Bluesology and Bofelosophy
Bluesology and Bofelosophy

Author: wa Bofelo, Mphutlane

Publisher: Botsotso Publishing

Published: 2019-09-05

Total Pages: 156

ISBN-13: 0981406882

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The poems, stories and essays of Mphutlane wa Bofelo operate within a framework of thinking that is an amalgam of philosophies: that of black consciousness, humanistic Islam and socialism. His voice is both lyrical and satirical, expressing anger and tenderness even as his barbs are sharp and his kisses tender. His beats are complex polyrhythms that roll on in incantatory style or achieve mystical brevity. Bofelo entered the world of sociopolitical and cultural activism in the early 1980s through the black consciousness movement in Zamdela Township in Sasolburg. He lives in Durban, where he has built up an audience as a performer of poetry, a speaker and a facilitator. He has self-published two poetry collections and is represented in journals, newspapers and on web sites.

Botsotso 16: poetry, short fiction, essays, photographs and drawings
Botsotso 16: poetry, short fiction, essays, photographs and drawings

Author: Botsotso

Publisher: Botsotso Publishing

Published: 2019-05-09

Total Pages: 192

ISBN-13: 0981420524

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The Botsotso literary journal started in 1996 as a monthly 4 page insert in the New Nation, an independent anti-apartheid South African weekly and reached over 80,000 people at a time – largely politisized black workers and youth – with a selection of poems, short stories and short essays that reflected the deep changes taking place in the country at that time. Since the closure of the New Nation in 1999, the journal has evolved into a stand-alone compilation featuring the same mix of genres, and with the addition of photo essays and reviews. The Botsotso editorial policy remains committed to creating a mix of voices which highlight the diverse spectrum of South African identities and languages, particularly those that are dedicated to radical expression and examinations of South Africa's complex society.

Ice Cream Headache in my Bone
Ice Cream Headache in my Bone

Author: Yaa de Villiers

Publisher: African Books Collective

Published: 2017-08-16

Total Pages: 84

ISBN-13: 1928215416

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In this, her third collection of poetry, Phillippa Yaa de Villiers invokes images of past and present with hypnotic clarity, summoning the heart and heat of memory painful and happy alike with the distinct musicality and visceral punch she is known for. Some poems invite contemplation. Question and provoke. Others are elegiac, moments for reverence in a rich, diverse collection that both spans decades and pauses to revel in the intensity and beauty of a single moment. In liquid form that incorporates prose and poetry, de Villiers fearlessly confronts and disrupts, dipping into a wellspring of images that are euphoric and horrifying. At once prophetic and playful, ice cream headache in my bone is an exploration and celebration of language, a definitive collection that yields and responds, burns and soothes, all the while, calling to a longing for truth, and a tongue not tempered by oppression or pain.

Steve Biko
Steve Biko

Author: Tendayi Sithole

Publisher: Lexington Books

Published: 2016-07-26

Total Pages: 225

ISBN-13: 1498518192

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Moving away from the domain of commemorative, iconicity, monumentalization, and memorialization, Sithole uses Steve Biko's meditations as a discursive intervention to understand black subjectivity. The epistemological shift of this book is not to be bogged down by the cataloging of events, something that is popular in the literature of Steve Biko and Black Consciousness. Rather, a theoretical imagination and conceptual invention is engaged upon in order to situate Biko within the existential repertoire of blackness as a site of subjectivity and not the object of study. The theoretical imagination and conceptual invention fosters an interpretive approach and an ongoing critique that cannot reach any epistemic closure. This is what decolonial meditations are all about, opening up new vistas of thought and new modes of critique informed by epistemic breaks from “empirical absolutism” that reduce Biko to an epistemic catalogue. It is in Steve Biko: Decolonial Meditations of Black Consciousness that the black subject is engaged not only in the politics of criticism for its own sake, but philosophy of existence.

Oral Literary Performance in Africa
Oral Literary Performance in Africa

Author: Nduka Otiono

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2021-05-31

Total Pages: 213

ISBN-13: 100039753X

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This book delivers an admirably comprehensive and rigorous analysis of African oral literatures and performance. Gathering insights from distinguished scholars in the field, the book provides a range of contemporary interdisciplinary perspectives in the study of oral literature and its transformations in everyday life, fiction, poetry, popular culture, and postcolonial politics. Topics discussed include folklore and folklife; oral performance and masculinities; intermediated orality, modern transformations, and globalisation; orality and mass media; spoken word and imaginative writing. The book also addresses research methodologies and the thematic and theoretical trajectories of scholars of African oral literatures, looking back to the trailblazing legacies of Ruth Finnegan, Harold Scheub, and Isidore Okpewho. Ambitious in scope and incisive in its analysis, this book will be of interest to students and scholars of African literatures and oral performance as well as to general readers interested in the dynamics of cultural production.

Sections of Six
Sections of Six

Author: Allan Kolski Horwitz

Publisher:

Published: 2008

Total Pages: 172

ISBN-13:

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The range of South Africans often fragmented experience is best captured when individual testimonies are placed side by side - not necessarily to contradict but to augment each other. These six poets cover a wide spectrum of situations, moods, concerns; sections of six spirits laid bare for those who wish to appreciate the multiplicity of our identity. The six poets included in this collection are Natalie Railoun, Matodzi Gift Ramashia, Alison Green, Abu Bakr Solomon, Khanyi Magubane and Thuto Maki. Their professions range from teaching drama, to being a headmaster, to radio work. The poems are well complemented by an eclectic sample of photographs (by Natalie Railoun and Thuto Mako) that offer images of people and places in stark black and white tones.

This Body is an Empty Vessel: Poetry
This Body is an Empty Vessel: Poetry

Author: Beaton Galafa

Publisher: African Books Collective

Published: 2021-09-02

Total Pages: 119

ISBN-13: 177927260X

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Here is poetry that is personal yet spreading to have its tentacles struggling to grip into other equally slippery facets of life. In brief, Beaton writes his poetry to assuage his personal feelings yet in so doing he ends up massaging our shared experience - as Malawians, Africans and just as humans. Beaton has observed, learnt, and is growing in the Malawian poetry space. Thus, he also comes to the stage bearing the Malawian influence on his poetry.