Stop all the clocks, cut off the telephone, Prevent the dog from barking with a juicy bone, Silence the pianos and with muffled drum Bring out the coffin, let the mourners come. W. H. Auden, stanza extract from Funeral Blues Yesterday we lost Ma’Mngoma Dr Sibongile Khumalo and it felt like listening to “Thula Mama”,…
I first came across drag queen LaWhore Vagistan through her TEDxTufts video on Youtube. In this video, she chronicles her journey into the art of auntie-ing, learned from a lineage of South Asian women who raised her. While acknowledging the complexities and problematics that come with being an auntie—gaslighting, fat-shaming, holding onto outdated traditional values—the…
For all the scepticism and sense of trepidation I feel about surveillance, tracking and the ‘computer’ knowing what I’m thinking, doing and going to do—I appreciate a good algorithm. Lately, the algorithms have flooded me with images of Black women dotting sharp outfits and high-end accessories I definitely can’t afford. In these moments, when I’m…
Rituals are the bedrock of our sense-making in this world….they help us regulate emotions, our goal/performance states, and our connection to other people. Kursat Ozenc It is with this sentiment on rituals that I approached five creative practitioners; Byron Fredericks, Refilwe Nkomo, Helena Uambembe, Simnikiwe Buhlungu and Tazmé Pillay. I wanted to get a sense of…
Fiction and art go side by side. One doesn’t depend on the other, however, I do think they become more beautiful the closer they exist to one another. In their junctions, the imagination is provoked and the ability to invent and create becomes clear. All this leads us to great capacities of significance and meaning…
What is the bachelor trope for women? And no, it can’t be the bachelorette because that seems to be a derivative of the bachelor — like how in the reality television series, The Bachelor, the runner-up (AKA the loser) gets to have her own spin-off show to hopefully find love again. In TV land, it’s…
Every afternoon, Ndiaye would leave his friends and family as they sat around their shared bowl of the traditional Senegalese lunch dish of rice and fish. Instead of wasting time eating, “Patina,” as he is known to most everyone, would leave the seaside neighborhood of Ngor Village and wander off shirtless, with a surfboard under…
Recently, I had the great pleasure (and dare I say honour) of sitting down with James Powell, art and culture editor of The Tenth. The Tenth describe themselves as “a media organisation that documents the history, ideas, aesthetics, and politics of the Black LGBTQ+ community”. This is achieved through digital platforms, events and a biannual…
Love for Moguls was a rose. Love for Mowglis, like us, is a poppy. A love smuggled across borders authorities tried stopping. First brown people we dated, self-hatred almost stopped it. Maybe it’s the thorns that I love, the cuts toughen the skin — I need to struggles to win so it’s the war that…
Picós [have] served as communal entertainment for Colombians in coastal areas, where a majority of the country’s black population lives. The culture of the sound systems have always embraced and promoted African music and, as FACT Mag points out, ‘played a vital role in building a collective diasporan identity for many Afro-Colombians living in a…
Like many of us on the mental health spectrum, my relationship with nourishment is inconsistent. As someone with a mood disorder, this inconsistency is met with violent extremes of too much, or never quite enough; and food is no exception. I am either disinterested or obsessed with flavour and texture – concerned over the contents…
The WNBA regular season is at a close with the playoffs in full swing—and while it was a short campaign—it will be one of the most memorable in the league’s history; not only because of the bubble experiment but because of how it became the most politically tinged season. After the death of George Floyd…
