CONTRIBUTORS

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

Omoseye Bolaji

Nigerian-born, has been honoured with two Lifetime Achievement awards in recognition of his contributions to literature, especially in South Africa. Bolaji has published some 30 books comprising fiction, essays, poetry, criticism, biographies and drama. He has been conferred with the Chancellor’s Medal by the University of the Free State, and he was also bestowed with a major Chieftaincy title in Ibadanland (Nigeria) – all thanks to his writing career. Omoseye Bolaji is the creator and writer of the “Tebogo mystery series” books which feature the sleuth-protagonist, Tebogo Mokoena. A film documentary on Bolaji, titled Home away from home has been produced by the Big Fish film-makers in Johannesburg. In 2020 Bolaji was presented with the Exquisite Calabash award in Ikire, Nigeria.

Barbara Boswell

is an Associate Professor and Head of the Department of English Literary Studies at the University of Cape Town. An academic who positions herself at the intersection of creative and more scholarly forms of knowledge production, Barbara is the author of And Wrote My Story Anyway: Black South African Women’s Fiction as Feminism (2020) and Grace: A Novel (2017), winner of the University of Johannesburg’s Debut Creative Writing Prize. She holds a PhD in Women’s Studies from the University of Maryland, where she studied as a Fulbright Fellow. Barbara also held a position as an ACLS Postdoctoral Fellow at the Woodson Institute for African-American and African Studies at the University of Virginia in 2011-2013. Her areas of teaching and research expertise include African women’s writing, Black Diasporic feminist writing, queer theory, creative writing, Black women’s literary tradtions, and postcolonial studies. Barbara is a member of the board of Agenda and the pan-Africanist literary journal, Imbiza.

Anthony Burgess

(1917-1993) was one of the most prolific literary figures of the 20th century, producing a large number of novels, plays, biographies, screenplays, criticism, and articles.

Kevin Davidson

Teta Diana

was born in Kenya and raised in Uganda before returning to Rwanda after the ’94 genocide, she composed her first song at age 11 – a love song for her late father Frazier Birangwa, a Rwandan poet, playwright and professor of literature. She launched her professional music career in 2012 when was selected to represent Rwanda in a leading East African music competition in Kenya. The following year, she joined the acclaimed Rwandan traditional band Gakondo Group as the group’s first and only female artist. While performing traditional songs at numerous local, national and regional events through Gakondo Group, she simultaneously developed a solo career, eventually attempting to merge the two worlds of Afro-pop and traditional music. During her solo career, Teta has written and recorded Afro-pop songs that blend her native Kinyarwanda with English, French and Swahili.

Mladen Dolar

was born in 1951 in Maribor, Slovenia, and is a senior research fellow in the Department of Philosophy at the University of Ljubljana, Slovenia, and a professor of philosophy at The European Graduate School / EGS. Dolar’s area of research is within German classical philosophy, German idealism, theoretical psychoanalysis, structuralism, and the philosophy of music and film. Together with Slavoj Žižek and Rastko Močnik, Dolar founded the infamous “Ljubljana School of Psychoanalysis” in the late 1970s. Their aim was, and continues to be, to combine German Idealism (Hegel in particular), Marxism (with and through the Frankfurt School), and the psychoanalytic theories of Jacques Lacan and Structuralism as a form of analysis in addressing contemporary issues. The author of ten books in Slovenian, Mladen Dolar is perhaps best known internationally for Opera’s Second Death (co-authored with Slavoj Žižek, Routledge, 2001) and A Voice and Nothing More (MIT Press, 2006). In the former, “a passionate exploration of opera––the genre, its masterpieces, and the nature of death,” the two authors “explore the strange compulsions that overpower characters in Mozart and Wagner as well as our own desires to die and to go to the opera.”

Inge Engelbrecht

completed her master’s degree (cum laude) at Stellenbosch University in March 2017. 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. Inge’s current PhD research is focused on the Afrikaans koortjie tradition in the coloured churches of the Western Cape, a tradition that is part of the cultural narrative of a community that is a largely unexplored field of research. Inge is currently part of the research team of the project called The Genadendal Music Collections Catalogue (GMCC) that aims to create a fully accessible online database of the music collections kept in the Moravian Mission Museum in Genadendal.

Stan Engelbrecht

is a photographer, publisher and organizer of Tour of Ara, Karoobaix and Eroica South Africa. Stan has also co-authored a book on South African bicycle culture – Bicycle Portraits. He is also the publisher of the best-seller African Salad.

Garth Erasmus

is a visual artist and musician whose work focuses on SA`s indigenous people, the KhoiSan, which is his heritage. Originally from the Eastern Cape he now lives and works in Kraaifontein (outside Cape Town). He taught at the Zonnebloem Children`s Art Centre, District Six in Cape Town, from 1982-1997. Garth is part of the activist music and poetry group, Khoi Khonnexion, who toured European music theatre festivals in 2018-19 with the production House of Falling Bones which is based on the Namibian genocide of the Nama and Herero people by the German colonialists. He is also part of the free-jazz group As Is and Riempie Vasmaak. Garth’s sonic collaboration with flutist Esther Marié Pauw enacts forms of decolonial aesthesis, and interventionist curating amidst publics, institutions, art, and music-making. Garth is also a member of the Khoisan Gypsy Band whose theatre production Die Poet Wie`s Hy? on the work of Adam Small won Best Production at the Woordfees 2020. Garth`s visual art has been extensively collected by the Smithsonian Institute of African Art in Washington, USA, but he is not represented in the collections of any South African institution or collection.

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.

Vadim Filatov

is a modern Russian philosopher-nihilist. Born in 1964 in a city of Dushanbe (Tajikistan, Central Asia). In 1987 he graduated from the Moscow State University (The History Department). Qualification work deals with “The Historical views of Dostoevsky”. In 1990-1994 he attended postgraduate courses at Moscow State University (The Philosophy Department). In 1994 Vadim Filatov finished the courses and got his PhD in philosophy. After that he spent some years teaching philosophy and history in different high schools of Russia. In 2007 the Publishing House of the Saratov University released Vadim Filatov’s book, titled: “Antiphilosophy, or the Notes of an Underground Paradoxalist”. Also, Vadim Filatov is the author of philosophical long-essays: “The Book of Non-Existence” (2009), “The Warriors of Void” (2010) and “Ethics of Nothingness. Life without Meaning: The Most Sad Philosophy” (2019). Now he continues to investigate a problem of life sense in a context of his own philosophy of not-existence.

Dr. Nikki Franklin

is a professional musician working as a composer, performer and educator across a range of musical styles. In 2020, Franklin completed a PhD in composition, creating a portfolio of works for the concert accordion, ranging from fully notated scores, exploring degrees of improvisation, concluding in a fully improvised concert for accordion, voice, poet and tap dancer. Franklin’s works have been performed in the UK, Italy and France and she has ongoing collaborations with artists across a range of disciplines.

Teshome Gabriel

(September 24, 1939 – June 14, 2010) was an Ethiopian-born cinema scholar and professor at the UCLA School of Theater, Film and Television in Los Angeles. A leading film theorist, he died of cardiac arrest in 2010 aged 70. Gabriel was an authority in the study of third world and postcolonial cinemas. The third cinema movement began in Latin America among radical, anti-capitalist filmmakers determined to combat what they saw as the rampantly commercial and colonising influences of Hollywood films. Teshome was among the first to extend the political aims of “third cinema” into critical contexts. His book Third Cinema in the Third World: The Aesthetic of Liberation (1982) remains a seminal work. Other publications include Otherness and the Media (1993) and Third Cinema: Exploration of Nomadic Aesthetics & Narrative Communities (2009).

Abigail George

is a Port Elizabeth-based blogger, essayist, poet and Pushcart Prize nominee short story writer. Recipient of two grants from the National Arts Council in Johannesburg, one from the Centre for the Book in Cape Town and another from ECPACC in East London, she briefly studied film at the Newtown Film and Television School in Johannesburg.

Adam Glasser

was born on the 20th September, 1955 in Cambridge, England, then later moved to Johannesburg with his family where he spent his childhood and teen years. Being the son of South African composer and music director Stanley ‘Spike’ Glasser, his father influenced him musically, handing him his first harmonica at the age of 17.  Adam however, would only learn to play the harmonica 10 years later and instead became a pianist that occasionally played at small time gigs and cruise chips. Adam returned to England in the 70’s to study and graduated with a BA (Hons) in European Literature, and afterwards decided to move to Paris to pursue and study jazz piano. In 1990 he became the lead pianist and musical director of acclaimed South African vocal group ‘The Manhattan Brothers’ for the following 16 years. During this time, Adam progressively focused on the chromatic harmonica, enhancing his skill and specialization which presented the opportunity to perform and record with key film composers and pop stars. Although Adam made waves musically, he only recorded his first debut album in 2009, Free at First, which won him the SAMA for best contemporary album.

Yvette Hardie 

is a theatre director, producer, and educator active in the world of theatre and performance, with a focus on children and youth. She initiated the launch of ASSITEJ SA in 2007 and leads the organisation as Director. She is currently serving her third term (2011 – 2021) as President of the international ASSITEJ, which operates in close to 100 countries. In these capacities, she creates opportunities for artistic exchange, mentorship, skills development and cross-cultural collaboration across the world, while working to invigorate the South African theatrical landscape with work of the highest quality and widest accessibility. She is valued for her work in Arts Education, having written national curricula and textbooks for both Dramatic and Creative Arts, and having been involved in teacher training over a period of some 15 years. Yvette also runs workshops in a variety of aspects related to theatre, including a focus on voice and speech, and is a certified teacher of the Lessac technique. She has an MA in Theatre Practice from the Tshwane University of Technology. She currently serves as Deputy Chairperson of the STAND Foundation and of Im4theArts. She was awarded the Mickey Miner Award for Lifetime Achievement from IPAY (International Performing Arts for Youth) for her contribution to theatre for young audiences locally and globally.

Ngoma Hill

is a performance poet, multi-instrumentalist, singer / songwriter, and paradigm shifter, who for over fifty years has used culture as a tool to raise socio-political and spiritual consciousness through work that encourages critical thought. A former member of Amiri Baraka’s The Spirit House Movers and Players and the contemporary freedom song duo Serious Bizness, he weaves poetry and song that raise contradictions and searches for a solution to a just and peaceful world. Ngoma was selected as the Beat Poet Laureate of New York for 2017 by The National Beat Poetry Foundation. Conversation with Esu, his latest CD, features poetry, jazz, funk, reggae, and blues. His poem “USDA Certified Nutracide” is included in Birds Fall Silent in the Mechanical Sea.

Sean Jacobs

is associate professor of international affairs at the Julien J. Studley Graduate Programs in International Affairs at The New School. He is founder and editor of Africa is a Country, a site of criticism, analysis and new writing. His book Media in Postapartheid South Africa: Postcolonial Politics in the Age of Globalization, was published on May Day 2019.

Aleksandar Jevtić

was born in 1978. He graduated illustration in 2002 and worked in the advertising industry till 2008. He is active in the Belgrade art scene, using his illustrator background to create highly improvised mixed media storytelling drawings that reflect his relationship with urban spaces and local communities, their everyday life and mythology that surrounds them. He does his research, exploring the city on foot, discovering abandoned, forgotten and liminal spaces, taking pictures and talking to the people who live there and other urban explorers. His work deals with relationships of people, animals, animate and inanimate objects, cybernetics, imaginary and mythological entities, deliberately blurring the definitions and borderlines of all of these.

Bambatha Jones (Mongezi Mcelu)

is a multi-disciplinary artist, photographer and art director based in Diepkloof Soweto.

Lynthia Julius

is gebore op Springbok, het grootgeword in Kimberley en woon tans in Bloemfontein. Sy beskik oor ’n honneursgraad in filosofie van die Universiteit van die Vrystaat. In 2018 is sy bekroon as die wenner in die Afrikaans­taalkategorie in die Avbob-digkunskompetisie. Uit die Kroes is haar debuutbundel.

Aryan Kaganof

is curator and editor of herri. His novel Die Wrede Relaas van Vuilgat en Stilte was recently published by Naledi

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.

Ikeraam Korana

is Chief at People of the South

Lawrence Kramer

(born 1946) is an American musicologist and composer. His academic work is closely associated with the humanistic, culturally oriented New Musicology, now more often referred to as cultural or critical musicology. Writing in 2001, Alastair Williams described Kramer as a pioneering figure in the disciplinary change that brought musicology, formerly an outlier, into the broader fold of the humanities.

Lizabé Lambrechts

is a Volkswagen Stiftung Research Fellow, partnered between Africa Open, Institute for Music, Research and Innovation (Stellenbosch University), the School for Oriental and African Studies (University of London), and the British Library and Archive. She completed her PhD in 2012 on five South African music archives as sites where embedded notions of power and politics become visible. During her post-doctoral work, she has published and worked with a variety of media and contexts in order to explore notions of archive, its impact on the present and our understanding of the constructions of history. Whereas her work is historically concerned with re-inscribing marginalized voices into the historical record, it is also aware that institutional and personal archives harbor the potential to reinvent and to look at things anew.

Olga Leonard

studied BMus (Performing Arts) at the University of Pretoria under the tutelage of Prof. Joseph Stanford. She continued her MMus (Performing Arts) at the University of Pretoria where she also presented a mini thesis on the String Quartet of Graham Newcater. Olga received master classes from Joseph Banowetz (USA), Adam Wodnicki (Poland – USA) and Jan Kadlubiski (Poland). She also completed the UNISA Performers Licentiate and was chosen for the UNISA Overseas Music Bursary Competition. Since January 2009 Olga has lived in Cape Town. She is the head of the music department of the Wynberg Girls School.

Christine 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.

Deon Maas

is a South African writer, producer, music and media manager best known as the author of books: Witboy in Africa, Melk die Heilige Koeie and Witboy in Berlin. He was born and raised in Cape Town South Africa. He was a judge on Afrikaanse Idols season 1 in 2006. He’s also the producer of Punk in Africa, a reality show ‘Gulder Ultimate Search’ in Nigeria, Jam Sandwich and Fortuinsoekers. Deon is passionate about two things: being creative and driving his insatiable ambition. He was a journalist in the 80s and had a strong interest in music, but it was after discovering hip hop in 1985 that he began to work for record companies. Later in the 90s, he discovered a special brand of hip hop originating from the Cape Flats. Between 1992 and 1998 he worked for Tusk Music as Music Manager and between 1998 and 2003 for Gallo Music as Marketing and later General Manager. He was also one of the presenters of the talk show Saturday Night on kykNET. Shortly after his first column was published in Rapport, he was fired after a viral boycott campaign was emailed and texted against him and Rapport was launched. The campaign arose following a statement made by Maas in his first column in which he wrote about Satanism: “a religion that has the right to be practiced”.

Ignatia Madalane

Ignatia “Iggy” Madalane holds a BMus degree and an MA in music research from the University of the Witwatersrand with a dissertation titled, “Ximatsatsa: Exploring Genre in Contemporary Tsonga Popular Music.” Ignatia worked as a tutor at Wits School of Arts and later joined Unisa as a lecturer in 2014-2019. Iggy has presented papers in nation and internal conferences, and has published the following articles: ‘Tsonga Popular Music: Negotiating Ethnic identity in ‘Global’ Music Practices’, in the Journal of Musical Arts in Africa (2014);  ‘From Paul to Penny: The Emergence and Development of Tsonga Disco (1985-1990s)’ in the African Music Journal (2015). Wenzani wena? Riffing on ‘genres will not be mixed’ (2018) in SAMUS. Her research interests include, popular music, genre, indigenous knowledge systems, ‘traditional music’, gender, sexuality, race, culture, language, identity, and music and spirituality.

Daniel Martin

is Assistant Professor (Tenured), at MacEwan University, Department of English. He received his Ph.D in 2007 from the University of Western Ontario. Supervisor: Dr. Christopher Keep. Dissertation Title: Victorian Bodies in Motion: Literature, Technology, Kinetics 1850-1900. 2001: M.A. in English, University of Victoria, Canada. 1999: B.A. in English, University of Victoria, Canada. Current Book Project: The Stammerer’s Complaint: An Archaeology of Victorian Dysfluency.

Tafadzwa Michael Masudi

(b1988) is a Zimbabwean born self-taught artist who lives and works in Cape Town. He specialises in painting and sewing. He started painting at the age of 16 in Harare while assisting a friend of the family who introduced him to the visual arts. In 2010 he migrated to South Africa and in 2020, having been laid off from a job in a clothing factory, he started painting full time to reflect on his environmental and social experiences as a foreigner in a new country.

Axmed Maxamed

is a queer diasporic Somali activist, organiser and music nerd, Axmed Maxamed is also co-founder of Dance with Pride, an initiative aiming to re-unify dance music with its queer roots and raise money for grass roots initiatives through parties and the sale of Dance with Pride T-shirts. Axmed is also a co-curator of the music compilation Place: The Netherlands – raising funds for and awareness around LGBTQIA+ refugees, co-organised the first Somali LGBTQIA+ gatherings in the Netherlands and is engaged in a project digitally archiving the lives of queer Somalis in the diaspora and Somalia, both past and present.

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.

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.

Masixole Mlandu

is the youngest of three children. He is a post-liberation ‘millennial’, born and raised in Khayelitsha, a “place [according to him] designed to host cheap, dispossessed, black labour” and “an example of our dispossession and conquest as black people”. He was parented by a single, independent mother employed as a domestic worker. Mlandu’s political activism dates back well before his time at UCT when he became involved with the Pan Africanist Congress of Azania. Within the PAC, he “began to find expression and to understand the deeper existential crisis”. Since 2013, he has studied Political Science at UCT. He describes his experience at UCT with three words: “It was alienating.” Therefore, in 2015, he became a founder member of the #RhodesMustFall and #FeesMustFall movements. He was a leader of the “Shackville Protest” on campus initiated on 15 February 2016. Masixole defaced the bust of Jan Smuts above the entrance to Smuts Hall and painted ‘slogans’ (‘F**K WHITE PEOPLE!!’ and ‘UCT IS A SITE OF CONQUEST’) on the UCT War Memorial commemorating members of the UCT community who had perished in WWI as well as those who had died fighting Nazism in WWII. As a result, he and other Shackville Fallists were expelled and were required to pay UCT’s costs including those of two legal counsel.

Kneo Mokgopa

Kneo Mokgopa is a graduate of the Wilfred & Jules Kramer Law School at the University of Cape Town. They are currently writing their Masters in Rhetoric Studies at UCT on South African identity systems and are the Communications Manager at the Nelson Mandela Foundation. Kneo has been publishing since 2016 in Daily Maverick, The Cape Times, The Sunday Times, Amandla! Magazine and Hola Africa magazine and has published a chapter in We are No Longer at Ease: The Struggle for Free Education, and many other platforms.

Fana Mokoena

(born 13 May 1971) is a South African Film, television and theater actor, and a political activist who served as a Member of Parliament, first as a delegate to the National Council of Provinces representing his home province Free State from May 2014 until August 2016; then later as a full member of the National Assembly of South Africa between August 2016 and October 2020. Mokoena is a member of the Economic Freedom Fighters party and serves on the party’s central command team.

Msizi Moshoetsi

is a former freelance journalist and editor of magazines like Kis. and Golf Rennaisance, Msizi is also a poet, researcher, translator, subtitler, social commentator, filmmaker and scriptwriter who holds a B luris degree from the University of the North. He first trained as a scriptwriter with the then South African Scriptwriters Union. He went on to train with Sediba funded by the SABC and did an advanced course in scriptwriting with The Creative Industry sponsored by the Irish Embassy. He studied filmmaking at Monash University, Film and TV Unit and at Big Fish where he majored in scriptwriting and directing. In 2008, he had his first film Amazing Grace commissioned by the SABC. In 2009, he wrote and directed his second film A Travelling Salesman – The Story of Sello K Duiker, also commissioned by the SABC. He is the scriptwriter for the factual reality show Khumburekhaya on SABC1. A storyteller, he runs The Book of Barolong, a photographic, production and publishing studio aimed at encouraging people to tell their family histories and their personal stories by publishing their own books. He facilitates Isigungu, a forum which runs mentoring workshops for men. Passionate about African forms of spirituality and culture, he is the founder of Ingolobane Yethu (Our National Storehouse) aimed at researching and preserving a wealth of African indigenous knowledge systems.

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.

Kumkani Mtengwana

is a musician from Gqeberha with a Diploma in music education from NMU and a band leader of a group known as INKENKQE. Kumkani explores a multilayered fusion of music in his work with his band and has been a prominent musician since 2009.

Vulane Mthembu

born in Mpumalanga Hammardsale KZN. A photographer, musician, producer, blogger, DJ, remixer. Co-founder of the alternative group BIG FKN GUN (have performed at TEDxSoweto, Design Indaba etc). Member of the Red Bull Music Academy affiliated Touch is A Move collective. One of the organisers and co-coordinator of the Durban International Film Festival, JOMBA! Contemporary Dance Experience, Poetry Africa and Time of the Writer Festivals. Coder Dojo mentor, Mathematics and Science educator. A Pneumatic and industrial technician and ordained Dudeism priest. Have worked with Madala Kunene, Spoek Mathambo, Moonchild Sanelly, Busiswa Gqulu, OkMalumkoolkat, MXO amongst other. At your service.

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 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. He is also Publisher of herri.

Graham Newcater

was born in Johannesburg on 3 September 1941. Newcater is a 12-tone composer, with compositions in the genres of symphony, orchestral music, ballet, chamber music, and, most recently, solo piano.

Mphuthumi Ntabeni

contributes to various national and international publications, The Bulletin of the National Library of South Africa, The Johannesburg Review of Books. He also writes a column for the The Southern Cross and Spotlight.Africa. His historical novel, The Broken River Tent, has won the University of Johannesburg’s Debut Prize for South African writing in English. He has worked with the Rhodes University Drama department to stage two plays which he wrote about the life and times of the Xhosa chiefs, Maqoma and his half brother Sandile that were featured on the South Africa’s National Arts Festival. He is trained in the economics of built environment, reads history and literature as something more than a hobby.

Simbarashe Nyatsanza

is an exceptionally hard-working Biotechnologist with a keen interest in research and the scientific process. His hobbies include reading English literature as well as taking walks in the evening. He has conducted volunteer work at Shiloah Christian School, where he tutored Math, English and Physics. Since then, he has held roles as a journalist and editor for a student newspaper, as well as a Research Intern at ARC in Stellenbosch. His vision is to create a large Biotechnology company in Southern Africa that will cater to the health and nutritional needs of the region.

Pascale Obolo

is an independent film-maker, researcher, curator and editor-chief of the art magazine Afrikadaa. Born in Yaoundé́, Cameroon, she studied film production at the Conservatoire libre du cinéma Français and then gained a master’s degree at the University of Paris VIII in the department of experimental film. The feminist film-maker brings her own perspective to the portrayal of women in artistic contexts. Her films won prizes at numerous festivals. As an activist, her work throws the archives and memories into question and is dedicated to the themes of identity, exile, invisibility. Pascale Obolo is driven by passion for the visual arts to produce and stage “film objects”, because she refuses to be pigeonholed into a film genre. Her film Calypso Rose: Lioness of the Jungle won the silver Yennega prize at the Fespaco Festival in the documentary field in March 2013. Her latest work scrutinises archives through the construction of historical narratives from a postcolonial perspective, through visual and cultural representations of political and economic history, through photography, video and performance. Pascale Obolo is the founder of Afrikadaa, a magazine for contemporary African art. She is also director of the African Art Book Fair (AABF), an independent publishing fair that concentrates on practical editing skills and supports unique publications of a high quality.

Olu Oguibe

(born 14 October 1964) is a Nigerian-born American artist and intellectual. Professor of Art and African-American Studies at the University of Connecticut, Oguibe is a senior fellow of the Smithsonian Institution in Washington. He is also an art historian, art curator, and leading contributor to post-colonial theory and new information technology studies. Oguibe was honoured with the State of Connecticut Governor’s Arts Award for excellence and lifetime achievement on 15 June 2013. Over a multidimensional art career that spans nearly three decades, Oguibe, intersects the personal with the collective in his writings and paintings; he creates poignant narratives of which the human condition is the central leitmotif. He acts as a seer, a troubled recluse, or a confident bohemian at home in a perilous world.

Riaan Oppelt

is from Paarl, and teaches English and Film Studies at Stellenbosch University. He lives in Cape Town and likes to imagine its apocalyptic reckoning in his creative work. He writes plays, short stories and has released a few albums. He is in three or four bands at any time, all of them making original music and one of them shooting for Afrorock, in which Cape Town gets its apocalyptic reckoning. When he isn’t trying to figure out what coloured identity means, his academic writing tries to focus on post-truth, the attention economy and Cape Town’s apocalyptic reckoning.

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.

Esther Marie Pauw

is an artistic researcher with Africa Open Institute for Music, Research and Innovation (AOI) at Stellenbosch University (South Africa), where she coordinates the AOI Sonic Residencies programme. She is a recipient of a 2020 Stellenbosch University postdoctoral award for excellence in research. Her PhD in artistic research (2015) examined perspectives on interventionist curating in classical flute music concert practice, using geo-political aspects of landscape as a lens for curations. Her subsequent work engaged mapping practices and site-specific aspects of music-making as interventionist curating amidst publics, institutions, art, history and music-making. During 2020 she was a visiting scholar and artist in residence at Stellenbosch Institute for Advanced Studies (STIAS), as part of the Xnau-Xnau duo research project with sonic and visual Khoi artivist Garth Erasmus.

Tracy Payne

is a visual artist and teacher, living in Pinelands and working from her studio in Woodstock, Cape Town. She is also an avid gardener and anthophile, hunting and gathering endemic wild flower seed to re-wild her garden and suburban surrounds.  Payne holds a degree in Fine Art from Michaelis School of Fine Art, University of Cape Town and an ASTAR (Accessing Spirit Through Art) Teaching Facilitator Certificate. She participates in group exhibitions on an ongoing basis and is currently preparing for her 9^th solo exhibition, Fragile Nature. Her interest in Eastern spirituality, sexuality and the dual nature of being are consistent threads in her work. Through her investigative tools, painting and drawing, Payne merges and blurs the divide between figuration and abstraction, freedom and bondage, sacred and profane.

Nicki Priem

is a producer and director of commercials, films and stills. He is the owner of Mad Little Badger.

Megan-Godfrey Prins

from Riversdale, South Africa, has performed as soloist and collaborative artist in North America, Europe, Africa, and Hong Kong. Prins featured in various local and international piano competitions, including the Honens International Piano Competition, the Hong Kong International Piano Competition, the UNISA National and International Piano Competitions, and the Midwest International Piano Competition. Prins made his concerto debut at the age of 11. He has appeared as soloist with orchestras in Germany, the USA, Botswana, and South Africa. In 2019, Prins was named the Standard Bank Young Artist for Music. During Stellenbosch University’s centennial celebrations, Prins was listed among the one hundred most notable graduates from the institution. Prins currently serves as full-time piano lecturer on the faculty of the University of Pretoria: School of the Arts. He pursued postgraduate studies with Antonio Pompa-Baldi at the Cleveland Institute of Music where he was awarded the Sadie Zellen Piano Prize, the Arthur Loesser Memorial Prize, and the Maurice and Judith Kaplow Prize for Uncommon Creativity.

Phiwokazi Qoza

is Humanities in Africa (HUMA) Doctoral research fellow at UCT. She holds an MA in Political and International Studies from Rhodes University. Her research is focused on protest performance, affect, and place / space. Her research delves into sex work in the digital era with the migration of sex work to audio-visual content subscription sites such as OnlyFans during the COVID-19 lockdown as a field of study. Ms. Qoza is also a Ph.D. trainee with Human Sciences Research Council (HSRC).

Matthys Rennela

is a researcher at CWI. He did his undergraduate and graduate studies at Université Paris 7 Diderot, and his PhD at Radboud University under the joint supervision of Prof. Bart Jacobs (Radboud) and Prof. Sam Staton (Oxford). His postdoctoral work is currently supported by Ronald de Wolf. Rennela has a broad interest for the foundations of quantum computing, and in particular for the identification of the logical and mathematical structures which describe quantum algorithms. His research includes category theory, operator theory, domain theory, semantics of programming languages, and more recently quantum complexity.

Dr. Bridget Renni-Salonen, PhD

is a performer, lecturer, researcher, and musicians’ health practitioner. Bridget is an artist who is passionate about both the meaning of the performing arts in society and the meaning of the performing arts for the artists themselves. An award-winning flautist and an experienced educator, she is a sought-after pedagogue. Her interdisciplinary research and leadership in musicians’ health (including education, prevention, and rehabilitation) and optimal artistic performance, is ground-breaking for South Africa. Bridget is Postdoctoral Fellow and Part-time Lecturer at Stellenbosch University and is a Licensed Body Mapping Educator and Training Mentor.

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.

Thomas Rome

is an American producer, manager, collector, and lawyer active in various disciplines in the arts.He is especially known, in music, for his innovative work in the careers of Senegal’s Youssou N’Dour, South Africa’s Abdullah Ibrahim, and Pakistan’s Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan. Icons in their respective national musical cultures, all three have had global impact. He has also guided a new generation of talent in jazz, classical, and “world music,” in cinema, and in the visual and plastic arts.

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.

Frédéric Salles

Fred is from Marseille – France and has lived in Cape Town, his second home, for 14 years. He is a sound engineer in the film industry and has worked extensively on the African Continent. He is now based in Nairobi, Kenya. Fred is the president of the cultural exchanges association Le Sud de l’Autre since 1997 in France, organizing cultural events, exhibitions, concerts and producing music recordings with artists from Southern Africa. He is also a musician and guitarist.

Ari Sitas

is a dramatist, writer and sociologist who has worked on a range of media that connect art to public life. In the last decade he has worked extensively with music composers and performers whether through the Insurrections Ensemble or the AfroAsia Ensemble. His latest published work is an Oratorio of Small Things that Fall Like a Screw in the Night. (2020: Tulika Press, India, Columbia University Press).

Eugene Skeef

is a South African percussionist, composer, poet and educator. He also works in conflict resolution, acts as a consultant on cultural development, teaches creative leadership and is a broadcaster. In 2003 he founded Umoya Creations, a charity set up to facilitate this international work. As a young activist, he worked alongside the anti-apartheid leader Steve Biko and co-led a nation-wide literacy campaign teaching in schools, colleges and communities across South Africa. Eugene is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts and has served on the board of directors of the London Philharmonic Orchestra (LPO).

Michael Taussig

teaches anthropology at Columbia University. He is the author of The Devil and Commodity  Fetishism (1980); Shamanism, Colonialism, and the Wild Man (1987); The Nervous System (1992); Mimesis and Alterity (1993); Law in a Lawless Land (1993); and My Cocaine Museum (2004).

Trevor Steele Taylor

is a Film Festival Director, Programme Curator, Writer, Filmmaker and Theorist – born in 1952 in Cape Town and educated (Bachelor of Arts) at the University of Cape Town in Philosophy, Classics, Drama, English Literature and Fine Art History. In 1975 he was part of the collective who turned the Labia Theatre in Cape Town into a repertory cinema and programmed the venue on and off until 1979. During this period he was also a Film Critic for the Cape Times. In London he worked for a year at the Gate Cinemas in Notting Hill Gate and Bloomsbury before returning to South Africa to take up the position of programmer at the Cape Town International Film Festival, a position he held until the late eighties when he became programmer at the Durban Film Festival and later the Weekly Mail & Guardian Film and Co-Director of the Limits of Liberty Anti-Censorship Festival. He took over as Director of the Cape Town International Film Festival in 1999. From 1999 to 2017 he was the Curator for Film at the National Arts Festival in Grahamstown. He is the Recipient of the Pangolin Fellowship for ‘Outstanding contribution to the Film Arts’ (2016).

Neil Tennant

(born 10 July 1954) is an English musician, singer, songwriter and music journalist, and co-founder of the synthpop duo Pet Shop Boys, which he formed with Chris Lowe in 1981. He was a journalist for Smash Hits, and assistant editor for the magazine in the mid-1980s.

Timbah

is Anime Clips. Lefty Politics. Sadboy Trap Beats.

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.

Arnold Van Wyk

(26 April 1916 – 27 March 1983) was a South African art music composer, one of the first notable generation of such composers. Despite the strict laws imposed by the apartheid government during his lifetime, van Wyk’s homosexuality was ignored by the authorities throughout his career due to the nationalistic nature of his music.

Zukiswa Wanner

is a South African writer, editor, and publisher born in Zambia, raised in Zimbabwe and currently based in Kenya but who considers the whole African continent her home. Her debut novel, The Madams (2006), was shortlisted for the 2007 K.Sello Duiker Award in 2007. Her third novel Men of the South (2010) was shortlisted for the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize Best Book 2011 and the Herman Charles Bosman Award. In 2015, she won the K Sello Duiker Memorial Literary Award for London Cape Town Joburg (2014). In 2020, she was awarded the Goethe Medal alongside Ian McEwan and Elvira Espejo Ayca, making Wanner the first African woman to win the award.

Pierre-Henri Wicomb

is a South African composer based in Cape Town. He works in musical environments encompassing everything from theatre/film music to acoustic/electroacoustic art music. Wicomb’s music has featured at the Festival D’Automne (Paris), New York City Electronic Music Festival and International Computer Music Conference (Utrecht) among others. He completed post graduate studies at the Royal Conservatory in The Hague where he started experimenting with improvisation as choreographed sound movement. He is currently completing an opera as part of his PhD at the Africa Open Institute, examining relational aspects in psychoanalysis to inform the compositional process in working with free improvisers.

Ilze Wolff

is an architect working in Cape Town. She co-directs Wolff Architects with Heinrich Wolff, a practice that is concerned with developing an architecture of consequence. In 2007 she co-founded Open House Architecture a research practice concerned with documenting architecture of Southern Africa. In 2013 she completed a Masters in Heritage and Public Culture at UCT with the thesis dissertation titled Unstitching Rex Trueform, an interdisciplinary study of the Rex Trueform garment manufacturing factory in Salt River, Cape Town. In 2016 the manuscript won the first edition of the International L’erma C prize, Rome and she is now working on preparing the manuscript for publication.

Paul Zisiwe

is 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, Paul finds his craft becoming a social barometer, where remembering is an act of activism in an era of forgetting.