiring Trumpeter. He is Creative Director at Green Ankh Works, a communal company that creatives edu-tainment through collaborations. A Black Consciousness inspired Rastafarian with an insatiable desire for Ancient Future of Afrika and the End of the World as we know it.
Khaliso Matela
I am a writer and filmmaker, who uses his creative expertise and art to interrogate and hold memory to account. Being of the conviction that art also judges history and how history is recalled, I find my craft becoming a social barometer, where remembering is an act of activism in an era of forgetting.
Sam Mathe
is an award winning journalist, writer and publisher. He is a founding editor and publisher of Jazz Life Magazine as well as contributing author of South Africa’s Greatest Entrepreneurs (MME Media, 2010) and Brenda Fassie: I Am Not Your Weekend Special (Picador Africa, 2014). His journalism career started in 1994 at the now defunct PACE magazine. Mathe has contributed widely to a number of South African newspapers and magazines including Drum, Mail & Guardian, The Star, Sunday Independent, Sowetan and Rapport. He is also the author of ‘From Kippie to Kippies: Group Portraits of South African Jazz, Folk & Soul Musicians’ (unpublished). His articles are currently published in the Sowetan on Fridays. Mathe is the 2018/2019 recipient of the Literary Journalism Award at the annual South African Literary Awards
Keith Matthee
BA LLB (UND), BD (Rhodes) and at present doing PhD (NWU) research on the “objective normative value system” which purportedly underpins the SA Bill of Rights. Appointed Senior Counsel by Pres. Mbeki in 2002. Has served as a judge in the High Courts of the EC, WC and Gauteng. Authored The Resurrection – a lawyer’s view, The Emperor Has No Clothing and Decolonising Jesus.
Mbe Mbhele
is a writer based in Joburg. He is a member of an art collective called Black Thought Symposium. “My dabbling with theory is nothing but a lousy excuse to run away from the brutal reality of my work of fiction.”
Zakes Mda
legally Zanemvula Kizito Gatyeni Mda (born 1948), is a South African novelist, poet and playwright. He has won major South African and British literary awards for his novels and plays. Zanemvula Mda was born in Herschell, South Africa, in 1948 and completed the Cambridge Overseas Certificate at Peka High School, Lesotho in 1969. He completed a MFA (Theater) and a MA (Mass Communication and Media) in 1984 at Ohio University, United States. He completed his PhD at the University of Cape Town, South Africa in 1989. On 8 June 2012 Zakes Mda was awarded an honorary doctorate of the University of Cape Town for his contributions to world literature. His novels have been translated into 21 languages.
Hugh Mdlalose
I draw from within to reflect an experience of jazz as a powerful medium of collective dreams and an unending endeavour for the total freedom of humanity. My approach to the subject is to let my personal encounter and journey with the medium of jazz speak for voices bigger than mine. I hope my work will be judged as a sincere artistic statement, a lone voice that seeks to get healing and spiritual restoration through the images as well as the sounds and souls behind the images.
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.
Zimasa Mpemnyama
is completing a Masters degree at the University of Cape Town’s Centre for Film & Media Studies. She is a writer and activist based in Cape Town.
Tereska Muishond
is an award-winning playwright, poet, television writer, performing artist, social activist and single mother. She holds a BA degree in Communication Science & Theatre Art from the Free State University and recently obtained a BA Honours degree in Creative Writing from Wits University. Her day job is as a Scriptwriter on e.tv’s most watched daily drama, SCANDAL!
Stephanus Muller
holds masters degrees in musicology from the University of South Africa and Oxford University. In 2001 he was awarded a DPhil from Oxford University before returning to South Africa in the same year. He is currently Professor of Musicology at Stellenbosch University and Director of Africa Open – Institute for Music, Research and Innovation, an ambitious institutional project that responds to the challenges and opportunities of music studies in South Africa. His most recent book, Nagmusiek, was awarded the Eugène Marais Prize by the Suid-Afrikaanse Akademie vir Wetenskap en Kuns, the Jan Rabie Rapport Prize, the kykNET-Rapport Prize and the University of Johannesburg Debut Prize for Creative Writing in Afrikaans.
Lindokuhle Nkosi
is a feminist writer, editor, advocate and curator from Johannesburg, South Africa whose textual work often merges with installation and performance. Interested in text, art and sonic narrative studies, she is a regular contributor to publications locally and internationally. She completed my MA in Creative Writing, using the black, artistic imaginary as a tool to investigate the mechanisms of violence in hyper-violent societies, and how this impacts black cultural production, and the black, femme imaginary.
Rithuli Orleyn’s
meditations on race & racism have been published in Mail & Guardian, Reddit, The Dailyvox, The Con, Sunday Tribune (IOL) among others. He works for Blackhouse Kollective – a home for Black Consciousness and Pan Afrikanist activists in Soweto. He holds an M.A. (creative writing) from Rhodes University. He has also been invited to share his work on SABC Radio & TV.
Martijn Pantlin
is a full stack web developer specialized in making custom web experiences. He has more than 20 years of IT experience, working in the fields of 3D animation, art direction and executive management of video games before switching to web development 10 years ago. With roots in Amsterdam, Martijn is a free roaming world citizen and based everywhere the web goes.
Andrea Rolfes
is a femme artist, designer and curator who lives in Johannesburg. Rolfes’ artworks often combine drawn, painted, stitched and machine sewn elements . Her work is autobiographical and experiential, exhibiting a fine and fragmented aesthetic approach. She is also the web designer of herri.
Hilde Roos
is the General Manager of Africa Open Institute for Music, Research and Innovation at Stellenbosch University. Her research interests concern the archive, historical representations of the practice of Western art music and the concomitant (colonial) mutations thereof in South Africa. Her book The La Traviata Affair: Opera in the Age of Apartheid is published by University of California Press.
Aleksandra Sekulić
is the programme curator at the Center for Cultural Decontamination (CZKD) in Belgrade. In the 2000s, she was programme curator and film producer at the Academic Film Center in Belgrade and is a member of the organisation Media Archaeology and the Kosmoplovci collective in Belgrade. Together with Branka Benčić she curates exhibitions and publishes essays on the heritage of experimental cinema, early video production and films clubs in former Yugoslavia.
Eugene Skeef
FRSA – London-based South African percussionist, composer, poet, educationalist and broadcaster. Works in conflict resolution, acts as consultant on cultural development and teaches creative leadership. His innovative global projects include community music, jazz, ‘world’ music, European classical music, contemporary dance theatre and children’s storytelling. Has composed for London Philharmonic Orchestra, London Sinfonietta and Royal Scottish National Orchestra,trained their players and helped to set up their education departments. Fellow of Royal Society of Arts and winner of Harry E. Schlenz Medal for Water Music.
Nathan Trantraal
is a poet, cartoonist, translator, screenwriter and short story author originally from Cape Town. He has made cartoons for The Cape Times, The Cape Argus and writes a bi-weekly column for Rapport. His work has been exhibited in Cape Town, Munich and Amsterdam. Nathan holds a Masters Degree in Creative writing from Rhodes University. He is currently a lecturer at Rhodes University at the School of Languages, where he specializes in Kaapse Afrikaans and the graphic novel.
Dylan Valley
is an award-winning filmmaker born and raised in Cape Town. He has directed work SABC, Al Jazeera, and independently. Valley grew up in Kuils River and then the white suburb of Durbanville where he faced being the only coloured child in the neighborhood. From this experience, he was pushed into the hip-hop music that constructed his identity. The Hip-Hop music genre led Valley to incorporate this style within his another passion that is documentary filmmaking. In 2006, he got his Honors degree in Film Theory and Practice from UCT. With Plexus Films, Valley developed a feature-length documentary, called Afrikaaps which explores the history of Afrikaans. The documentary won Best South African Documentary at the Cape Winelands Film Festival. He has also directed two documentaries for Al Jazeera’s Arabic documentary channel, on struggle icons Fatima Meer and Tatamkhulu Afrika.
Greer Valley
is a Ph.D. candidate in Art Historical Studies at Michaelis School of Fine Art, a lecturer in Visual Studies at Durban University of Technology and a Ph.D. research fellow at the Archive and Public Culture Initiative at the University of Cape Town (UCT). She is currently a director on the board of the Africa South Arts Initiative (ASAI). Her research and practice interests include curatorial interventions in institutions and exhibition spaces focused on colonial histories. In 2018 she was a curatorial fellow at the Institute for Creative Arts (ICA) also at the University of Cape Town. Greer has experience in the Visual Art, Architecture and Design industries in South Africa, the Netherlands and the UK. She holds a Bachelors (professional) degree in Architecture, Honours in Visual Studies and Master’s in Visual Art. She was recently selected as a MAHASSA fellow (Modern Art Histories in and Across Africa, South and Southeast Asia) 2019-2020. She is a guest curator for the 2020 DAK’ART Biennale in Senegal.
Juliana Venter
is a vocalist, composer and trained opera singer (known to accompany an orchestra of motorcycles and string instruments for example), she is also an actress and performance artist. She was lead singer for the cult performance art group The Mud Ensemble in Johannesburg. More recently she opened an exhibition as vocalist together with saxophonist Rolf-Erik Nystrøm at the Edvard Munch museum in Oslo performing to the paintings of Edvard Munch and Asger Jorn. In 2018 she represented South Africa in Cannes at the uncertain regard for her role in The Harvesters for which she was nominated best supporting actress at the Silwerskerm.
Salim Washington
was born in the housing projects in Memphis, Tennesee. Salim first entered Harvard in 1976 and subsequently dropped out to become a jazz musician. He finally returned to Harvard in 1993 and completed his PhD in 2000, while still remaining active as a performer, writer, activist and family man. For Salim, the fascination with South Africa has been longstanding. It began with Gil Scott-Heron’s hit record, Johannesburg, about the aftermath of the 1976 riots in Soweto. It would take thirty-three years until Salim’s first visit to South Africa, when he was invited to teach at the University of KwaZulu-Natal (UKZN) in 2009. In 2013, he became a full-time professor in the Music Department at UKZN. “This feels like home,” he reflects, “ This is home. I am home.”
Rafieka Williams
is a Writer and Social Activist from Cape Town with an unquenchable thirst for truth and a deep love for Africa. With a Post Graduate degree in Journalism from the University of the Witwatersrand, she continually strives to grapple with the meaning of identity in an ever changing global context.
Makhosazana (Khosi) Xaba
(born 10 July 1957) trained as a nurse and has worked a women’s health specialist in NGOs, as well as writing on gender and health. She has an MA degree in creative writing from Wits University and is working on a biography of Noni Jabavu. Xaba won the Deon Hofmeyr Award for Creative Writing (2005) for her unpublished short story “Running”. Her poems have appeared in publications including Timbila, Sister Namibia, Botsotso, South African Writing, Green Dragon and Echoes, and have been collected in These Hands (2005)[ and Tongues of Their Mothers (2008). A book of her short stories, Running and Other Stories, was published in 2013, and won the 2014 Nadine Gordimer South African Literary Awards Short Story Award.