It is with deep sadness that Africa in Words writes of the passing of Joanna Skelt, who was, amongst many other things, a writer for Africa in Words. Joanna was a poet, scholar, activist and teacher. She died on 31… Read More ›
Reviews & Spotlights on…
Finding Fictions, Forging a Feminist Fantastic: Reflections on ‘This F-Word’, the 5th edition of the Aké Arts and Book Festival (Abeokuta, 14-18 November, 2017)
By Matthew Lecznar Last November, I had the pleasure of attending the 5th edition of the Aké Arts and Book Festival. Organised by the Lagos-based Book Buzz Foundation, Aké is a five-day cultural extravaganza that takes place in and around… Read More ›
Looking Back and Looking Forward: Happy New Year from AiW
Season’s greetings from the team at Africa in Words! Thanks for your readership and for another year of conversations on writing and culture from the African continent. As 2017 comes to a close, the blog is moving through some transitions…. Read More ›
Review: Revisiting Makhosazana Xaba’s These Hands – Poems
AiW Guest: Stephanie Selvick I asked Makhosazana Xaba what it was like hearing that her debut collection of poetry, These Hands: Poems (2005), was accepted by Modjaji Books for a reprint due to demand by readers and teachers. “There is… Read More ›
Neatly packaged snapshots of often inaccessible headlines: A Review of The Hamburger that Killed Jorge
AiW Guest: Nafeesah Allen The Hamburger that Killed Jorge is an anthology of short stories, written by young and emerging Mozambican writers, meant to open an aperture for a new branch of crime fiction. Born out of a 2016 national… Read More ›
‘A secret history of the nation’: Small Magazines at Writivism 2017
AiW Guest Nathan Suhr-Sytsma How does our sense of cultural and literary history shift if we start not from celebrity authors or landmark novels but from small magazines and the literary networks they foster? This question motivated the discussions of… Read More ›
4 Years, 42 Honeycomb Grain Silos, 1 Remarkable Museum – Will Zeitz MOCAA take us into an Afrofuture?
AiW Guest: Katarzyna Kubin. September was a busy month of cultural events in South Africa. The Jozi Book Fair in Johannesburg took place over three days from 31st August to 3rd September. The Open Book Festival followed in Cape Town… Read More ›
The Problem with the Prophet: Review of Alain Mabanckou’s Black Moses
AiW Guest: Sarah Ahrens The first thing that struck me about the English translation of the latest novel of Francophone Sub-Saharan Africa’s arguably most successful living writer was its title: Black Moses is quite a departure from the original French… Read More ›
A Study in Contrast: A Review of Stanley Gazemba’s Forbidden Fruit
AiW Guest: Amanda Anderson Stanley Gazemba’s 2002 novel Forbidden Fruit, previously published in Kenya as The Stone Hills of Maragoli, presents a tightly woven tapestry of human experience. The narrative follows Ombima, a poor man from the small village of… Read More ›
Voices from the Seventh Edition of the Open Book Festival, Cape Town, 2017.
AiW Guest: Katarzyna Kubin. One of the most exciting, world-class literary events, the Open Book Festival, takes place annually at the start of spring in Cape Town, South Africa, spear-headed by the independent bookshop, The Book Lounge, and the renowned Fugard… Read More ›
Old is New: A Review of Emmanuel Dongala’s Jazz and Palm Wine
AiW Guest: David Borman I first encountered Jazz and Palm Wine in fragmentary form. As a student who read French poorly yet took a course on Francophone African Literature, I was allowed to read translations of our coursework, and… Read More ›
Okey Ndibe’s orchestra
AiW Guest: Pelu Awofeso “I am a student of Chinua Achebe,” Okey Ndibe says near the end of his reading at University of Lagos’ Faculty of Arts last July. “But as a writer, my temperament is between [Wole] Soyinka, Achebe… Read More ›
The global concerns of southern African photography
AiW Guest: Oyedepo Olukotun It is interesting to observe that a number of the 2017 summer exhibitions in London, UK, have coalesced around the storyline of Blackness. On the forefront with this storyline is Tate Modern’s Soul of a Nation:… Read More ›
Self-help as Warfare: Lola Akande’s campus novel and What it Takes to be a Woman who Succeeds on a University Campus
AiW Guest: Carli Coetzee The title of Lola Akande’s novel What it Takes can be interpreted in more than one way. The novel can be read as a celebratory narrative of the extraordinary achievements of the protagonist, Funto Oyewole, as… Read More ›
The Keiskamma Guernicas – (re)making experiences of HIV/AIDS in the Eastern Cape. 3 short films from ‘Guernica Remakings’ (3).
AiW Guest: Nicola Ashmore. AiW note: this post is the last continuing our AiW series about the project, book, and exhibition Guernica Remakings (University of Brighton, July 31 – August 23). Curated by our Guest Author Dr Nicola Ashmore, the… Read More ›
The Keiskamma Guernicas – (re)making experiences of HIV/AIDS in the Eastern Cape. 3 short films from ‘Guernica Remakings’ (2)
AiW Guest: Nicola Ashmore. AiW note: This post continues our AiW series about the project, book, and exhibition Guernica Remakings. Curated by our Guest Author Dr Nicola Ashmore (University of Brighton, July 31 – August 23), the exhibition features visual… Read More ›
The Keiskamma Guernicas – (re)making experiences of HIV/AIDS in the Eastern Cape. 3 short films from ‘Guernica Remakings’ (1).
AiW Guest: Nicola Ashmore. This post continues our AiW series about the project and upcoming exhibition Guernica Remakings, curated by our Guest Author Dr Nicola Ashmore (University of Brighton, July 31 – August 23). The exhibition features visual artworks from across the… Read More ›
The fifth Keiskamma Guernica: Guernica Remakings – an exhibition, Brighton UK.
AiW Guest: Nicola Ashmore. This post marks the first in an AiW series introducing the project and upcoming exhibition, Guernica Remakings, curated by Dr Nicola Ashmore (University of Brighton). The exhibition, which opens next week (July 31), involves the display… Read More ›
Familiar, yet utterly new: A Review of Fred Strydom’s The Inside Out Man
AiW Guest: Kimmy Beach Bent is a gifted jazz pianist who plays in seedy nightclubs, lives in the “Crack Radisson”—a run-down flat in a Johannesburg suburb—and doesn’t seem to need much more in his life. With that deceptively… Read More ›
Refreshingly focused on the fiction, but struggling for definition: a review of A Companion to Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, edited by Ernest N. Emenyonu.
AiW Guest: Matthew Lecznar Since the turn of the 21st-century, few authors have been able to implant themselves on the global literary imagination with the kind of deftness and flare exhibited by the Nigerian writer Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie. The author’s… Read More ›
africainwords.com 