Arts & Books

You fought the good fight!

You won the race

In defence of your race

You fought the good fight.

You fought the good fight!

Oh gallant daughter of Africa

And liberated South Africa;

You fought the good fight.

Kiswahili has been spoken in Tanzania for centuries, and it is due to that fact that there has been peaceful co-existence among its more than 100 ethnic groups.

In 1992, the world of music changed and civility in the arts became pejorative, as the once unacceptable and inflammatory content of hard-core rap valorising misogynistic, homophobic, gangster and other bigoted themes were mainstreamed into music and pop culture.

This past weekend I went to watch Black Panther with my family.

I wished Trump a win

For I wished to see an experiment

For I had never seen an experiment

It is true; I had never seen an experiment

I did not see Stalin’s experiment

I did not see Hitler’s experiment

I did not see Mussolini’s experiment

Hollywood films should always come with a consumer health warning to people of African descent: “Beware of The Ideology of the Aesthetic”, as Terry Eagleton would put it.

After watching the Inxeba movie, my impression is that it has less to do with ulwaluko/koma (initiation), and more to do with homosexuality and the prejudices generally suffered by gay men.

In his epic 1973 masterpiece, Two Thousand Seasons, Ghanian novelist Ayi Kwei Armah framed the whole of Black life as one of remembrance.

“It is indeed unfortunate that so much Nok material has been looted over time to supply the international market. Properly excavated, such pieces might have shed valuable light on the Nok culture,” Ekpo Eyo [1]

In this essay I reflect on Ngũgĩ’s Wizard of the Crow in the context of larger issues that bridge literature and politics.  I argue that like all social studies, there is no neutral literature. Observers and writers on society – economists, journalists, novelists, etc.