This article offers a close reading of Achmat Dangor’s stories “Skin Costs Extra” and “Goodbye, Midnight” from the perspective of masculinity studies and affect theory. It argues that Dangor’s stories describe post-apartheid masculinities by exploring the lingering influence of patriarchal and hegemonic gender patterns on male-female relationships. Dangor’s male protagonists adopt these notions of masculinity in the hope that it will give them a sense of agency. Attached to the privileges of hegemonic masculinity, they also feel the confines of this gender formation, even if they do not express this awareness in an overt way. This sense of limitation imposed by their masculinities is analyzed on the level of affect and emotion. To that end, the article juxtaposes those two notions by referring to chosen critical perspectives on affect studies, including those by Brian Massumi, Todd Reeser, Lucas Gottzén, and others.

This article examines the work of two influential Black South African women—artist Gladys Nomfanekiso Mgudlandlu (1917–1979) and writer Miriam Tlali (1933–2017)—through the lens of decolonization. Focusing on Mgudlandlu’s Houses in the Township (1970) and Tlali’s Between Two Worlds (originally Muriel at Metropolitan), the article explores how both creators challenged dominant cultural narratives during apartheid. Mgudlandlu’s painting evokes Black township life through an aesthetic shaped by memory, spirituality, and everyday resilience, while Tlali’s novel critiques racial injustice and amplifies Black women’s lived experiences within oppressive urban and workplace structures. By situating these works within a decolonial framework, the study highlights how they unsettle colonial representational practices and foreground Black agency. Together, Mgudlandlu and Tlali offer alternative ways of seeing and imagining South Africa’s cultural landscape, underscoring the continued relevance of their contributions to discourses on resistance, identity, and transformative cultural change.

This essay explores the historical significance and modern ­relevance of Zambia’s national anthem, “Stand and Sing of Zambia,” as the nation marks 60 years of independence. It examines whether the anthem remains a “blueprint” for national development or has become an “illusion” that fails to reflect the current socio-economic reality.

This visual essay takes a haptic, multi-sensory approach to ethnographic witnessing to trace Mozambique’s nationwide wave of protest. The protests began with rapper Azagaia’s death in March 2023, intensified after the municipal elections later that year and erupted following the contested October 2024 general elections. The revolt coalesces around three overlapping strands: Azagaia’s ubiquitous legacy, the opposition politics of charismatic leader Venâncio Mondlane, and a broader decolonial popular revolt demanding an end to electoral fraud, police brutality, corruption, and Frelimo’s entrenched rule. Drawing on situational ethnography from Maputo, documentary photographs, news media, and street chants and protest music, this visual essay argues that these strands reinforce one another, reshaping political consciousness and exposing the limits of state legitimacy. The analysis shows how the revolt’s multiple, overlapping social and temporal layers – and their diverse visual, sonic, and affective practices – index a transformative moment in Mozambican politics.

On 24th October 2024, Zambia commemorated sixty years of independence from British colonial rule. To celebrate its diamond jubilee, the Zambian government announced the theme “Honoring Our Heritage, Embracing Our Future Beyond.” The government and private actors organized a series of events to mark the occasion. Like years prior, the key activities included: wreath-laying ceremonies where state officials and citizens laid wreaths at the Freedom Statue to honor those who fought for independence, recognition of distinguished citizens, parades, public lectures, educational debates, and a presidential address stressing the importance of unity and peace for Zambia’s continued economic progress. Aside from the official 60th independence song, performed by nine Zambian singers and groups, the creative community was notably absent from the official celebrations. There was no comparable marker of creative writing progress since independence, nor was there a celebration of the country’s current state of literary production.

The essay discusses how Africans, specifically Zambians, require new stories to claim ownership of the narrative about them.

This essay is an immersive exploration of how women's roles as professional musicians have altered as the political and cultural landscape in Zambia evolves. It charts the involvement of women in bands, as solo artists and as subjects of music from the historical pre-colonial, through to the political struggle for Independence, on to the emergence of a new nation and the ongoing settling into a distinct cultural identity.

This paper examines how Haswell Kunyenje’s Puludzu political cartoons merge art and critique to intervene in Malawi’s public discourse. In a climate of deep mistrust in politicians and chronic governance failures, the study argues that Kunyenje’s work provides a sharper and more accessible commentary on Malawian politics than official rhetoric or party manifestos. Drawing on interviews with newspaper vendors, readers, journalists, and editors in Blantyre and Zomba, it explores the cultural meanings of puludzu and its transformation into a metaphor for elite arrogance. Through iconographic analysis of Puludzu cartoons published in The Daily Times between 2009 and 2014, the paper shows how Kunyenje uses satire, caricature, and metaphor to expose moral decay and executive obstinacy among the Malawian leadership. Ultimately, Puludzu emerges as both a critique of failed leadership and a mirror of popular complicity, revealing the complex dynamics of power, accountability, and artistic resistance in Malawi’s post-1994 democracy.

This paper reflects on the ways in which the township space has been constituted as a space of dwelling for black life under apartheid racial regime; focusing on township as a racialized space, the location of township at the periphery, housing and incarceration of township. The paper argues that, what has come to form the township space in the apartheid South Africa was its articulation as a product of power, over which its establishment came to be an instrument and the exercise of disciplinary power. The function of disciplinary power is centred on the organization and supervision of bodies in a space and time in accord with established rules, it observes, reads, and orders the subjected bodies. Such power in the township was enforced by apartheid state administrators of violence through the combination of brutal force, torture, pain and by leaving excessive amount of suffering, even death in their wake.

In this interview, South African artist Sitaara Stodel speaks with researcher Julia Rensing about the shifting meanings of family photographs as they are relocated and recontextualized. Together, they explore the value of such images, how they can be reactivated, and made meaningful in unintended ways—particularly when they carry the weight of complex or troubling histories. Stodel links these themes to her experiences of displacement, uprootedness and the need for perpetual home-making in South Africa. The interview reflects on Santu Mofokeng’s conception of “home,” and Lebohang Kganye’s take on family photography and family identity to explore Stodel’s strategies of refining the meanings of home and family in her collages. Beyond personal concerns that inform her practice, the artist also addresses the notions of belonging and longing as universal preoccupations central to her work and engages with the ethical implications of refiguring family images.