Month: August 2024

  • When Dambudzo Marechera Met Aaron Chiundura Moyo – A Brief History of Zimbabwe’s Language Wars

    When Dambudzo Marechera Met Aaron Chiundura Moyo – A Brief History of Zimbabwe’s Language Wars

    In newly independent Zimbabwe, language wars erupted between homecoming writers who had made their names in the language of exile and writers who had worked with the state-run Literature Bureau to grow a Ndebele and Shona canon. Onai Mushava revisits the cold encounters of two of Zimbabwe’s best known writers, Dambudzo Marechera and Aaron Chiundura…

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  • Beyond Big Man Palaver: Pan-Africanism in 2022

    Beyond Big Man Palaver: Pan-Africanism in 2022

    Pan-Africanism means we will do it ourselves by doing it together. It grounds economic advancement, political liberation, cultural self-determination and territorial integrity in the unity of all African people on the continent and its diaspora. While the African Union has scored some important wins, African unity essentially fails along class lines.

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  • MOVIE REVIEW| Kagiso Lediga’s “Catching Feelings”

    MOVIE REVIEW| Kagiso Lediga’s “Catching Feelings”

    Catching Feelings is a South African romantic comedy, written, directed and led by Kagiso Lediga. The Netflix thinkpic brings together sex, race and literature as seen through the insecurities of its cruelly self-probing lead character Max Matshane.

    Click or not: MOVIE REVIEW| Kagiso Lediga’s “Catching Feelings”
  • Juju, Ganja and Mafia at Dynamos

    Juju, Ganja and Mafia at Dynamos

    Juju, Ganja and Mafia at Dynamos A long-serving captain at the country’s most successful football club, Mucherahowa identifies, in the course of his own life story, some of the millstones holding back Zimbabwe’s version of the beautiful game. Even at the high point of its glory days, during the 1998 CAF championship campaign, Dynamos reliably…

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  • MOVIE REVIEW| Boots Riley’s “Sorry to Bother You”

    MOVIE REVIEW| Boots Riley’s “Sorry to Bother You”

    MOVIE REVIEW| Boots Riley’s “Sorry to Bother You” Marxist Boots Riley left critical references to the U.S president out of his 2018 movie, Sorry to Bother You, so they do not feed the buzz at the expense of his less comfortable communist ideas. This lone-wolf angst is shared by Kendrick Lamar whose 2021 feature finds the…

    Click or not: MOVIE REVIEW| Boots Riley’s “Sorry to Bother You”
  • Nas’ Ultra Black Theory

    Nas’ Ultra Black Theory

    Nas’ Ultra Black Theory “Ultra Black” is the most commercially successful Pan-Africanist artist’s white paper on Black power. As a hip hop capitalist, Nas is the unusual poet laureate who observes neither the saintly asceticism of Bob Marley nor the socialism of W.E.B Du Bois and George Padmore. As a lone-wolf intellectual, Nas may be…

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  • Three Silences of Winky D (Introduction)

    Three Silences of Winky D (Introduction)

    Winky D wants to restore Zimdancehall to its default ghetto settings. His 13th album, Eureka Eureka, challenges culture capture by self-seeking patrons and state actors. Noted for his conceptual dynamism and pro-poor devotion, Winky D has repeatedly thrown his weight against trends to influence the industry in his own direction. Will Zimdancehall respond to his…

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  • Mebo, Winky D and Karl Marx

    Mebo, Winky D and Karl Marx

    Few remember Karl Marx as a love poet but long before the shaggy economist was the poster-boy of regime change, he was an impassioned lyricist, smitten with the mortal madness of love like the rest of us. Despite his documented hate for capitalism, he concluded his love poems in cheesy capitals like: “LOVE IS JENNY,…

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