CONTRIBUTORS

Gwen Ansell

is a freelance music writer, cultural industries researcher, media consultant and writing coach. Her work appears in multiple publications ranging from online news platforms, magazines and newspapers to scholarly books and journals. She is the author of, among others, the music history Soweto Blues: jazz, popular music and politics in South Africa, and blogs at www.sisgwenjazz.com.

Max Annas

worked as a journalist before he changed career path and started writing highly successful novels. A renowned film critic, his first novel, The Farm, is currently under film production in South Africa. Catalyst Press also released The Farm into North America and South Africa (via LAPA) in 2020. Annas used to live in South Africa where he taught at the university of Fort Hare, before returning to his homeland. He still visits South Africa regularly.

Malaika wa Azania

(born 19 October 1991as Malaika Lesego Samora Mahlatsi), is a South African writer, political commentator, essayist, blogger, columnist and television presenter. She is also a self-proclaimed feminist. In 2014, she published her first book Memoirs of a Born Free. The book describes her family history, beginning with her grandmother’s life, then her mother, and finally her own. The book is framed as a letter to the ANC to both thank and criticize the party on the development of South Africa since 1994. Primarily, wa Azania details her disillusionment with the concept of the “Rainbow Nation” and being a “Born Free.”

Djo BaNkuna

is a 47-year-old businessman born and raised in Tzaneen, Limpopo. He has a masters degree in cultural anthropology from the University of Sussex in the UK. He also studied political sciences at the University of Witwatersrand and did management courses at the University of Stellenbosch Business School.

Vonani Bila

writes poems in Xitsonga and English. He is the founding editor of the Timbila poetry journal and founder of Timbila Writers’ Village, a rural retreat centre for writers. He teaches in the Department of Languages at the University of Limpopo. He is a PhD (Creative Writing) at Wits University.

Hilton Biscombe

friend, writer, filmmaker and keeper of memories in Stellenbosch, born in 1953 in what is now called Ryneveld Lodge, passed away on 26 April 2022. As researchers at Africa Open Institute, we remember Hilton Frank Biscombe for the significant impact that he had as a keeper of memories in Stellenbosch. Hilton’s compiled book about Stellenbosch’s histories of forced removals, In ons Bloed (2006), provided the model for the Eoan community-written book, published as Eoan – Our Story (2013).

Blaq Pearl

(Janine van Rooy-Overmeyer) from Cape Town, started writing poetry and songs at the age of 12. Her musical genre is a fusion of Afro/Soul/Hiphop/Jazz/R&B. She is a cast member in the popular and award winning musical theatre productions Afrikaaps & A Plekkie in die son as well as Krotoa. Towards the end of 2011 she finally released her debut album titled Against All Odds. Blaq Pearl holds a Bachelor’s Degree in Psychology and Linguistics from the University of the Western Cape. 2015 marked the release of her first self published book Karadaaa!!! a collection of her poetry, stories and songs written in both English and Afrikaans. Her latest production is a one-woman show titled Storie van My Lewe.

Omoseye Bolaji

was born in Nigeria where he attended the Obafemi Awolowo University.  Over the years, he has published a great deal of fiction, poetry, drama, literary appreciation, and other general works. He is the creator and writer of the “Tebogo Mokoena Mystery series”. Among his accolades for writing, Bolaji has been conferred with the Chancellor’s Medal by the University of the Free State (2007), and the “Exquisite Calabash” at Ikire, Nigeria (2020). His latest published work is Books Bards and Barbs (2022).

Shane Cooper

is a bassist, composer and producer based in Johannesburg, South Africa. He is part of the new wave of South African Jazz artists pushing the music forward, and is also known for his work in the electronic/dance music world, as well as commissioned works for films and theatre. The projects he is currently leading are 6 piece Afro-jazz band Shane Cooper & MABUTA, cinematic 5-piece the Dinaledi Chamber Ensemble, and Card On Spokes. As a sideman you can find him in the Kyle Shepherd Trio, Thandi Ntuli’s live band, and Skyjack.  In the past he has also performed and/or recorded with artists like Zim Ngqawana, Shabaka Hutchings and Louis Moholo-Moholo.

Rafi Aliya Crockett

is a recovering academic turned policy nerd who really wishes she were an artist. To scratch that itch, she dabbles in visual art, nail art, jewelry making, interior design and film production. She currently resides in Washington, D.C. and is plotting her “Blaxit” from Amerikkka.

Dr Lindelwa Dalamba

is a Senior Lecturer teaching music history at the University of the Witwatersrand’s School of Arts, Department of Music. She is an historian of jazz, focussing specifically on South African jazz history in the country and in exile during the apartheid years. Her current research projects are on Todd Matshikiza and on South African jazz’s Afro-modernisms. She is currently the editor of SAMUS: South African Music Studies, and is a recipient of a National Research Foundation Thuthuka Grant (grant number 121910).

Finn Daniels-Yeoman

is from Brighton, UK, and has recently completed his AHRC-funded doctoral studies at the University of Glasgow. His PhD project focussed on the (de)colonial politics of documentary on continental Africa, and he is currently in the process of turning his thesis into a monograph. He is interested in all things documentary

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.

Thandi Allin Dyani

has been focusing on social justice, equity, diversity and belonging, development issues, social entrepreneurship and ecosystem building in Denmark, Northern Europe and Sub- Saharan Africa. In government institutions, NGOs, as founder, consultant, manager and CEO.

Johnny Mbizo Dyani

(30 November 1945 – 24 October 1986) was a South African jazz double bassist and pianist who played with such musicians as Don Cherry, Steve Lacy, David Murray and Leo Smith. He was born and grew up in Duncan Village, a township of the South African city of East London. In the early (30 November 1945 – 24 October 1986) was a South African jazz double bassist and pianist who played with such musicians as Don Cherry, Steve Lacy, David Murray and Leo Smith. He was born and grew up in Duncan Village, a township of the South African city of East London. In the early 1960s he was a member of South Africa’s first integrated jazz band The Blue Notes, with Mongezi Feza on trumpet, Dudu Pukwana on alto saxophone, Nikele Moyake on tenor saxophone, Chris McGregor on piano, and Louis Moholo on drums. The band fled South Africa in 1964 to seek musical and political freedom. In 1966, Dyani toured Argentina with Steve Lacy’s quartet. Lacy, Dyani, and Moholo recorded The Forest and the Zoo. He later moved to Denmark and Sweden, recording many albums under his own name, often on the Steeplechase label. He recorded with Dollar Brand, Don Cherry, Steve Lacy, David Murray, Joseph Jarman, Clifford Jarvis, Don Moye, Han Bennink, Brotherhood of Breath, Mal Waldron, and many others. After his death the remaining members of The Blue Notes reunited to record a moving tribute album Blue Notes For Johnny on the label Ogun Records.

Jonathan Eato

is a composer and saxophone player with interests in a wide range of contemporary musics, jazz, improvisation, South African popular music, interdisciplinary performance, music and postcoloniality, and music for dance. From 2007-2008 Jonathan was a visiting research fellow at the University of Stellenbosch, South Africa, working on questions of performance practice in South African jazz. In 2010 he produced Black Heroes, a new solo piano recording by South African jazz legend Tete Mbambisa. He recently contributed an essay on a newly available South African jazz archive for the book Keeping Time: 1964-1974 the photographs and Cape Town jazz recordings of Ian Bruce Huntley (ed. Chris Albertyn) and a chapter for the forthcoming volume Jazz and Totalitarianism edited by Bruce Johnson for the Routledge Transnational Jazz Series. Jonathan is co-applicant with Professor Stephanus Muller for South African Jazz Cultures and the Archive (2015-17), a two year British Academy Newton Advanced Fellowship designed to facilitate a critical engagement with archival initiatives in South African jazz

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.

Ed Epstein

is an American saxophonist and composer living in Sweden. From 1979 to 1986 he was often a member of Johnny Dyani’s various groups. His latest work is a duo album with Eric Bibb, Baritones.

Federico Federici

is a physicist, a translator and a writer. His texts have recently appeared in 3:AM Magazine, Art in America, Diagram, Jahrbuch Der Lyrik, Poet Lore, Sand, The Shanghai Literary Review, The Manhattan Review and others.

Among his books: L’opera racchiusa (LN 2009, Lorenzo Montano Prize); Mrogn (2017, Elio Pagliarani Prize); (Anderem 2021); the asemic/poetry catalogues Liner notes for a Pithecanthropus Erectus sketchbook (LN 2018); “A private notebook of winds” (LN 2019); Transcripts from demagnetized tapes (LN 2021); Biophysique Asémique (LN 2021).

Dr. Diana Ferrus

is a writer, poet and storyteller. Dr. Ferrus retired from the University of the Western Cape at the end of 2016. She has published three anthologies of poetry. She is well-known for the poem “I’ve come to take you home” that was instrumental in the return of Sarah Baartman’s remains.

Zoliswa Fikelepi-Twani

is an Associate Professor and the current Director of the Miriam Makeba Centre of Performing Centre, also known as the Eastern Cape Audio Visual Centre (ECAVC) of the Faculty of Social Sciences and Humanities at the University of Fort Hare in South Africa, where she has worked for six years. She is a Musicologist with a PhD in Musicology from the University of Witwatersrand (WITS). Her interdisciplinary approach to research and published articles is on music and values; music and language; music and gender; music and politics and music and identity .

Willemien Froneman

is Head of Postgraduate Studies at the Africa Open Institute for Music, Research and Innovation (AOI), and coordinator of AOI’s sonic redress project at Stellenbosch University. Access her Google Scholar profile here.

Asher Gamedze

is a cultural worker based in Cape Town, working mainly as a musician, student, a writer, an organiser and an educator. As a musician, primarily as a drummer, I have worked with Xhanti Nokwali, Manny Walters, Lu’rah, Nduduzo Makhathini, Angel Bat Dawid, Xristian Espinoza and others; some of my own albums include Dialectic Soul (On The Corner Records, 2020), out side work | two duets (Astral Spirits, 2022), and Turbulence and Pulse (International Anthem, forthcoming 2022). As a writer and a researcher my interests include African history, histories of revolutionary thought and practice, Black cultural production, and radical pedagogy and my written work is published in a variety of online popular and news forums, academic journals and independent activist publications, some of these are: Chimurenga, Pathways to Free Education, The Funambulist and NewFrame. I’m also working on a PhD on the history, thought and political tradition of the Yu Chi Chan Club.

Heidi Grunebaum

is a writer, scholar and director of the Centre for Humanities Research, UWC and works on the afterlives of genocide, war and forced displacement in South Africa, Germany and Palestine/Israel. She is author of Memorialising the Past: Everyday Life in South Africa after the TRC (2011) co-editor of Uncontained: Opening the Community Art Project Archive (2012) and Athlone in Mind (2017). With Mark J. Kaplan, she made The Village Under the Forest (2013) with whom she is currently making a second documentary film set in Germany.

Tracey Khadija Heeger

is a published poet, actress, facilitator, cultural activist, who hails from the Cape Flats. Her work has been characterised as stark and unapologetic. Khadija’s debut poetry collection is called ‘Beyond the delivery room’ and a second poetry collection is due to be released in 2022. The 2nd collection will be followed closely by the 3rd which is a departure from the themes her work generally has covered.

Oscar Hemer

is Professor of Writing at Malmö University, Sweden. He is a frequent visitor to South Africa and the author of some 15 books in different genres. His début novel, Coyote (1983), was set in Peru.

Glenn Holtzman

is a Senior Lecturer in Music and the Performing Arts at Nelson Mandela University. He holds a PhD from the University of Pennsylvania and is a specialist in critical race theory, queer theory, and performative practice. He identifies as an academic social justice activist and artist, with an interest in higher education transformation and equity initiatives.

Mustapha Jinadu

is a poet who grew up in Lagos Nigeria and lives in Northern Virginia in the United States. He studied philosophy at Wits University, Johannesburg. Apart from writing poetry he writes philosophical and sociopolitical essays. As a philosopher his research interests are in semantics, social philosophy, and art theory.

Zweledinga Pallo Jordan

(born 22 May 1942) is a South African politician. He was a member of the National Executive Committee of the African National Congress, and was a cabinet minister from 1994 until 2009.

Sisca Julius

calls herself a short story writer in Afrikaans and English. She holds a BA degree, majoring in Afrikaans, English and Anthropology. Julius won the South African Academy for Arts and Sciences Chancellor’s Award for Prose in 2013, 2014 and 2015, and the Academy’s Award for Poetry in 2015. She was the first to win this award more than once as well as both categories. She was awarded the K and L Prize for African Literature in 2019 for her short story The Honeybee. She is currently busying herself with a B.A. Honours Degree in Afrikaans. Julius is also the mother of a six-year-old.

Aryan Kaganof

Aryan Kaganof conceived, curates and is editor of herri.

Attiyah Khan

is a Journalist, Arts Writer, Selector, Crate-digger, Event Organiser, Researcher and Archivist from Johannesburg, now based in Cape Town. Since 2008, she has been documenting visual arts, theatre, music, film and other forms of culture in South Africa. Her writing has been published in newspapers across the country as well as internationally. As selector El Corazon she spins records as a way to communicate through sound. Her sets explore music beyond boundaries and form transcontinental connections, to evoke curiosity in the possibility of sound. She started collecting records more seriously when co-founding music collective Future Nostalgia in 2013. The collective is a platform to bring ‘collectors, selectors, deejays, and diggers’ together and hosts regular vinyl listening sessions around Cape Town. Her sets explore various sounds including dub, cumbia, jazz, funk and music from the continent.

Sharlene Khan

is a South African visual artist, whose multi-media works focuses on the socio-political realities of a post-apartheid society and the intersectionality of race-gender-class. She was a recipient of the Rockefeller Bellagio Visual Arts residency (2009), the Canon Collins/Commonwealth Scholarship (2011), the African Humanities Post-doctoral Fellowship (2017), the National Institute for Humanities and Social Sciences Award for Visual Arts (2018) and was runner-up winner in the Videokunst Preis Bremen video art award (2015).  She is co-convenor of the annual African Feminisms (Afems) Conference; runs the Art on our Mind Research Project; the Black Feminist Killjoy Reading Group and the Decolonial AestheSis Creative Lab. She holds a PhD (Arts) from Goldsmiths, University of London and is currently Associate Professor at the Department of Fine Arts, Wits School of the Arts, Wits University, Johannesburg.

Andile Khumalo

(born 12 May 1978) is a South African composer and a music lecturer at the University of Witwatersrand. In 2013, he completed his Doctor of Musical Arts at Columbia University under the supervision of Professor George Lewis. There he also studied with Fabien Levy and Tristan Murail. Prior to his DMA, Khumalo studied under Marco Stroppa at the Staatliche Hochschule für Musik und Darstellende Kunst Stuttgart (HMDKS) and with Jürgen Bräuninger at the University of KwaZulu-Natal. Khumalo’s compositions are predominantly in a spectral style.

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.

Oswald Kucherera

is an avid reader, short story writer, poet, novelist and pan-Africanist activist currently residing in Cape Town. He is an author of the best-selling self-published novella, The Exodus Down South (2016) and Washing Dishes and Other Stories (2018). His work is published in various publications including Sleeping Giants Awakes (2018) and Migrants, Thinkers, Storytellers (2021). He is a contributing writer for FUNDZA an online publication.

Bruce LaBruce

is an internationally acclaimed filmmaker, photographer, writer, and artist based in Toronto. Along with numerous short films, he has written and directed eleven feature films, including Gerontophilia, which won the Grand Prix at the Festival du Nouveau Cinema in Montreal in 2013, and Pierrot Lunaire, which won the TeddyAward Special Jury Prize at the Berlinale in 2014. As a visual artist he has had numerous gallery shows around the world, including Obscenity, a photography exhibit that caused a national ruckus in Spain in 2011. Notoriously, his feature film L.A. Zombie was banned in Australia in 2010 after having been programmed at the Melbourne International Film Festival. It later premiered in competition at the Locarno Film Festival, Switzerland that same year. He has also worked widely in theatre and in filming music videos.

George Lewis

Edwin H. Case Professor of American Music at Columbia University, is an American composer, musicologist, computer-installation artist, and trombonist. A member of the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians, Lewis is a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the American Academy of Arts and Letters, a Corresponding Fellow of the British Academy, and a member of the Akademie der Künste Berlin. Other honors include the Doris Duke Artist Award (2019), a Guggenheim Fellowship (2015), and a MacArthur Fellowship (2002). His music is performed worldwide, and he is widely regarded as a pioneer in the creation of improvising computer programs. He is the author of A Power Stronger Than Itself: The AACM and American Experimental Music (University of Chicago Press) and co-editor of the two-volume Oxford Handbook of Critical Improvisation Studies.

Bokwe James Mafuna

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. The church also played a role in Makhathini’s musical understanding, as he hopped from church to church in his younger days in search of only the music. The legends of South African jazz are deep influences as well, in particular Bheki Mseleku, Moses Molelekwa, and Abdullah Ibrahim. Active as an educator and researcher, Makhathini is the head of the music department at Fort Hare University in the Eastern Cape. 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. Those albums earned him multiple awards and include Sketches of Tomorrow (2014), Mother Tongue (2014), Listening to the Ground (2015), Matunda Ya Kwanza (2015); Icilongo: The African Peace Suite (2016), Inner Dimensions (2016), and Reflections (2016). His 2017 album Ikhambi was the first to be released on Universal Music South Africa and won Best Jazz Album at the South African Music Awards (SAMA) in 2018. His Blue Note debut Modes of Communication: Letters from the Underworlds was named one of the “Best Jazz Albums of 2020” by The New York Times, and was followed by In the Spirit of Ntu in 2022.

Gaddafi Makhosandile

is a journalist who is passionate about reporting on social issues and producing community based stories. I grew up in rural KZN and I have lived in Pretoria and at the ‘City of Gold’ but through reading, I’ve traveled to other parts of the world and through time. Within my small circle, I’m for social justice and I believe all people are equal.

Slovo Mamphaga

is a Johannesburg-based artist and creative (BA Multimedia) whose work and subject matter is mostly based around the nature of the current conditions throughout the landscapes. He uses the artistic view as an expression to question and depict these conditions through Fine Art, Illustration, Digital Art & Design.

Kei Murray Mongezi Prosper McGregor

born to South-African parents Maxine and Chris McGregor after they left South Africa on exile in 1964 as part of the Blue Notes, grew up in southern France surrounded by musicians, artists, friends and promoters of the Blue Notes and the Brotherhood of Breath. Kei is a teacher of English in French schools and part-time musician who began playing the trumpet at the age of 12 and learnt from the wealth of musicians staying at his parent’s farm, especially the late Ernest Mogotsi Mothle (bass) and trumpeter David Defries. Constantly involved in South-African, Jazz and Improvised music, Kei currently leads a seven-piece band who play their own blend of South-African Jazz, deeply rooted in Kwela, Mbaqanga and the rich legacy left by trailblazing musicians such as Dudu Pukwana and Gwiwgi Mrwebi.

Hugh Mdlalose

“My inspiration and love for music comes from within, the reflection and experience of jazz as a powerful medium of collective dreams and an unending endeavour for the total freedoms of humanity. I approach the subject to let my personal encounter and journey with the medium of jazz speak for voices bigger than my own. My aim with photographing jazz is to make a sincere artistic statement and contribution by sharing the voice music has in bringing healing and spiritual restoration through the sounds and souls behind the image.”

Jurgen Meekel

herri Gif maker, colourist, herri film grading.

Frank Meintjies

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

Sandile Memela

is a journalist, writer, cultural critic and public servant. He has written for the City Press, Sowetan Sunday World, Star, Daily Dispatch, The New Age and several other publications in the country. He studied comminications at Fort Hare (1984) and journalism at Stellenbosch (1986) before attending fellowships at Universities of Wales (1992) Maryland (1998) and Duke (2000). He has worked in the media and government for almost 35 years. He is from Soweto and lives in Midrand.

Dilip Menon

is Professor of History, Department of International Relations and Director, Centre for Indian Studies in Africa, University of the Witwatersrand. Dilip does research in World Literatures, Cultural History and Cultural Anthropology. He is the author of The Blindness of Insight and Caste, Nationalism and Communism in South India, Malabar 1900-1948.

Niq Mhlongo

is an award-winning Soweto-born author, travel journalist, story editor, essayist and educator. He has written four novels and three collections of short stories. He also edited a collection of essays called Black Tax, Burden or Ubuntu as well as two collections of short stories called Joburg Noir and Hauntings. His works have been translated into several languages, including German, French, Spanish, Italian, Burmese, Dutch, and Flemish.

Mkhululi

is an uncredentialed, undecided reader from New Brighton, eGqeberha but currently based in Tshwane. He has an interest in theory, in the past had immersed himself in theories like Afropessimism, but right now has chosen to commit himself mostly to German Idealism. The task he has given himself – albeit not being trained in theory or philosophy – is that of showing the inoriginality of certain theoretical concepts that those mainly focusing in Black Studies have used, without looking at the implications of that inheritance due to their insistence desire for moving away from European philosophy.

Mkhulu Mngomezulu

(Ignatia 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. She is also a certified and practicing traditional healer. Ignatia has presented papers in national and international 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.

Vusumzi Moyo

grew up in Mamelodi, Gauteng. He went to CCOSA College Zimbabwe, and thereafter studied at Bethune-Cookman University and Clark Atlanta University. He is self-employed.

Kneo Mokgopa

LLB (They/Them) is a writer and artist living and working in Johannesburg. They are the Narrative Development Manager at the Nelson Mandela Foundation and a Thought Fellow at the Centre for Critical and Creative Thought at the University of Stellenbosch. Kneo writes a regular column with the Daily Maverick where they explore the porous boundaries between human and object in South African society.

Carol Muller

is a Professor of Music (ethnomusicology), who has published widely on South African music, both at home and in exile. Her intellectual interests include the relationship between music, gender and religious studies, migration and diaspora studies, and critical ethnography. Musical Echoes: South African Women Thinking in Jazz (Duke Fall 2011) with Sathima Bea Benjamin; Shembe Hymns (Univ. of KwaZulu Natal 2010); Focus: South African Music (Routledge 2008); Rituals of Fertility and the Sacrifice of Desire: Nazarite Women’s Performance in South Africa (Chicago 1999) are some of the books she has authored and edited. Muller has published on South African jazz, religious performance, traditional and popular musics in a variety of journals that represent her interdisciplinary interests. Muller is also a seasoned gumboot dancer.

Churchil Naude

het met sy digbundel Drol innie drinkwater en albums, Kroeskop vol geraas en Kroesifaaid hom in die voorste linie van Suid Afrikaanse woordkuns gevestig en nuwe, opwindende dimensies van Afrikaans ontgin. Hy het al gewerk saam kunstenaars soos Anton Goosen, David Kramer en Jannie Hanepoot. Hy het as fasiliteerder vir ñ NGO gewerk met minderjarige gevangenes in tronke soos Pollsmoor, Hawequa en Brandvlei. Churchil is van Mitchell’s Plein waar hy woon met sy vrou en drie kinders.

Mphuthumi Ntabeni

contributes to various national and international publications. He’s trained in built environment, reads literature, history and philosophy. He lives in Cape Town. His debut novel, The Broken River Tent, won the University of Johannesburg Debut Prize 2019. His second novel, The Wanderers, was published by Kwela in July 2021.

Simbarashe Nyatsanza

is a Biotechnologist originally from Zimbabwe, now based in South Africa. He is also a freelance writer and journalist whose writing mainly focuses on issues of African nationalism, identity and politics. He believes in an African present and future that is shaped by the needs, wants and ideas of Africans, one that is a true reflection of Africa’s cultures, politics, religions and the essence of its humanity.

Henk Oosterling

(1952) studied martial arts in Japan, taught kendo in the eighties, was associate professor Philosophy at the Erasmus University Rotterdam from 1985-2018, did academic research on Intermediality and Interculturality and developed an ecosophical educational program that, since 2007, was successfully implemented in primary, secondary, vocational and scientific education in Rotterdam. His most recent publication is Resistance in Times of Ecopanic (2020).

Rithuli Orleyn

is a co-founder of Blackhouse Kollective – a home for Black Consciousness & Pan Afrikanists activists work in Soweto. His meditations on race/racism have been published in ‘political analysis’ styled publications, here and abroad. He holds an M.A. from Rhodes University, is a PhD candidate in History at UWC and a fellow at the Centre for Humanities Research.

Martijn Pantlin

is a full stack web developer specialised 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. 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. 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.

Michalis Pichler

is an artist/writer, operating independently from the commercial gallery system, and a community-builder, (co-)founding and maintaining artist-run institutions like Conceptual Poetics Day and Miss Read.  Pichle spent some twelve years of academic derivé at various Universities and Art Schools in Berlin, Athens and New York, and two years at the Acropolis Preservation Site in Athens, in a sculpture apprenticeship. He invented Recto-Verso-Collage in 2002 and objet perdu in 2003. A monograph of Pichler’s practice titled “MICHALIS PICHLER: Thirteen years: The materialization of ideas” was edited by Annette Gilbert and Clemens Krümmel and co-published in 2015 by Printed Matter, Inc. and Spector Books.

Lesego Rampolokeng

born in Soweto, South Africa, is the poet of the lost generation of apartheid. He summarizes his artistic goals as follows: ‘Whether that pleases the kings and princes of this earth is absolutely of no importance to me’. As a child, he was inspired by dithoko talking songs of the SeSotho who brought this tradition to the huge African melting pot of Soweto as street poets. Later, as a teenager, he was devouring comics and the poems of the English romantic poet John Keats (1795-1821), North American rap á la Gil Scott-Heron, the recordings of Jamaican dub poet Linton Kwesi Johnson, the poems of William Burroughs and the poetry of the Black Consciousness movement. The material for his own poetry he found on the streets of Soweto. After aborting his law studies, Rampolokeng concentrated on writing and in 1990 he published his first volume of poetry, Horns for Hondo.

Jean Rhys

(born Ella Gwendolyn Rees Williams; 24 August 1890 – 14 May 1979) was a British novelist who was born and grew up in the Caribbean island of Dominica. From the age of 16, she was mainly resident in England, where she was sent for her education. She is best known for her novel Wide Sargasso Sea (1966), written as a prequel to Charlotte Brontë‘s Jane Eyre. In 1978, she was appointed a Commander of the Order of the British Empire (CBE) for her writing.

Andrea Rolfes

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

Hilde Roos

is a researcher at Africa Open Institute for Music, Research and Innovation at Stellenbosch University. Her work focuses on historical and contemporary representations of opera in South Africa with special reference to the intersection of the genre with politics and race. In 2018 she published The La Traviata Affair – Opera in the Age of Apartheid with University of California Press and in 2020 she co-edited African Theatre – Opera and Music Theatre with Christine Matzke, Lena van der Hoven and Christopher Odhiambo.

Catherine Rudent

One of her main topics is pop vocality, on which she recently edited and prefaced an issue in the journal Volume! 

Mohammad Shabangu

is an assistant professor at Colby College. He teaches and researches contemporary world literature.

Kholeka Shange

is a lecturer at the University of the Witwatersrand, Anthropology Department. She is also a Book Review Editor at the Journal of Contemporary African Studies.

Steven Shaviro

is DeRoy Professor of English at Wayne State University Department of English. He has published eleven previous books, including Without Criteria: Kant, Whitehead, Deleuze, and Aesthetics (MIT Press), and numerous stories and articles. He was awarded the Science Fiction and Technoculture Studies Book Award in 2017 for his book Discognition.

Tendayi Sithole

is a professor in the Department of Political Sciences, University of South Africa. He is the author of Mabogo P. More: Philosophical Anthropology in Azania (New York and London: Rowman and Littlefied International, 2022), The Black Register (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2020), and Steve Biko: Decolonial Meditations of Black Consciousness (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2016).

Eugene Skeef (FRSA)

is a London-based South African percussionist, composer, poet, educationalist and broadcaster. He 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. Eugene has composed for the London Philharmonic Orchestra, the London Sinfonietta and the Royal Scottish National Orchestra; trained their players and helped to set up their education departments. Skeef is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts and winner of the Harry E. Schlenz Medal for Water Music.

Unathi Slasha

is a novelist, poet, and literary scholar from Despatch. He is the author of the novel Jah Hills (Black Ghost Books, 2017; CLASH Books, 2019), which was nominated for the 2019 NOMMO Awards.

Trevor Steele Taylor

is a film festival programmer, writer and film theorist. He programmed film for the Grahamstown National Arts Festival for 19 years.

Keyan Tomaselli

is Distinguished Professor, Dean’s Office, Faculty of Humanities, University of Johannesburg. He is recipient of the ‘Heroes and Legends Award’, Simon “Mbunu” Sabela Film Awards. His book, The Cinema of Apartheid (1988) earned a KWANZA Award. He also authored Encountering Modernity:  20^th Century South African Cinemas (2006) and edited “Encounters in the Kalahari” (Visual Anthropology, 1999) and Writing in the S/and: Autobiographic Explorations by Indigenous South Africans (2007). He is founder and co-editor of Critical Arts and of the Journal of African Cinemas.

Nathan Trantraal

is a poet, cartoonist, translator, screenwriter, critic and short story author originally from Cape Town. He has made cartoons for The Cape Times, The Cape Argus, Vrye Weekblad and writes a bi-weekly column for Rapport. His work has been exhibited in Cape Town, Munich and Amsterdam and poetry translated into French and published by Lanskine Paris 2020. Awards he’s won include, the Ingrid Jonker Prize for poetry and The Jan Rabie/Marjorie Wallace prize for a 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.

Hans Maarten van den Brink

is a Dutch journalist and writer. He was born in 1956 in Oegstgeest. He began his career as an art editor at the NRC Hendelsblad. He worked in Spain for a few years as foreign correspondent, which provided material for a couple of his books (The Thirty Days of Saint Isidore, on bullfighting; and Spain: Body and Soul). He also worked in television. He is best known for his novella On the Water (1998) which was translated in many languages and won numerous literary prizes.

Faeez van Doorsen

is a storyteller with a variety passions, including but not limited to unearthing the untold histories of the kullid community across South Africa through fiction. He is an avid creator of food in the Cape Malay tradition, devout student of Toni Morrison and Ben Okri’s respective oeuvres and lover of all things tennis.

Lize van Robbroeck

is Professor in Visual Studies at Stellenbosch. Her research focuses on postcoloniality and settler subjectivities in South African visual arts. Her research interests include psychoanalytic theories of subjectivity and race, and she works at the intersection of Lacanian psychoanalysis and Feminist New Materialism. She teaches, inter alia, on decoloniality, ecocriticism and posthumanism in the visual arts.

Stephanie Vos’

doctoral research, undertaken at Royal Holloway, University of London, was an inquiry into discourses of South African exile in the 1960s through the lens of jazz. Abdullah Ibrahim’s music of the 1960s was a focal point in this research project. Stephanie has taught at Unisa, and tutored at Stellenbosch University and Royal Holloway. She has presented her research at various conferences in the USA, UK, Europe and South Africa, and is currently the Secretary of the South African Society for Research in Music.

Dara Waldron

is a writer and researcher based in Limerick, Rep. of Ireland. He is the author of New Nonfiction Film: Art, Poetics and Documentary Theory (2018) along with numerous academic essays and articles on contemporary art and film. HIs current research explores the intersection of the political and aesthetic in essay films. He teaches at the Limerick School of Art and Design. @WaldronDara

Salim Washington

is a multi-reedsman, composer, and jazz educator. Salim recorded his debut CD Love In Exile with Roxbury Blues Aesthetic (RBA), featuring pianist and composer, Joe Bonner. While doing this, he was midway through graduate school at Harvard, where he wrote a dissertation entitled Beautiful Nightmare: Coltrane, Jazz, and American Culture, under the supervision of Henry Louis Gates. With doctorate in hand, he headed to New York to play in the city, as well as begin a professorship at the Brooklyn College Conservatory of Music. While on a commission for works celebrating the life and music Dexter Gordon he established a new group, the Harlem Arts Ensemble, which continues the legacy of the RBA. In addition to his own group, Salim plays regularly with a number of ensembles including the Donald Smith Quintet, Antonio Dangerfield’s Ensemble Uniqua and Frank Lacy’s Vibe Tribe. He is a member of the Jazz Study Group at Columbia University. Today he lives in South Africa where is currently a professor of jazz studies at UKZN.

Wanelisa Xaba

is a South African gender activist and decolonial education scholar passionate about transforming the lives of women on the African continent. She is also passionate about the decolonization of the education system so that it is free and accessible. Her involvement in the #FeesMustFall movement has strengthened that resolve. Xaba obtained a Bachelor of Social Sciences in Gender Studies and Politics in 2012 and throughout her degree, she was engaged in advocacy work with the African Gender Institute. She completed an Honours degree in African Studies in 2014 and a Masters in Social Development in 2018. As an activist, her scholarship seeks to bridge the colonial dichotomy between academia and activism, that places academics as “knowledge producers” and activists/disadvantaged communities as “case studies”.

Benjamin Zephaniah (Dr Benjamin Obadiah Iqbal Zephaniah)

was born and raised in Birmingham, England. He cannot remember a time when he was not creating poetry but this had nothing to do with school where poetry meant very little to him, in fact he had finished full time education at the age of 13. His poetry is strongly influenced by the music and poetry of Jamaica and what he calls ‘street politics’. His first real public performance was in church when he was 10 years old, by the time he was 15 he had developed a strong following in his home town of Handsworth where he had gained a reputation as a young poet who was capable of speaking on local and international issues. In 1985 he performed with Johnny Mbizo Dyani as part of the Radio Freedom Christmas Tour to raise money and support for the anti-apartheid struggle.

Paul Khahliso Tjobolo Matela Zisiwe

is a South African video artist and documentary filmmaker, whose work deals extensively with a variety of social and aesthetic concepts. A writer and documentarian by profession and creative inclination, his artistic practices are not bound by convention and dogmas of traditional methodologies. Matela, who also refers to his craft as that of a video poet, has shown a keen interest in the liminal spaces of visual creativity, and has continued to produce challenging and psychologically engaging video poems. His unflinching eye endlessly delves into the deepest caverns of the human psyche.

An avid blogger and critical thinker, he publishes his writing on An Irrational Diary