Discourse / Essays

The Chimurenga Library is an online archive of black periodicals, and an exhibition and research method by Chimurenga, a Cape Town-based, pan-African publisher and broadcaster of topics dealing with arts and politics. The Chimurenga Library seeks to reimagine the library as a laboratory for extended curiosity, new adventures, critical thinking, daydreaming, socio-political involvement, partying and

‘Semi-politan’ cartographies: resituating self through obsolete and new technologies Recently, Momtaza Mehri, who goes by the Twitter handle @RuffneckRefuge, tweeted: ‘africans being deported in israel, kidnapped in libya, shot at indiscriminately in italy & the afropean passport posse is still bragging about how cosmopolitan they are.’1 Across oceans and borders, Africans on the move nodded

The colonial period: centrifugal infrastructure We can understand infrastructure as one of the very tools of colonialism to hegemonise and exploit a continent. With the start of colonisation, the French and British but also the Belgian and Portuguese colonisers used infrastructure systems such as harbours, roads and railways to make territories accessible, and to transport

There is a link between the ugly trope of the current ‘Mediterranean refugee crisis’ as an authenticating stand-in for what African mobility is supposedly all about – despite the fact that we speak of this crisis without taking into account the subversive movement of illicit capital that refugee trajectories as a generality in reality inadvertently

‘There are maps now whose portraits have nothing to do with surface.’ — Michael Ondaatje This is an essay in three parts, each concentrating on some aspect of the complex relationship between ‘home’ and ‘away’, between ‘roots’ and ‘routes’ and between ‘origin’ and ‘destination’. It focuses on one aspect of African mobilities – migration –

Mobilities across time and space are reshaping African lives, communities and imagination. As people make lives across multiple sites – connections forged through travel, media and the circulation of goals, memories and values – they are generating novel forms of mobile urbanism and belonging. Within cities, rapidly expanding, diversifying and mobile urban populations now interact