Ethiopia’s violence in focus—Percy Zvomuya reads regional conflict through the lens of the Tigray War
Percy Zvomuya draws on Martin Plaut and Sarah Vaughan’s valuable new book Understanding Ethiopia’s Tigray War in a reading of…
Category: Essays
‘An open-hearted refusal of the atomised world’—Wamuwi Mbao reviews Hedley Twidle’s new collection of essays, Show Me the Place
In Show Me the Place, Hedley Twidle displays an earnest curiosity about how to inhabit a world that seems to…
‘I lose myself for hours inside its green and blue pixels’—Read Masande Ntshanga’s new essay Technologies of Conquest, from The Creative Arts: On Practice, Making and Meaning
The JRB presents an excerpt from Masande Ntshanga’s essay ‘Technologies of Conquest: On Writing the Dystopian through South Africa’s Past,…
[Conversation Issue] Jimi Solanke: a prodigal as folk hero—Sanya Osha salutes an inimitable artist
Sanya Osha pays tribute to the late Jimi Solanke, and chats to Oluwatoyin Sutton about her book Jimi Solanke: The…
An enigma called Christopher Okigbo—Sanya Osha reflects on the visionary and paradoxical poet (including an interview with his biographer Obi Nwakanma)
Once one experiences the phenomenal power of Christopher Okigbo’s poetry, it seems the reverberations persist throughout one’s creative life, writes…
‘Marechera was the epitome of this simmering revolt’— Musaemura Zimunya remembers the Pots and Pans Protest of 1973
This month marks the fiftieth anniversary of the Chimukwembe demonstration, aka the ‘Pots and Pans Protest’, a student uprising in…
‘I write to leave footsteps’—An excerpt from I Write the Yawning Void: Selected Essays of Sindiwe Magona
The JRB presents an excerpt from I Write the Yawning Void: Selected Essays of Sindiwe Magona. I Write the Yawning…
Wole Soyinka vs Caroline Davis—The CIA Controversy by Adekeye Adebajo
In 2020, Caroline Davis, a British scholar, now based at England’s University College London, published the book African Literature and…
[City Editor] ‘At first sight, Johannesburg is simultaneously welcoming and unwelcoming, familiar and unfamiliar’ by Lidudumalingani
There is something permanent about how Johannesburg reveals itself to anyone arriving in it, etching itself into the memory, even…
How to write like a white person—Ben Williams presents notes towards a framework for reading white fiction’s ‘literature of success’
In the context of increasing scrutiny on the literary production of white writers, Ben Williams offers up some ideas on…
[City Editor] In communion—Lidudumalingani gives deference to the worshippers who gather in the streets, parks and open lands of Johannesburg
On Sundays, in downtown Johannesburg, on the edge of Hillbrow, encroaching into Braamfontein, queues of worshippers fill out the streets,…
[City Editor] The people who stare at the city—Lidudumalingani recognises Joburg’s street vendors, our unacknowledged everyday archivists
The man at the bottom of Johannesburg Road in Highlands North, where Berkswell Road intersects it, punching it from the…
Intimations of an ending—Carey Baraka on the unspoken demise of Kwani?, and the death of a dream
‘Still, there were dreams, and there were dreamers.’ Carey Baraka attempts to gather together the stories of Kwani? 1. One…
The Winter of Our Discontent—Angelo Fick reflects on 150 days of lockdown
A commentary on the present crisis and the need for literate understandings of it by Angelo Fick. 1. These are…
[City Editor] A city caught between two moments—Lidudumalingani considers Johannesburg’s obvious and hidden histories
Almost every city has been built more than once. Each phase complete with its own architecture and infrastructure and, for…
‘They hate us like we murdered their entire family.’ Read ‘Shelter in Place’, an essay on anti-Blackness by Adam Smyer
Adam Smyer reflects on a global pandemic and Black Lives Matter. As I write this, we are in roughly Month…
‘Does my chest sound tight to you?’ The first 40 days; notes from a South African lockdown, by Nadia Davids
Editor’s note: by agreement with the author, this article has been removed from The JRB, ahead of its reappearance in…
‘Black people are not asking to be loved beyond reason’—Hemley Boum reflects on the Black Lives Matter protests during the coronavirus lockdown
It happens that words become too inconsistent to communicate shock. Not that we can’t guess at the terrifying explosion, whose…
‘Thinking while black’—Read Grace A Musila’s essay from the award-winning book Black Academic Voices: The South African Experience
‘How do we craft a healthy, dignified blackness, in a world where blackness is a captured identity location that needs…
‘I am quite normal. I just wonder what JM Coetzee would taste like, slow-roasted, with tarragon.’—Read ‘The man who would be eaten’ by Rustum Kozain
The following piece was written in 2006, since when it has been languishing on the author’s blog. It was revived…
Yvonne Adhiambo Owuor’s weight of whispers—Carey Baraka considers Dust, The Dragonfly Sea and a novelist’s mission to retell the ‘vile things’ of history
The Kenyan novel is not dead, writes Carey Baraka, as long as Yvonne Adhiambo Owuor keeps writing. 1. On June…
[Conversation Issue] ‘I won’t be polite, because there’s nothing polite about patriarchy’—Mona Eltahawy inspires (and triggers) at the Abantu Book Festival, reports Itumeleng Molefi
As part of our January Conversation Issue, Itumeleng Molefi reflects on Mona Eltahawy’s keynote address and conversation with Pumla Dineo…
[City Editor] Notes on migration, the city and home by Lidudumalingani
Those who temporarily abandon Johannesburg this December—and those who stay while pining for home—must know that the city is theirs,…
Tyranny of place, tyranny of time: Remembering Es’kia Mphahlele in his centenary year, by Mmatshilo Motsei
Mmatshilo Motsei pays tribute to Es’kia Mphahlele, one hundred years after his birth. I first encountered Es’kia Mphahlele when, in…
Gandhi as heir of Rhodes? A reassessment of the Mahatma as an Afro-Asian prophet
Adekeye Adebajo addresses the once-unthinkable question ‘Was Gandhi a racist?’, as the 150th anniversary of his birth is celebrated. 1….
How Hip Hop is helping a new generation to ‘read the world’—Read an excerpt from Neva Again: Hip Hop Art, Activism and Education in Post-Apartheid South Africa
Hip Hop is producing a new generation of readers and writers in a world that operates in diverse literary forms,…
Jia Tolentino is a moral voice for the secular world—Khanya Mtshali reviews Trick Mirror: Reflections on Self-Delusion, a collection of essays that explores how we survive our late-capitalist hellscape
In Trick Mirror: Reflections on Self-Delusion, Jia Tolentino presents her cosmopolitan obsessions with piercing insight and authority, writes Khanya Mtshali. Trick…
‘I will always love Africa, because from the minute I arrived it treated me like a white girl.’—Author Adam Smyer reflects on his visit to the Open Book Festival
The following is an edited excerpt from a work in progress by American author Adam Smyer, whose debut novel, Knucklehead,…
Our Words, Our Worlds: The work of Black women poets as an act of poetic revolt, by Moshibudi Motimele
Moshibudi Motimele reflects on the publication of Our Words, Our Worlds: Writing on Black South African Women Poets, 2000–2018, a…
The quest to establish a world-class African philosophical tradition—Sanya Osha reviews Paulin Hountondji: African Philosophy as Critical Humanism
On Paulin Hountondji’s Universalist philosophy—Sanya Osha reviews Paulin Hountondji: African Philosophy as Critical Humanism, by Franziska Dubgen and Stefan Skupien….
The deferred dreams of so many people who put family commitments before their own needs—Read Niq Mhlongo’s Introduction to Black Tax: Burden or Ubuntu
Read an excerpt from Black Tax: Burden or Ubuntu, a new collection of essays edited by City Editor Niq Mhlongo….
Francophonie notes—Radio France Internationale interview with Abdourahman Waberi and a new essay by Patrice Nganang
Djiboutian author Abdourahman Waberi talks to RFI Djiboutian author Abdourahman Waberi spoke to Radio France Internationale recently about his life growing…
On Noni Jabavu and the return home—Makhosazana Xaba celebrates one of South Africa’s foundational literary centenarians
This August marks one hundred years since the birth of Noni Jabavu. Makhosazana Xaba reflects on the life of this…
‘To know the African wild was to know the African subject’—What training as a field guide taught Jacob Dlamini about culture, nature, power and race
The JRB presents a new essay by Jacob Dlamini. For Dlamini, what began as a research project on the labour…
[The JRB Daily] OluTimehin Adegbeye wins the 2019 Gerald Kraak Prize for her essay ‘Mothers and Men’
OluTimehin Adegbeye has won the R25 000 Gerald Kraak Prize, which honours African writing and photography that ‘provokes thought on…
Voices as powerful as guns: Panashe Chigumadzi on Dorothy Masuka’s (w)ri(o)ting woman-centred Pan-Africanism
The JRB Contributing Editor Panashe Chigumadzi presents a new reading of the work, career and life of Dorothy Masuka, arguing that…
Rough honesty, ample sex and ripe desire—Efemia Chela reads Leïla Slimani’s Adèle, Ariana Harwicz’s Die, My Love and Melissa Broder’s The Pisces
The JRB Contributing Editor Efemia Chela reads Adèle, Die, My Love and The Pisces, three stirring psychological novels, kindred portraits of contemporary womanhood….
Discovering a Nervous Condition—an essay by Pwaangulongii Dauod on the geometry of darkness
The JRB presents new narrative non-fiction by Pwaangulongii Dauod. In December of 2014, barely one week after the department reluctantly…
[City Editor] Finding out you’re big in Myanmar—and a caution on the potential effects of South Africa’s Copyright Amendment Bill
City Editor Niq Mhlongo finds a cautionary tale in an interaction with one of his (heretofore unknown) international publishers. In…
‘Baldwin the symbol of black transgression and global black anger is simply peerless’—Bongani Madondo on If Beale Street Could Talk, the book and Oscar-winning film
James Baldwin’s novel of half a century ago, If Beale Street Could Talk, now reissued by Penguin Random House, was…