contributors
Ayi Kwei Armah
(born 1939, Takoradi) is Ghanaian novelist whose work deals with corruption and materialism in contemporary Africa.
Jeffrey Babcock
shows unique movies in English or with English subtitles at a number of venues in Amsterdam, as part of his underground cinemas. “The only real criterion is that every film I show has something absolutely unique about it, which makes it different from any other movie ever made. It could be a trashy movie, have no budget, or could be a big film, as long as it is not a formula. Watching a film is like being in a dream and I think it is very important to be in a whole room with people going through that experience together.”
James Baldwin
(August 2, 1924 – December 1, 1987) was an American novelist, playwright, essayist, poets and activist. Gay and bisexual men frequently feature as protagonists in his literature.
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?
Thabiso Bhengu
is a business director and producer of the television show The Big Debate.
Blaq Pearl
was born and raised in the working class community of Beacon Valley, Mitchellʼs Plain, Cape Town. She is a gifted singer and writer, she also holds a degree in Psychology and Linguistics from the University of the Western Cape. She was the only female collaborating alongside 7 independent male artists, in the popular theatre production: AFRIKAAPS (HipHopera) which debuted at KKNK & ran at The Baxter Theatre. This production won several awards at Kyknet Fiestas. Her first poetry collection Karadaa!!! was published in 2015.
Cornelius Cardew
(7 May 1936 – 13 December 1981) was an English experimental music composer and founder of the Scratch Orchestra, an experimental performing ensemble. He later rejected experimental music, explaining why he had “discontinued composing in an avantgarde idiom” in his own programme notes to his 1973 Piano Album 1973.
Michael C Coldwell
is the artistic pseudonym of Michael Schofield, a photographer and multi-media artist. He is also a lecturer and media researcher at the University of Leeds and holds a PhD in photography. His eclectic work explores memory, illusion, spectrality and obsolescence in a variety of different media, often via representations of the changing cityscape. The artist has staged several solo exhibitions including Lost Leeds in 2019 and Residuum at Left Bank in 2017, which also served as the launch event for his critically acclaimed hauntology album CC-AM. Schofield is currently writing a book on ghosts and photography.
Derek Davey
is a sub-editor in the Mail & Guardian’s supplements department who occasionally puts pen to paper. He has irons in many metaphysical fires – music, mantras, mortality and moustaches. He has recently published his memoir, Three Foot Tiger.
Danyela Dimakatso Demir
is a post-doctoral fellow at the University of Johannesburg. Her monograph, Reading Loss: Post-Apartheid Melancholia in Contemporary South African Novels, was published in 2019. Currently, she is working on a book on Lesego Rampolokeng’s oeuvre, which is tentatively entitled “Precarious Love: Reading Lesego Rampolokeng’s Works from Horns for Hondo to Bird-Monk Seding”. Together with Olivier Moreillon, she has also co-written a volume of interviews with a selection of contemporary South African authors. The book is forthcoming with UKZN Press in 2020
Arturo Desimone
is an Aruban-Argentinian writer and visual artist, born 1984 on the island Aruba which he inhabited until the age of 22 when he emigrated to the Netherlands. He later relocated to Argentina while working on projects related to his Argentinean family background. Desimone’s articles, poetry and fiction pieces previously appeared in CounterPunch, Círculo de Poesía (Spanish) Island, Drunken Boat, The Missing Slate, EuropeNow, Aruba Today, Writers Resist Anthology, Al Araby Al Jadeed (Arabic), New Orleans Review. Two collections of poetry and visual art recently appeared in the UK and in Argentina: Mare Nostrum / Costa Nostra (Hesterglock Press, 2019) and Ouafa and Thawra: About a Lover from Tunisia appeared in the UK and throughout Africa and in bilingual editions as La Amada de Túnez in his second homeland Argentina in 2020
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 which is part of the cultural narrative of the coloured church community and is a largely unexplored field of research.
Garth Erasmus
was born in 1956, in Uitenhage. A visual artist and musician best known for his innovative use of materials, Garth has extensive experience as a facilitator and teacher. He has been featured in almost every major book survey of South African art since the late 1980s, and is well represented in the National Museum of African Art, Smithsonian Institute. More than any other South African artist, Erasmus unsettles the hegemonic, exclusionary constructions of African and coloured identity. By pursuing the ‘Khoisan question’, Erasmus enters cultural terrain that has been proclaimed as ‘primitivist’, off limits to the shallow Afropolitanisms of the trendy set. His introspective explorations of his decolonial identity, frequently presented on an intimate scale, stand solidly and silently in opposition to the obligatory, often obscene scale that has become normative.
Lucy Valerie Graham
is from the rural Eastern Cape. She studied at the universities known as Rhodes and Oxford, and is currently teaching at the University of Johannesburg. A writer of academic work and sometime doggerel, she is also an insomniac, an isolated social justice activist, an anti-natalist, and a daydreamer who suspects that hypochondria may be a path to enlightenment.
Allan Kolski Horwitz
grew up in Cape Town. Between 1974 and 1985 he lived in 1986. Since then he has worked in the trade union and social housing movements. He continues to be a writer in various genres as well as being an educator and activist. He is a member of the Botsotso Jesters poetry performance group and of the Botsotso Publishing editorial board. His books of poetry are entitled Saving Water and There are Two Birds at My Window in the Middle East, Europe and North America, returning to live in Johannesburg
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.
Michelle Kisliuk
Associate Professor, received her doctorate in Performance Studies from New York University in 1991. Integrating theory and practice, she specializes in a performance approach to ethnographic writing and research, and in an ethnographic and critical approach to performing. Since 1986 she has researched the music, dance, daily life, socioesthetics, and cultural politics of forest people (BaAka) in the Central African Republic, and has also written about urban music/dance and modernity in Bangui (the capital city). Her published essays have appeared in collections including Shadows in the Field (Oxford University Press), Teaching Performance Studies (University of Southern Illinois Press), Performing Ethnomusicology (University of California Press) and Music and Gender (University of Illinois Press). Her book, Seize the Dance! BaAka Musical Life and the Ethnography of Performance (Oxford University Press) won the ASCAP Deems Taylor Special Recognition Award.
Antjie Krog
was born on 23 October 1952 on a farm in the Free State. She completed her BA degree with Afrikaans (cum laude), Philosophy (cum laude) and English at the University of the Orange Freestate and then she went on to obtain a Masters degree in Afrikaans at the University of Pretoria. She also completed a Teachers diploma (cum laude) at the University of South Africa. Antjie has published nine volumes of poetry, two volumes of verse for children, a short novel published by Heinemann and a book, Country of my Skull, on the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission published by Random House.
Ashanti Kunene
is a decolonial dialogue facilitator, public speaker, published writer and activist poet. She holds a BA (Hons) International Studies Cum Laude from Stellenbosch University. Her research interests are the epistemological and epistemic emancipation of all humans from mental slavery and ignorance. To read her work and watch her TedX talk go to her website below.
David Langemann
is a Cape Town based recording engineer with 27 years live and studio experience. He has a strong interest in recording acoustic based instruments. World music, jazz and classical styles are among his favourites. Dave has, amongst others, engineered and/or mixed Abdullah Ibrahim, Jonny Clegg, Freshlyground, Cape Town International Jazz Festival, Tony Cedras (Paul Simon band), and Medicine Boy.
Christina Lucia
has been Extraordinary Professor at Stellenbosch University since her retirement from the University of the Witwatersrand in 2008. Editor of The World of South African Music: A Reader (2005) and author of Music Notation: A South African Guide (2011) in addition to many articles, she currently curates the collaborative Andrew Mellon Moerane Critical Edition project at the Africa Open Institute.
Lwazi Lushaba
has a BA (Hons) from the University of Transkei, an MA in Philosophy from the University of Ibadan, an MPhil from the Centre for Studies in Social Sciences in Kolkata, and a PhD from the University of the Witwatersrand. He has taught at Fort Hare and Wits, and he has held a Visiting Fellowship at the African Studies Centre, Leiden, The Netherlands. Lushaba’s interests include political philosophy, in particular German phenomenology and Enlightenment philosophy; Subaltern Studies (decolonial thought, the politics of representation, and postcolonial theory); African Politics, including African political economy and the postcolonial African state; and radical African/Black traditions of intellectual thought.
Tshepo Madlingozi
holds a PhD from the University of London, as well as two Masters degrees in law and sociology from the University of Pretoria, where he has been based for over 16 years. He has shown a deep commitment to social justice not only through his teaching and extensive publication record, but also in his activism. Over the past 13 years, he served as the national advocacy co-ordinator and a board member of the Khulumani Support Group, which represents over 85,000 victims and survivors of apartheid-era gross human rights violations. In addition to his work at Khulumani, Madlingozi has served on the boards of a number of human rights and social justice organisations, including the Centre for Human Rights, University of Free State; the Socio-Economic Rights Institute of South Africa; Zimbabwe Exiles Forum; the Council for the Advancement of the South African Constitution and amandla.mobi.
Nduduzo Makhathini
grew up in the lush and rugged hillscapes of umGungundlovu in South Africa, a peri-urban landscape in which music and ritual practices were symbiotically linked. Active as an educator and researcher, Makhathini is the head of the music department at Fort Hare University in the Eastern Cape. He has performed at renowned festivals including the Cape Town International Jazz Festival and the Essence Festival (in both New Orleans and South Africa), and in 2019 made his debut appearances the Blue Note Jazz Club in New York City, as well as Jazz at Lincoln Center where he was a featured guest with Wynton Marsalis and the Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra on their 3-night musical celebration The South African Songbook in Rose Theater. In addition to producing albums for his peers (such as Thandiswa Mazwai’s Belede and Tumi Mogorosi’s Project Elo), Makhathini has released eight albums of his own since 2014 when he founded the label Gundu Entertainment in partnership with his wife and vocalist Omagugu Makhathini. His Blue Note debut Modes of Communication: Letters from the Underworlds was released in April 2020.
Gaddafi Makhosandile
is an online journalist who completed his studies in the field about a decade before the inception of ‘fallism’, which is a pity considering the pretty pennies his parents threw into his education. I currently live and work at the Place of Gold, mining my way through life until I reach my goals.
Mkhulu Maphikisa
is a Multimedia artist and a sangoma. Born in the small town of Empangeni, Obizo Mission, he is a mix of a ‘farmboy’ and a ‘ghetto boy’. He likes to rage against the machine.
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.” tumblr.com
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.
Patric Tariq Mellet
was born and grew up in the working class districts of old Cape Town – Salt River, Woodstock and District Six. His family were poor working people from what was regarded as a grey area community of people who came to be classified during the Apartheid years, as ‘coloured’ and ‘white’ but defiantly contradicted the official segregationist paradigm and did not neatly fit into these labels. Patric Tariq Mellet is a heritage activist, storyteller and educator specialising in Cape slavery studies.
Bongani Michael
is the author of Black Love: Poverty Pain and Sorrow
Eric Miyeni
is an accomplished writer and actor as well as a radio and television presenter. He spent fifteen years working in advertising, starting as a copywriter and finishing as Managing Creative Director of ChilliBush Communications in 2006. His acting career has spanned the stage, television and the big screen, working with the likes of James Earl Jones (Cry the Beloved Country), Danny Glover (Bopha) and Elizabeth Hurley (Dangerous Grounds). He played the lead role in Aryan Kaganof’s Nice To Meet You Please Don’t Rape Me!
Phehello Mofokeng
is a WITS University Honours graduate who specialised in African Languages and Drama & Film. After this he studied executive management and business courses at the WITS Business School. He furthered his knowledge by also studying advertising design for two years at NEMISA (National Electronic Media Institute of South Africa). Mofokeng’s Geko Publishing has published 21 titles so far – including the multi-award winning Setswana novel Ga ke Modisa by (2013) by the award-winning journalist Sabata-mpho Mokae.
Setumo-Thebe Mohlomi
tells stories with written and broadcasted words, still and moving images. His work focuses on Sub-Saharan African arts, culture, heritage and their nexus with business and socio-politics. He is a recipient of the Arts Journalism of the Year Awards: Gold Award for Features.
Sabata-Mpho Mokae
is a novelist, translator and academic. He writes in English and Setswana. He is the author of a teen novella Dikeledi and a biography The Story of Sol T. Plaatje. His first novella, Ga ke Modisa [I’m Not My Brother’s Keeper] won the M-Net Literary Award for Best Novel in Setswana as well as the M-Net Film Award in 2013. He also won the South African Literary Award in 2011. In 2014 he was a writer-in-residence at the University of Iowa’s International Writing Program. Mokae also received the inaugural Lesedi la Afrika Award in 2017. Mokae is teaching creative writing at the Sol Plaatje University in Kimberley, South Africa.
Mantoa Motinyane
translator and linguistic expert on the Mohapeloa project, is a Senior Lecturer in the University of Cape Town’s Department of Southern African Languages. Her recent work in poetry includes her position as the isiXhosa judge and editor of the 2017/18 AVBOB Poetry Competition.
Msaki
is a composer and singer-songwriter from East London, South Africa. Born into a musically gifted family, her father who was a Dj and her grandfather was a well- known composer and songwriter. Msaki taught herself how to play the guitar in 2010 while studying Art at Leeds University in England where she was an exchange student as she spent many cold afternoons in her room writing songs. 2012 was the year the singer-songwriter was selected out of over 900 applicants from all over the world to go study in North Carolina USA with 30 other artists, musicians and writers. Msaki creates a sound that combines soulful folk with symphonic movements, Xhosa lyrics and African poly-rhythms with portals of improvisation. Her debut album Zaneliza was co-produced with Standard Bank Young Artist of the Year for 2015, Nduduzo Makhathini.
Tk Mthiyane
went to Sithokozil Secondary School, lives in Johannesburg and is from Durban.
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.
Neo Muyanga
was born in Soweto. He studied the Italian madrigal tradition with choral maestro, Piero Poclen, in Trieste, Italy. In the mid 90’s he co-founded the acoustic pop duo, BLK Sonshine with Masauko Chipembere, garnering a following throughout Southern Africa and Internationally. Neo writes music plays, chorus songs and has a variety of works for chamber and large ensemble (his operetta, “the Flower of Shembe”, premiered to critical acclaim in 2012). Neo co-founded the Pan African Space Station in 2008 with Chimurenga’s publishing editor, Ntone Edjabe, as a continually evolving host of cutting-edge Pan African music and sound art on the internet and across stages in Cape Town and other parts of the globe.
David Mwambari
is a Lecturer in African Security and Leadership Studies at the African Leadership Centre. He is also a by-fellow at Churchill College Cambridge University for the academic year 2019-2020. He was previously a Research Foundation, Flanders (FWO) postdoctoral research fellow at the Department of Conflict and Development Studies at Ghent University, Belgium (2017-2019). He was an assistant professor of international relations at the School of Humanities and Social Sciences, United States International University, Africa in Nairobi, Kenya (2015-2017). In addition to academic research, David has worked as a consultant for multinational companies, such as the Royal Dutch Philips and international organisations, such as the Mastercard Foundation. Since 2019, he has been a member of the advisory board of the European Research Council (ERC)’s project on ‘Globalised memorial museum: Exhibiting atrocities in the era of claims for moral universals’, based at the Austrian Academy of Sciences.
Mpho Ndebele
holds a BA in Economics and an MSW in Social Planning. She has worked mainly with non-profit organisations and has served on many boards, including the Desmond Tutu HIV Foundation. She is Research Assistant for the Andrew Mellon Moerane Critical Edition project at Africa Open Institute, Stellenbosch University.
Chwayita Ngamlana
has a Master’s degree in Creative Writing (with distinction) and a controversial novel, If I Stay Right Here, published by Blackbird Books – an imprint of Jacana Media. Her novel was named one of the best books of 2017 by The Sunday Times. It was also long-listed for the Barry Ronge Fiction Prize in 2018. She has given writing seminars at Witwatersrand and has been guest lecturing for the Master’s in Creative Writing (MACW) course at Rhodes University since 2018. In 2019, she was one of the writers chosen to contribute an essay towards the now popular and highly recommended book – Black Tax. Until recently, she hosted her own ‘Sex & Sexuality’ radio show and managed the marketing department at Rhodes Music Radio. She is currently working on her second novel.
Lindokuhle Nkosi
is a writer from South Africa whose textual work often merges with installation and performance. She has written for numerous local and international publications, and has curated exhibitions and projects in galleries and in the public space. While floating across different genres – journalistic, reflective, experimental – her work is consistently insightful, rich in textures, and engaged with realities. She completed her MA in Creative Writing with UCKAR (the University Currently Known As Rhodes).
Akin Omotoso
is one of the successful actors and directors in the South African film and entertainment industry. He was born in Nigeria, and he was raised in Ile Ife in Osun State. Akin Omotoso father, Kole Omotoso, is a famous writer. In 1992, he relocated to South Africa together with the rest of the family. While he was still at the University of Cape Town, Akin joined the television and film industry in South Africa. The movies that this talented actor has starred in include: A Reasonable Man, Gums & Noses and Blood Diamond. In 2006, he directed this short film, Jesus and the Giant: He directed the award winning feature film Man on Ground in 2011 followed by Tell Me Sweet Something (2015) and Vaya (2016).
Pluto Panoussis
has been an architect, a designer, an illustrator, an educator, and a filmmaker. He has directed a number of award-winning productions, which span a range of media, including film, television and the stage. He has co-written and directed two television series, exhibited as a fine artist with five solo exhibitions to his name, and has designed and headed publicity campaigns for over a hundred local and international theatre productions. As an educator, he established the School of Film Arts at The Open Window (Institute for Arts & Digital Sciences) and was instrumental in developing the Bachelor of Film Arts degree (the first of its kind in the world). In 2012 he launched The Creative Hub – a postgraduate design and media laboratory, and from 2016 –early 2018 occupied the position of Dean of Academics at the Open Window. Recently he has developed Creativity Thinking and Depth Creativity courses, and is in the process of establishing the first Creative Arts University in Zambia. iMPAC (the Initiative for Motion Pictures within the African Continent), founded by him in 2009, is part of his ongoing commitment towards fostering a culture of exploration in the moving image and affiliated creative disciplines.
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.
Daniel-Ben Pienaar
was born in South Africa, where he made his debut aged 14 playing Liszt’s First Piano Concerto. He studied at the Royal Academy of Music where he won the Queen’s Commendation in 1997. He divides his time between studying and reading, performing and recording, and teaching at the Academy. His international recital appearances have included cycles of works by Bach, Mozart, Beethoven, Schubert and Chopin. Over the last fifteen years he has begun recording that repertoire, with much interest in the special artistic possibilities that the studio affords. His discography includes much-praised traversals Bach’s ‘48’ and Mozart’s complete Piano Sonatas, the first complete recordings of the keyboard works of Orlando Gibbons and of the mature piano works of South African composer Arnold Van Wyk, and both the Goldberg and Diabelli Variations. His most recent release is a complete Beethoven Sonata cycle which is proving more controversial than his previous publications.
Levy Pooe
born 1994 is a Johannesburg based Visual Artist currently working in the mediums of paint and charcoal. Interrogating the idea of Art as a social diary, a public diary of a black being in the city.
Leonhard Praeg
is the head of the Philosophy Department at the University of Pretoria. His works in the domains of African Political Philosophy and Higher Education. He published his first philosophical novel entitled Imitation in 2017 (UKZN Press, South Africa).
Steven Robins
is a professor in the Department of Sociology and Social Anthropology at the University of Stellenbosch. He has written on a wide range of topics, including the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, the politics of land and identity, and social movements and popular politics in South Africa. Apart from his academic writings, he also is a regular newspaper op-ed contributor on issues of public concern. His book Letters of Stone was published in 2016.
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.
Mamta Sagar
is a noted Kannada poet, playwright and translator from Bengaluru, India. Her writings focus on identity politics, feminism, issues around linguistic and cultural diversities. She delves into the sounds and music innate to Kannada language and intersects her poetry performances with multimedia, multilingual and collaborative projects. Mamta is actively involved with international translation projects like the Commonwealth Writers Translation Network, Literature Across Frontiers, Poets Translating Poets and Melding Voices. Her translation of Elif Shfak’s The Forty Rules of Love in Kannada is conferred with the prestigious Bhashabharathi Translation Award 2019. She was the Charles Wallace India Trust fellowship for the year 2015. Mamta has worked with Hyderabad Central University and Bangalore University where she has taught Comparative Literature, Translation Studies, Kannada Literature, Feminism, Postcolonial and Cultural Studies.
Ruby Kwasiba Savage
moved from her hometown Amsterdam to London in 2007, where she worked behind the counter at Honest Jon’s Records and managed record label Sounds Signature, where she also created the Wildheart Recordings sister label. Much of Brownswood Recording’s recent success has been down to her stewardship as label manager from 2016-2018, while personal exploits have taken her to the dance floor with her In Flames post-punk disco party and a monthly show on NTS and internationally playing clubs and festivals around the world. Low lights, solid subs and sweaty peoples that come to dance, have fun and shake off any ’n’ all bad juju to get back in sync with themselves and each other… That’s the kind of dance Ruby lives for. Follow her on:
Dick Tuinder
born in 1963 is a film maker, fine artist, cartoonist, novelist and, more recently Consulent for the Netherlands Film Fund.
Johan Van Wyk
was born in Jansen Street, in the suburb Dagbreek of the mining town, Welkom in 1956. He studied at the University of the Witwatersrand in 1975, leaving the university at the end of 1976, fleeing the country as objector to military service. His first volume of poetry Deur die oog van die luiperd was published in 1976. He lived in Swaziland in a tent for a few months and was arrested during a return to his parents farm in 1977. He returned to university and completed his BA and Hons degree. He then enrolled at Rhodes University for an MA degree, which was eventually changed into a Ph.D. In 1989 he compiled, with Pieter Conradie and Nic Konstandaras, the anthology SA in poësie/ SA in poetry. His English novel Man Bitch(2001) is about the people of the Point Area, in Durban. He had a stroke in 2002, and about two months later was attacked in his flat by a lover. His output diminished dramatically after this.
Dara Waldron
is an Irish-based writer and researcher. He is a lecturer in Critical and Contextual Studies at the School of Art and Design, Limerick Institute of Technology. He is author of the recently published New Nonfiction Film, Art, Poetry and Documentary Theory (2018). His research focuses predominately on film and visual art; in particular the relationship between fiction and creative nonfiction film.
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.”
Tom Whyman
I recently completed my PhD in Philosophy at the University of Essex, where I currently lecture as a Part-Time Teacher. My thesis was on the concepts of Freedom and Nature in Adorno and John McDowell. I have research interests in Frankfurt School critical theory, contemporary neo-Aristotelian ethical naturalism, and Kierkegaard (especially Kierkegaard’s social and political thought). Previously I studied at the University of Manchester, where I completed an MRes thesis on Kant and McDowell.
Venicia Xoroloo Williams
is an Associate of the Genadendal Museum.
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 is now the Head of Digital Library Services at UCT Libraries. Zimmer occasionally lectures in theory and discourse of art, and gives workshops in video, sound and photography. He also works as an independent photographer and drummer. Zimmer has performed, exhibited and published in the fields of visual art studies, theory of photography and sound studies.
Manfred Zylla
was born in Germany when Adolf Hitler was in power, and came to South Africa in 1970 where he almost immediately produced work which was scathingly direct in its political and social content and highly critical of the National Party’s apartheid system. Zylla dealt directly with topical subjects of the day such as the Soweto uprisings of 1976 and the subsequent events of the turbulent 1980s. Zylla is particularly well-known for the series of drawings entitled Inter-action, which were shown at the Community Arts Centre in Cape Town in 1982. These works were all highly political in nature, but what was particularly novel about the exhibition was the fact that Zylla encouraged viewers to actually interact directly with the works themselves by writing and drawing on them. The participatory nature of this abolition of the traditional barriers between works of art and the viewers in an exhibition space resulted in an activist art that is peculiarly resonant of that period in South African history. Zylla continues to produce works on environmental themes, globalisation and other socio-political issues.