Dorothy-Grace Guerrero and Firoze Manji (ed) (2008) China’s New Role in Africa and the South: A search for a new perspective. 
African Writers’ Corner
RSS FeedPortrait
Juliet Maruru (2008-06-18)
I look at the portrait in my mind and hope that every parent, every caregiver, every teacher can acknowledge that every child growing up is a human being, has an ethnic, physical, mental, psychological and sexual identity all rolled up and intermingled with each other, and that the education of that child needs to equip him or her to explore all aspects of it all while learning restraint and respect for social boundaries and respect for other people's choices and boundaries.
Mapambazuko
Anonymous (2008-05-28)
Usiku wa dhuluma (The night of oppression) Usiku wenye giza (The night of darkness) Usiku mrefu mno (The long long night) Usiku bila mwisho (The night without end) Usiku huo (Even such a night) Mwishowe utaisha (Will finally end)
You enabled the heaven-hued carnival, but...
Stephen Derwent Partington (2008-04-24)
(i.m. Aimé Césaire, Négritudist) The windward waves are storming: black. The basalt of Pelée is black. The mourners' blown umbrellas: black. The massing clouds above them: black. Umbrella bolls of cotton: black. The acres of vanilla pods: a...
Zanzibari Slave Market 2007
Nafeesa T Nichols (2008-04-08)
dirty, rusted, corroded links of the iron chain hung innocently around the neck of a sculpture afraid to touch the layers of fossilized blood, sweat, agony and fear Fear so soul deep that one can smell it touch it intimately know it when...
Chapter excerpt from "Souls Forgotten"
Francis B. Nyamnjoh (2008-03-17)
The following is only a short exerpt of Souls Forgotten. The extend article can be found at the link below. Four years have gone by since disaster struck the villages of Abehema, Tchang and Yenseh, killing over 2000 peasants and tens of thousand...
Promises, Choices, Spaces: Voices for women
Betty Makoni (2008-03-06)
Ever seen a four every word punctuated title ? Question mark? comma, full stop .exclamation mark !in one Women lives full of thus Patriarchy domineering , feminism under backlash Women have negotiated, still negotiate, will ever negotiate Promi...
Offering
Shailja Patel (2008-03-01)
you wake in the night lips shaped around a word that has not yet arrived you close your eyes wait for it to grow into a poem a poem that might breathe itself into heat, form into a body merged with yours and if you entered that body ...
Weekly Obits
Stephen Derwent Partington (2008-02-26)
There she is, dead again, that grandma with her jowls and battered cardigan, her headscarf and her grainy backstreet photograph. From week to week her image stares to haunt us. It’s the text that brings her sharply into f...
My wish: That every day is Valentine Day
Salma Mlidi (2008-02-20)
My wish: That every day is Valentine Day In the midst of the post-election violence plaguing Kenya, Constable Andrew Maoche found the strength to contribute to the mayhem by shooting on January 31, 2008 David Kimutai Too, the newly elected parlia...
Kenyan women targets of violence
Simiyu Barasa (2008-02-14)
Many thought her bravado was pure madness, that unknown young woman on the television screen. “Why do we have to keep on being tear-gassed because of you? We want to work!” She screamed at the leaders of the opposition party outside Nairobi’s Stanley Hotel as they prepared for a banned protest march against the disputed victory of the Mwai Kibaki’s presidency....
An unorthodox update on Zimbabwe’s voters roll (poem)
Isabella Matambanadzo (2008-02-14)
I dressed for the occasion. Put my cute fanny in lace nickers, Gave my breasts some serious gravity (EJ Win always says wear new, matching underwear on important days, that’s why she got me stuff from Bravissimo). I was already sizzling Rainbow...
I Divorce You because of the President
Simiyu Barasa (2008-02-12)
Nairobi, 4 February 2008; On the last day of the year 2008, we sat previewing a wedding video I had made for my fiancée’s brother, Martin, who was leaving with his bride Sally for South Africa a few days later. Like bad movie editors, we constantly switched from footage of elegant Maasai dancers from the bride’s family and Gikuyu dancers from the grooms family, to television news of paramilitary police in their jungle fatigues keeping rowdy crowds from the Electoral Commissioners of Kenya announcing the election results. ...
You, S/He: a Language Test in Time of Strife
Stephen Derwent Partington (2008-02-07)
Rewrite this sentence as a question: I should kill you. Next, correct this split infinitive: To clearly know what’s wrong. Reverse the pronouns in this sentence: You’ll forgive me. The infinitive of Love is: Love; To L...
PRAISE POEM
Stephen Derwent Partington (2008-02-05)
We praise the man who, though he held the match between his finger and his thumb, beheld the terror of its tiny drop of phosphorous, its brown and globoid smoothness like a charred and tiny skull and so returned it to its box. So too, we ha...
Lethe
Stephen Derwent Partington (2008-02-05)
When peace erupted, none of us was ready. You remember how the sticks above our heads were gently lowered, how our riot gear was sloughed-off like a skin? We rubbed our chins. And yet, the dead, they didn’t rise. Do you recall the day the gran...
Divide and Misrule
Stephen Derwent Partington (2008-01-30)
What does dug earth care at all about ethnicity? A Mwangi fits a six-foot hole as snugly as Owuor. And tell me, where's the corpse that anyone can teargas with success? Or did you do it to augment the tears of mourners, out of kindness? Ca...
Their bodies are a battle ground (poem)
2008-01-29
we hear a woman’s raped every 30 minutes this fact needs to be adjusted as 56 & more many more were assaulted inside the first 2 days of premeditated brutality of the elephants’ skirmish their bodies are the frontline where foes are belittl...
What was left of us
Mildred Barya (2008-01-24)
Everything changed. We are back home trying out new skins as the continent wastes on. We had believed we could save Africa. We were young dreamers. We embraced The African Manifesto, a tract which in our group became as popular as The Communist Manifesto in its time. The first oath we took steered us towards defending and liberating our national frontiers. There was trouble all around Africa. Enemies were approaching our land. We could hear their gunshots from whichever direction we faced. We did not want to run away. It was more worthy standing up to fight. How could we have known the truth? By the time Biira and I finally agreed that it was what was left of us that needed saving, many of our comrades had died, along with our dreams. What pained Biira and I most, however, were not the deaths but the denial, the lack of a funeral. In Africa, when someone died, it was acknowledged and burial arrangements made. In fact, it seemed we respected the dead more than the living. Nowadays of course things have turned round. Alive or dead there’s no big deal. Though it’s tougher staying alive than dead, of course! And probably that’s why we have more haunted and tragic lives. For many of us life is cruel and disjointed like a chicken cut up and assembled according to the parts: the wings together, the drumsticks together and so on. When you cook them you think that you’re going to eat chicken but that’s not true. You’re only feeding on parts of a chicken. That is our life, not lived wholly. One by one, our comrades were bundled in reed mats and blankets, and ‘disposed of.’ Our commanders called the disposal operation smooth. We learnt years later that the bodies were not flown home. That they were taken to a villa in Lubumbashi where they were slit open. That the hearts, livers, kidneys and lungs were plucked out and sold in South Africa. That’s what our government did to our fallen heroes. No consolation letters were sent to their families. No condolence messages to their friends. How can I admit that operation smooth as its name suggests was indeed fast and efficient? Years later when Biira and I sat down by the river Congo to remember our comrades, it seemed as if they had never lived, never walked here, they were never born. We had only imagined them. What had happened to our memory that we could not recall their names except one? We searched desperately for their faces, their names. How were they erased? Exhausted, shocked, we questioned our sanity, failure of the mind to recollect our absent colleagues. Had nothing happened? Had everything happened? Biira and I are from Arcadia, a relatively small country compared to most African states. Sometimes, if you’re not careful your eyes might miss us on the map. Foreigners tease us that our country is only a strip, but we are there all the same. And those of you, who still follow news, don’t pay much attention to what you read, see, or hear about us currently. It wasn’t like that at all in the beginning. We were an enviable rich state, in control of our resources, proud of our land and the people. And we were on our way to liberating the whole of Africa. We never made it. Things changed.