The Epistle.

There is no doubt that Africa has produced knowledges. She has cultures. Traditions. Languages. Music. Art. She has compassionate human beings who have always had the capacity to think, to theorise, to make sense of what they populate. Although not all written down, and therefore primitive in the eyes of those who want to modernise us away from ourselves, Africa has shown a devotion to ideas and a dissemination of such ideas among its people, such that it was possible to lead a normal life even before colonialism. And so I find it odd that Black people in general, but Black intellectuals specifically, are quick to look to the West in order to theorise. They seek, read, and rely on the likes of Socrates, Plato, Noam Chomsky, Immanuel Kant, Friedrich Nietzsche, Søren Kierkegaard , etc., in an attempt to philosophise and conceptualise solutions for contemporary complications. Don’t get me wrong. These thinkers from Europe are undoubtedly necessary. Blacks should know what the ...

I write with the greatest pain in my heart when I say the deadliest, the most cruel defect of humanity is the elevation of one race ahead of the other because one is perpetually superior and human, the other, in his own land of birth, is perpetually inferior and subhuman. Equally painful is the fact that there are Blacks, essentially part of the elite, who have made it their duty to rise against the radical black thought on behalf of white supremacy. This, for me, means that the colonial racist superstructure has succeeded in shaping a part of the black world in its own image. For the radical left, this means that there is no room for complacency. Towards the African revolution the task is to conscientise more blacks while at the same time continuously examining and moving to dismantle white superiority. To give this piece a Fanonian take, I look to the preface of The Wretched of the Earth . Fanon explains in this 1963 work that “[n]ot so very long ago, the earth numbered two tho...

Dear Mr President, I write to you humbly, as a Pan Africanist, one pregnant with hope that one day soon, Africa will be one. I feel comfortable writing to you because I know that you yourself are a Pan Africanist whose burning desire is to see a united and prosperous Africa. To state the obvious, Mr President, millions of your countrymen have made their way across the border into South Africa, the region's economic power. This would be nice if the mobility was voluntary but, as we all know, it isn’t. They have run from persecution, from hunger, from joblessness, from a government – yours, sir, that will not hesitate to apply force to quash opponents. Your (in)actions have many, far-reaching consequences, Mr President. One such consequence is that a Pan Africanist political party like the Economic Freedom Fighters (EFF)now stands accused of protecting (il)legal African immigrants who are not wanted in South Africa. While you are oppressing and suffocating your own people, send...

Superman. Bucie. Black Coffee. It was Homebrewed in 2009, Superman, so the attraction to say it is an old tune might be too intense for some, but I would say it is a little longer than seven minutes of erudition that succeeds in retaining a rare freshness. In speaking of Superman, let me say first and foremost that, like black coffee, Superman is at once thorough in taste and smell and temperature. And skill. Fresh and vital, Superman is a sunlight that reaches out through the voice that is Bucie – a voice that is steady yet so susceptible. It is a sunlight that makes you hear your thoughts, Superman. It extends like strong black coffee that is at once thorough in taste and smell and temperature , with a love so dense it hides your skin when it is cold. Superman is not concerned with simply imaging the design and promise of love. It enjoins, this Homebrewed ever-fresh air, the atypical construction of visions of what it means to be in love, of what it means to hope for l...

The night of Friday the 10 th of February, 2023, was not only different. It was the height of a media maelstrom about the brutal murder of one of South Africa’s most distinguished hip-hop artists, AKA , who was gunned down at close range outside an eatery in Durban’s busy Florida Road. He was with his friend and celebrity chef  Tebello ‘Tibz’ Motsoane , who was also murdered in the same way. In order to set the tone, let me appeal to Edward Said’s In Representations of the Intellectual , wherein Said claims that always “the intellectual is beset and remorselessly challenged by the problem of loyalty. All of us without exception belong to some sort of national, religious or ethnic community: no one, no matter the volume of protestations, is above the organic ties that bind the individual to family, community, and of course nationality.” Now, no matter how generous I want to be, I cannot accuse ALL entertainment industry practitioners as intellectuals in the way Said imagines, bu...