Zimbabwe, Malema & the Court Jesters
Fezokuhle Mthonti & Vimbai Midzi There is something about the way in which Nina Simone’s voice deepens every time she sings her 1971 hit New World Coming off the Here Comes the Sun album: There’s a new world coming And it’s just around the bend There’s a new world coming This one’s coming to […]
Zimbabwe’s Blood Diamonds
The phrase “resource curse” has been used to describe a state of affairs in which a mineral-it is usually a mineral-that should benefit a country becomes the chief means of its damnation. Think of petroleum in Nigeria; and diamonds, coltan and other minerals in the Democratic Republic of Congo. In recent years, Zimbabwe has […]
In Defence of Witchcraft
The African Futures conference held in Johannesburg at the end of October brought a motley array of scholars and artists from the continent and overseas. Their interests ranged from superheroes, Sun Ra and science fiction to technology, knowledge production, feminism and witchcraft. One of the visitors was Bonaventure Ndikung, a Cameroonian-born scientist and curator, […]
Terence Ranger and the Jagged Geometry of Zimbabwe
Percy Zvomuya celebrates the thoughts and texts of groundbreaking historian Terence Ranger, who died on 2 January 2015 In 2004, after Terence Ranger had delivered a paper at the Wits Institute of Social and Economic Research (Wiser), I went up to him to greet him, make a few comments about his lecture and introduce myself […]