The links between Asia and Africa and South America have always been present but in our times they have been made invisible by the fact that Europe is still the central mediator of Afro-Asian-Latino discourse. We live under what Satya Mohanty in his interview in Frontline (April 2012), aptly calls the long intellectual shadow of the Age of European Empire.

In my case, I had always assumed that my intellectual and social formation was tied to England and Europe, with no meaningful connection to Asia and South America. There was a reason. I wrote in English. My literary heroes were English. Kenya being a British colony, I had learnt the geography and history of England as the central reference in my widening view of the world. Even our anti-colonial resistance assumed Europe as the point of contest; it was we, Africa, against them, Europe. I graduated from Makerere College in Uganda in 1964, with a degree in English; then went to the University of Leeds, England, for further studies, in English.  Leeds was a meeting point of students from the Commonwealth: India, Pakistan, Australia, and the Caribbean. We saw each other through our experience of England. Our relationship to England, in admiration, resentment or both, was what established a shared space.

After I wrote my memoir of childhood, Dreams in a Time of War, published in 2006, I looked back and saw how much India had been an equally important thread in my life.  I had not planned to bring out the Indian theme in my life: but there it was, staring at me right from the pages of my narrative. The thread starts from home, through school, college and after.

I did not grow up in a Christian home, but we celebrated Christmas, everybody did, it was a time of carnival, with children, in their very best, trooping from house to house to indulge their fancy in terms of food. We were vegetarians through out the year, though not out of choice, and to many, Christmas day was the first time they would taste meat. For me Christmas meant the occasion for eating gĩtoero, a curried broth of potatoes, peas, beans, and occasionally a piece of lamb or chicken, but the centerpiece of the dishes was cabaci sometimes called mborota. Even today, Christmas and feasts in Kenya mean plentiful of cabaci, thambutha and mandathi, our version of the Indian chapati, paratha, samosa. The spices, curry, hot pepper and all, so very Indian, had become so central a part of Kenyan African cuisine that I could have sworn that these dishes were truly indigenous.

It was not just Christmas: daily hospitality in every Kenyan home means being treated to a mug of tea, literally a brew of tea leaves, tangawizi, and milk and sugar, made together, really a massala tea. Not to offer a passing guest or neighbor a cup of tea is the height of stinginess or poverty; and for the guest to decline the offer, the ultimate insult. So African it all seemed to me that when I saw Indians drinking tea or making curry, I thought it the result of African influence. Where the Indian impact on African food culture was all pervasive, there was hardly any equivalence from the English presence; baked white bread is the only contribution that readily comes to mind.

This is not surprising.  Imported Indian skilled labor built the railway line from the Coast to the Great Lake, opening the interior for English settlement. Every railroad station, from Mombasa to Kisumu, initially depots for the building material, mushroomed into town mainly because of the Indian traders who provided much needed services to the workers initially but in time, to the community around.  If European settlers opened the land for large-scale farming for export, the Indian opened the towns and cities for retail and wholesale commerce.

Limuru where I come from had a thriving Indian shopping center built on land curved from that of my maternal grandfather’s clan. The funeral pyres to burn the bodies of the Indian dead were held in a small forest that was also under my maternal grand father’s care.  Cremation is central to Hindu culture: it asks Agni, the fire god to release the spirit from the earthily body to be re-embodied in heaven into a different form of being. The departed soul traveled from pretaloka to pitraloka unless there were impurities holding it back. My mother did not practice Hinduism, but to her dying day, she believed and swore that on some nights, she would see disembodied Indian spirits, like lit candles in the dark, wandering in the forest around the cremation place.  She talked about it as a matter of regular material fact and she would become visibly upset when we doubted her.

It was not all harmony all the time. The Indian community kept to itself, there was hardly any social interaction between us, except across the counters at the shopping center.  Fights between African and Indian kids broke out, initiated by either side.  The Indian dukawalla, an employer of Africans for domestic work and around the shops, was, more often than not, likely to hurl racially charged insults at his workers. Some of the insults entered African languages.  One of the most insulting words in Gĩkũyũ was njangiri. A njangiri of a man meant one who was useless, rootless, like a stray dog. Njangiri came to Gĩkũyũ from Jangaal, the Sanskrit/Hindi word for wild: it would have been what the Indian employer was likely to call his domestic help.  In the colonial times, in my area at least, I do not recall the tensions ever exploding into inter-communal violence,

The post-colonial scene presents a different picture. Time and again Indians and Indian owned stores have been targets of violence especially in times of crisis, mostly victims of looting.  I am not sure if it’s the fact of their Indianness or the fact of their being a most visible part of the affluent middleclass. In such a case the line between the racial and class resentment is thin.  Different in that sense is the case of Idi Amin’s Uganda, where hundreds of Asians were expelled from a country that had been their home for almost a century. In both the colonial and post-colonial era, social segregation, forced in the case of the colonial era, or a consequence of habit and history, has exacerbated tensions.

The colonial school system segregated Asian, European and African from each other and it was not until Makerere College that I had social interaction with Indians. Makerere was an affiliate of the University of London in Kampala, Uganda, where, until the advent of idi Amin, racial relations were benign.  Before its college status, Makerere used to be a place of post-secondary schooling for African students from British East Africa, but as Independence approached, the college opened its doors to a sizeable Indian student presence. That is when we started learning about each other’s different ways of life at a more personal basis. We shared dorms, classes, and the struggles for student leadership in college politics and sports. Leadership emerged from any of the multi-ethnic and multi-racial mix. Doing things together is the best teacher of race relations: one can see and appreciate the real human person behind the racial and ethnic stereotypes.

The lead role of an African woman in my drama, The Black Hermit, the first major play ever in English by an East African black native, was an Indian. No make up, just a headscarf and a kanga shawl on her long dress but Suzie Wooman played the African mother to perfection, her act generating a standing ovation lasting into minutes. I dedicated my first novel, Weep Not Child, to my Indian classmate, Jasbir Kalsi, probably as homage to our friendly but fierce intellectual rivalry in our English studies. Ghulsa Nensi led a multi-ethnic team that made the costumes for the play while Bahadur Tejani led the team that raised money for the production.

It was not simply at the personal realm. Commerce, arts, crafts, medical and legal professions in Kenya have the marks of the Indian genius all over them. Politics too, and it should never be forgotten that Mahatma Gandhi started and honed his political and organizing skills in South Africa where he spent twenty one years of his life from 1893  leaving for India in 1914. The South African scholar, Masilela Ntongela, places Gandhi squarely as one of the founding intellectuals of what Masilela calls the New African Movement. The honorific Mahatma, the great soul, was first applied to him in South Africa for by the time he left for India, he had already developed his Satyagraha and Ahimsa ready for use in his anti-colonial struggles that eventually led to Indian independence in 1947, an event that had a big impact on anti-colonial struggles in Africa.  What India achieved could be realized in Africa!  Gandhi kept in touch with politics in Africa, Kenya in particular, and wrote a letter of protest when the British imprisoned one of the early Kenyan nationalists, Harry Thuku, in the 1920s.  Gandhi created the tradition of South African Asians at the front line of struggle in South Africa. Ahmed Kathrada was one of the ten defendants in the famous Rivonia trial that would lead him to Robben Island where he spent eighteen years alongside Mandela and others. What Gandhi started Mandela completed. When I met Mandela in Johannesburg soon after his release and becoming President of the ANC party, I came out from the hour-long one on one conversation, struck by the charisma of his simplicity, reminiscent of what people say about Gandhi.

The birth of Trade Union Movement in Kenya was largely the work of Gamal Pinto and Makhan Singh. Imprisoned by the Kenya colonial authorities repeatedly, Makhan Singh would never give up the task of bringing Indian and African workers together. He was the first prominent political leader to stand in a court of law and tell the British colonial state that Africans were ready to govern themselves, a heresy that earned him imprisonment and internal exile. Kapenguria is usually associated with the trial and imprisonment of Jomo Kenyatta but Makhan Singh preceded him. There have been some Indian political martyrs, the first being the Indian workers executed for treason, by the authorities in the very early days of colonial occupation.   Gamal Pinto, a hero of the anti-colonial resistance, would be a prominent victim of the post-colonial negative turn in Kenyan politics. Though under a fictional name, Gamal Pinto, has been immortalized in Peter Nazareth’s novel, In a Brown Mantle one of the best literary articulations of the political drama of the transformation of African politics from the colonial to the neo-colonial.

The recent explosion of Chinese interest in African might obscure the fact that there has always been a small but significant migrant Chinese presence, South Africa mostly, but also in Zimbabwe.  Fay Chung whose grandparents migrated to Rhodesia in the 1920s became an active participant in the anti-colonial struggle, at one time running for her life into exile in Tanzania, was a big player in the founding of Zimbabwe. She founded Zimfep which invited Kamĩrĩthũ theater to Zimbabwe, a visit was scuttled by the Moi regime by simply banning the theater group and forcing one of its leaders, the late Ngũgĩ wa Mĩriĩ, to flee to Zimbabwe, and under Zimfep, launched the Zimbambwe Community Theater  Movement [1], ensuring that the continuity and expansion of the Kamĩrĩthũ spirit.

Mao Tse Tung never visited Africa but his thought has been part of the intellectual debate in the post-colonial era. His class analysis of Chinese society was seen as providing a more relevant model for analyzing African post-colonial social realities than the European Marxist model, and Kwame Nkrumah book, Class struggle in Africa, has the Mao’s marks all over it. The notion of the Comprador bourgeoisie dependent and serving foreign capital and hence contrastable from the national bourgeoisie with its primary reliance on national capital has become an analytic model in Political theory and development studies.

The intellectual history of the continent would be the poorer without the journal, Transition, now based in Harvard, but founded by Rajat Neogy way back in 1962.  Neogy, a brilliant and creative editor, was Uganda born and educated: he believed in the multi-cultural and multifaceted character of ideas, and he wanted to provide a space where different ides could meet, clash, and mutually illuminate. Transition became the intellectual forum of the New East Africa, and indeed Africa, the first publisher of some of the leading intellectuals in the continent, including Wole Soyinka, Ali Mazrui and Peter Nazareth. Transition published my short story, The Return, a turning point in my literary life.  The story that captured what would later become so central a part of my aesthetic explorations in my novels, principally A Grain of Wheat et al, was the sole basis of my inclusion in the 1962 conference of African writers of English expression.

Peter Nazareth and Bahadur Tejani, early contributors to Transition would later set the tradition of Afro-Indian writing with their novels, a tradition taken to new heights by Moyez G Vassanji.  More than even black African writers, these three have been among those who have explored extensively and intensively the often problematic African-Indian relations.  My own work, Wizard of the Crow, published in 2006, in which I tried to bring in Eastern philosophies  into imaginative discourse with  African realities was following in the footprints already made by these writers on the sands of the  cultural scene in Africa.

It may be argued that in the specific cases of East and South Africa where there has always been a sizeable Asian immigrant presence, Afro-Asian dialogue was inevitable.  But, in general, Africa and Asia, have met through the political entities like the Bandung conference; the non-alignment movement; the Afro-Asian Peoples solidarity organization; and at the intellectual practice, the long years of the Afro-Asian writers movement which staged  conferences in various capitals of Asia and Africa.

I have always felt the need for Africa, Asia and South America to learn from each other. This south-to-south intellectual and literary exchange was at the center of the Nairobi Literature debate in the early sixties, and is the centerpiece of my recent theoretical explorations, in Globalectics: Theory and the Politics of Knowing. The debate brought about a literature syllabus that centered the study of Indian/Asian, Caribbean, African-American and South American writers along side those of the European tradition.  The result was not to the liking of the  neo-colonial regime in Kenya who accused me and my colleagues of replacing Shakespeare with  Marxists revolutionaries from Asia, the Caribbean, Afro-America and latin America, among them being Lu Xun, Kim Chi Ha, VS Naipaul, George Lamming, Kamau Brathwaite,  CLR James, Alejo Carpentier, Richard Wright, and Ralph Ellison. Shakespeare was of course safe but we had committed the crime of placing him among other writers and changing the name of the department from English to Literature, which we thought the more appropriate designation of the study of literature without borders.

As the editor of the Gĩkũyũ language journal Mutiiri, I have published the Gĩkũyũ translations of some of the poetry of Ariel Dorfman and Otto Rene Castillo. Professor Gitahi who did the translations directly from Spanish into Gĩkũyũ did his doctoral work on the Latin American literature. Gĩtahi was a product of the literature syllabus of the reorganized literature department of Nairobi University. His translation has facilitated direct Spanish-Gikuyu language conversation.

I would like to publish numerous translations from the languages of Asia and South America and you can call this a challenge to African, South American and Asian translators. More important I would like to see similar efforts at enabling conversations between African, Asian and South American languages.  This also calls for new category of literary scholars who have studied a combination of languages from Asia, Africa and South America.

It is time to make the invisible visible in order to create a more interesting — and ultimately more creative and meaningful — free flow of ideas in the world.   Satya Mohanty is quite right when he points out that “One of the many advantages of the present moment is that the long intellectual shadow of the Age of European Empire seems to be receding a bit, and we have remarkable opportunities to work across cultures to learn from one another.”

Mohanty’s  call for the cultural interaction and interchange  across borders — beyond the Eurocentric campus and our current notions of Comparative Literature — echoes in a forceful way  and fresh manner the vision assumed and contained in the call for the abolition of the English Department made in Nairobi in 1969, the first steps in what would later become post-colonial theories and studies.  Mohanty’s call for  cross-regional comparative literary studies is a  necessary and timely intervention on the path towards a genuine world literature.

This essay by the eminent writer Ngugi wa Thiong’o was inspired by the interview with Satya P. Mohanty (“Literature to Combat Chauvinism”) published in Frontline in April.  It was written for the new “Global South Cultural Dialogue Project” that has been initiated by writers and scholars from the Global South, in particular Mukoma Wa Ngugi (Kenya, USA) and Prafulla Kar (India).

The Global South Cultural Dialogue series is co-curated by Chimurenga Mag (South Africa), Frontline (India) and Cornell University in the US of A.

Also check out Ngugi’s new book: Globalectics: Theory and the Politics of Knowing.

For online PMS Reader seeking video art, images, photos, graphic work, writing, thoughts, itineraries, audio works that addresses/contributes to the discussion on this relationship between power, money and sex.

Deadline is 16 May 2012.

PMS Reader is Chimurenga‘s contribution to the Open Forum, 22-24 May 2012. Money Sex Power Reader is published by Chimurenga Magazine and created in collaboration with Open Society Initiative of Southern Africa.

For more info, email: production@chimurenga.co.za

[A creation of the African Centre for Cities & Chimurenga]

Call for Submissions 2012
April 2012

The African Cities Reader is a journal-like platform where Africans tell their own stories, draw their own maps and represent their own spatial topographies as our cities continue to evolve and adapt at the interstice of difference, complexity, opportunism, and irony. The intervention is premised on the fact that the cultural, livelihood, religious, stylistic, commercial, familial, knowledge producing and navigational capacities of African urbanites are typically overlooked, unappreciated and undervalued. The aim of the African Cities Reader is to bring their stories and practices to the fore through a variety of genres and experiments in criticality.

The third African Cities Reader will explore the unholy trinity of land, property and value-the life force of cities everywhere – especially in an era of late modernity marked by a speculative impulse that takes on a spectral character as it instigates adventures of city imagineering, deal-making, and symbolic reinvestment. The material effects of which is often displacement, violence, day light robbery and night time seduction. This incessant (re)making of the African city is a game that leaves few untouched or unmoved.

As too many demands are placed on too few infrastructural endowments, land and living space come at a premium. Ingrained differential standards of what constitutes “acceptable” or “adequate” levels of consumption create a grotesque reflection of class and other markers of hierarchy in the built landscape. And in the absence of widespread formal and regular sources of income, most city dwellers are forced to hedge every shred of connection, cunning, positioning and affiliation to retain a foothold or expand their room for manoeuvre. The third instalment of the African Cities Reader will bring these constitutive dynamics to life.

Specifically, we are looking for imaginative reflections on the recent phenomenon of investment in urban utopias for the global middle-class unmoored from the messy realities of emergent urbanisms. In fact, the investment, construction, marketing and governance dynamics of these experiments reflect a fascinating geography of rapidly changing geo-economics in an increasingly multi-polar world. At the other end of the spectrum, we are also curious about the enduring traces of autonomous artist colonies or spaces; often modest material interventions but with powerful symbolic effects. Asef Bayat draws our attention to what he calls “the quiet encroachment of the ordinary” – survival practices of urban majorities that involve the relentless occupation of resources at the expense of elites to simply get by, but which add up to a redefinition of land-use, settlement patterns and resource flows in the city. (Bayat, A. (2000) ‘Social Movements, Activism and Social Development in the Middle East’, Civil Society and Social Movements Programme Paper, Geneva: UNRISD). Stories, theorisations and illustrations that flesh out this proposition are invited.

Furthermore, the new and emerging forces of power and investment cannot but imprint themselves on the urban fabric. Their power and status demands a built manifestation. So, we are curious to better understand the changing visual landscapes and cultures as religious, commercial, ethnic, security and other forces announce their power and intentions. How might these symbolic economies be redeployed and ridiculed as ordinary people move in and out of their intentions of place-making?

Developmentalist discources on tenure security as a gateway to urban citizenship has been part of the mainstream for at least three decades. What has this resulted in? Why is there still such an abiding optimism about the magical powers of title and tenure security? Where might these discourses go to next? How can they possibly make sense of the vast peri-urban dynamics that now dominate the lived reality of most African cities?

Finally, since African cities and towns (including new ones) will have to accommodate at least another four hundred million people over the next two decades, what is the future of land, property and value? What alternative imaginaries are available to us to think about the bare fact of co-existence, being, and home? Is there even a horizon to be thought or imagined? What might the hue of that horizon be?

In keeping with previous manifestations, the third African Cities Reader remains open to multiple genres (literature, philosophy, faction, reportage, ethnographic narrative, etc.), forms of representation (text, image, sound and possibly performance), and points of view. The African Cities Reader insists on embodying the rich pluralism, cosmopolitanism and diversity of emergent urbanisms across Africa. Thus, the Reader invites and undertake to commission writing and art by practitioners, academics, activists and artists from diverse fields across Africa in all of her expansiveness.

Submissions will be accepted until Wednesday, 31st August 2012, and should be submitted electronically in Word format and low-res jpg to the email address below. Submissions may vary in subject matter and will be assessed on their relevance to theme. All work should accompany a short abstract, biography and relevant contact details.

Explore the first and second African Cities Readers here.

For further information contact:
Liepollo Rantekoa
africancitiesreader@chimurenga.co.za
T) +27(21)4224168

Editors: Ntone Edjabe & Edgar Pieterse

Begun in 2011, the IPP is a research initiative aimed at gathering people and objects around the idea of self or small-scale publishing in a South African context.

Combining contemporary and historical examples, the books, booklets, zines, take-aways and leaflets generated, gathered and traded through the project advocate independent publishing as a first rather than a last resort. Looking at independent or small-scale publishing as both a medium and a strategy, the project’s interest in these items is part sentimental, part tactile and part political. Consumable but not commodified, these works traverse closely-knit networks as if by word of mouth, existing as intimate instruments of personal agency and freedom of thought. They create a space.

Focusing on collaboration and conversation among contemporary practitioners the second exhibition of the IPP will feature a select reading room and a working studio. Guest participants to occupy the space include Josh Ginsburg, Rangoato Hlasane, Mark Kannemeyer, CUSS (Ravi Govender, Jamal Nxedlana, Nikki Comninos and Zamani Xolo), and Sebastian Borckenhagen, amongst others.

The project will develop within the space over six weeks, culminating with a combined event showcasing new works, an IPP broadsheet and the screening of CUSS’s Johannesburg focused webisode. The event will take place on the 24th of April at 18:30 at the Goethe-Institut.

See press or the project blog for more information or project related updates.

Goethe-Institut Südafrika http://www.goethe.de/Johannesburg

119 Jan Smuts Ave
Entrance on New Port Road
Parkwood 2193
Johannesburg
Tel: +27 11 4423232
Fax: +27 11 4423738

Gallery hours*

Mon – Fri: 9:00 am-6:00 pm
Sat: 10:00 pm-2:00 pm

* The reading room may have specific viewing hours imposed from the 19th of March, these times will be posted on the IPP blog so please check before visiting.

The collection of over a hundred publications explores the various ways in which contemporary artists and designers utilize the magazine format as an experimental space for the presentation of artworks and text.

The works on view include an array of international titles, from community-building newspapers to image-only photography magazines to conceptual design projects.

Other featured publications include A Prior, Apartamento, Bidoun, Cabinet, Copenhagen Free University, Correspondencia, Le Dictateur, Fillip, Institute for Social Hypocricy, Journal of Aesthetics and Protest, Journal of Radical Shimming, Knit Knit, Metronome, Point d’Ironie, Zug and many more.

February 20–May 14, 2012. Mezzanine, The Lewis B. and Dorothy Cullman Education and Research Building, The Museum of Modern Art, 11 West 53 Street  New York.

More here: www.moma.org/visit/calendar/exhibitions/1244

Friday 24 February, 19h00 till 22h00 at the Gugu s’Thebe Arts and Culture Centre, cnr Washington and Church Street, Langa. Free Entry

“There are three sides to every story. His. Mine. And the truth.”

-          Ade (Hakeem Kae-Kazim)

Man on Ground is a drama structured as a thriller to expose the complexities that inform the personal and public navigations of a place called home. Written and directed by Johannesburg-based filmmaker Akin Omotoso, Man on Ground follows the estranged relationship of expatriate Nigerian brothers, London based Ade (Hakeem Kae-Kazim) and South African based Femi (Fabian Adeoye Lojede). Ade, upon discovering Femi’s disappearance on a trip to South Africa, ventures to solve the mystery of his brother’s vanishing against the backdrop of escalating xenophobic violence.

Starring a stellar cast including Hakeem Kae-Kazim, Fana Mokoena, Fabian Adeoye Lojede, Makhaola Ndebele and Bubu Mazibuko, Man on Ground has featured at prestigious international film festivals such as the Toronto International Film Festival (TIFF) and 8^th Dubai International Film Festival.

For the project three Cairo-based, conceptually diverse DIY initiatives (Zine El-Arab, TokTok, and Cairobserver) have set up temporary printing bureaus in Townhouse’s First Floor Gallery. Over the next three weeks, practitioners behind each of these uncensored, Arabic-language projects will be working on their publications in the gallery space, meeting with their collaborators, and discussing their initiatives with the general public.

The project also includes a reading room where visitors can continue these cross-disciplinary discussions over a cup of coffee, and consult a curated selection of publications, including Chimurenga.

Visit www.thetownhousegallery.com or their facebook page at http://www.facebook.com/events/320253274685235/ for more details.

Sharifa Rhodes-Pitts

We caught up with Sharifa at the PASS Studios during a recent visit to Cape Town to talk about the book and its place in her broader projected exploring black utopia.

James Joyce once boasted that were Dublin raised to the ground, it could be rebuilt from scratch with Ulysses as the blueprint. Could the same be said for Harlem is Nowhere? What would a city-within-a-city built on your blueprint look like?

It would be a very idiosyncratic Harlem! Years ago when I was a teenager I did a course where they had us make maps of places, highlighting what drops out just based on personal experience of a place. I think of this book very much like that – a personal map of the places I went or that caught my eye. Many things are left out. I was always sure it wasn’t going to be an encyclopaedic book.

The title refers to Harlem’s multiple realities and histories, but also its mythical status – that imaginary Harlem that hovers over the city. What role does and can that myth play in informing current realities. 

Firstly it’s important to point out that the title is borrowed from Ralph Ellison – so I had him to contend with from the beginning… all of those writers! At first, I found myself at first bumping heads with them and their declarations about Harlem. In 1925 Alain Locke wrote in the The New Negro that Harlem is prophetic, that is had the same roll to play for black American that Dublin did for Ireland or Prague for the new Czechoslovakia. So there was this gauntlet thrown down at the beginning that it had this roll to play. It’s always enacted this self mythologizing.

In terms of how it works out today it’s most evident to me in different setting. On the one hand, going to political meetings and people saying, ‘what happens in Harlem matters everywhere’, which is true but it also overstates the case and doesn’t allow for the specificity of other places and their particular experiences. Harlem looms larger than everything and overshadows everything. The result is that dialogue with other places is closed down. Then there is this sense when you’re on the street and talking to people that Harlem always appears in quotes or block letters. So I found myself always trying to go behind that, to find a real entry point. It’s like trying to go behind the Hollywood sign. Sometimes there’s nothing there. My question is always what do you see when you’re not dealing with a place as a pronouncement.

How did you avoid getting weighed down, consumed by all that myth and history? With the weight of all the history how does one move forward toward new futures?

This is a question that’s been on my mind a lot here in Cape Town – reading, listening to music and sometimes I feel like everything that troubles us has already been accounted for and that we just haven’t managed to put it in motion. That requires an engagement with history. So, yes, I feel the weight. I feel it in the form of prose – which is a very heavy form for me right now. As a prose writer I sometimes felt like I had dragged a whole library on my back. My process was really an immersion – reading, spending time revisiting things I thought I knew already then synthesising it.  I knew from the beginning my challenge would be to make all these different kind of knowledge exist on the same plane – the things I was reading; things I remembered (both correctly and incorrectly); things someone told me in passing; things I picked up from the street. All these things needed to balance out. So that was one very deliberate strategy that I used.

Harlem has been a hotbed of creativity, dissent, innovation – in music, literature, politics, life! What is the relationship between place and creativity for you? What conditions are necessary for a place to become one of emergence?

 I live in New Orleans now and have for about two years now. Along with Harlem, it is, of course, one of the most iconic crucibles of black creativity. The one thing that jumps out for me as a person that’s passing through there, is that continuity is a conduit for creativity. Up until Katrina and the failure of the levees it was a place where many people stayed. The beginnings of jazz were there. There have been huge movements from New Orleans – to California, the rest of the country, the world. But all through that it’s remained a place where people have been rooted. People have a really strong feeling of a direct connection to what happens in that place. So something  that they do on a Sunday is related to something people did on a Sunday a hundred years ago.

But of course creativity can also be determined by flux – a sense of influx or dispersal. Harlem historically was a weird convergence of what was happening at that moment, which can be defined in so many ways – the end of the rural life; urbanisation; the begins of this industrial age; artistically, modernism; politically, nationalism… all these things happen at the same time. On top of that you have people coming from so many different places. Not just from the South but from the Caribbean and Africa, and of course black New Yorkers who had been there for many years.

The book is part of a larger exploration into black utopia – that includes Haiti and the Black Belt South. Utopia has always been a Western concept – from Plato’s Republic to Thomas More’s Utopia. It was one of the founding ideas behind colonialism. How does the idea of a black utopia function in relation to this history? What’s your understanding of black utopia?

For me it goes back to a question of how do you constitute a space that you haven’t chosen to be in. The question of black people in America is a question of building – where are you going to build, how are you going to live – literally, virtually, politically. Recently I’ve been reading Harold Cruse’s The Crisis Of The Negro Intellectual and he’s really great at identifying the blind spots of the black radical movements and moments. He looks at the 1920s as this lost moment when black political and creative culture got usurped by the integrationist mandate and then again in the 1960s, the vision of the nationalism that emerges and the pockets that were rejected and ejected from political and creative life during that period. It becomes almost a decision to yield the ground literally. So, the question is, how do we build? Who lives there? Who pays for it? In the Harlem I encountered today, those questions are all still relevant. Sure, you can declare Harlem as the Mecca, a cultural capital but it means nothing if the money is being controlled by other people. The consistency between where you end up and how you got there is crucial. The situation Harlem is in today as black place that is being like sold off by black people, though of course not exclusively, points to that contradiction. It’s a utopia that is nowhere, that is nothing.

So how do we move from this point? Is it possible to still be utopian?

The third book in the series focuses on the South and the founding of black towns both before the civil war and after the civil war. There are stories of people coming together – sometimes on the same land they had been enslaved on – in mutual protection with a great sense of hope about the possibilities of community. Sure, many of those places failed or don’t exist anymore but I’m interested in that beginning, which is that really lofty and space filled with a mission to live out something that has been promised. So in the next books I hope to trace that ground and make a stronger connection between that point and where we are now. I feel I circled or danced around it in the Harlem book but I want to be more direct about what the lesson from those places is; how they are relevant for us now.

I think black American thought has arrived at a really weird moment with writers of my own generation making really weird declarations about “post blackness”. It’s something I’m really trying to work out. It seems to me that these dispatches from this “post-something world” point to a lack of history, a lack of that continuity where what you do is directly connected to something in the past. So there is this sense of the gap, a rupture, a break that relates to the missed chances, the blind spots that Cruse talks about. My generation seems to be suffering from a claim that there is nothing left to fight for. I just don’t see that. Maybe I’m being a throw-back but I see lots to fight for. We are still living in such heavy times; black people in America are facing such heavy times. It’s such an old idea but that sense that we are all connected, that we share a history is imperative to care about the future.

Harlem, Haiti, the Black Belt South… why aren’t any African cities included in the project? Is it possible to explore black utopia without Africa? What role does Africa play in the project? How is it present?

For me it was about working within the limitation of history, living within the boundaries that were marked off. So Africa is completely present in the book and in other ways it isn’t. One of the things that dropped off my map of Harlem is West 116th Street which is called Little Senegal. It’s full of West Africans and immigrants most of them Muslim and French speaking. It wasn’t a part of my everyday life – I walked there, sure and I often ate there but the stories in book are all from my everyday life and it just never entered in that way. Rather it enters peripherally – people I saw, things I saw that I didn’t necessarily understand.

Ironically after I finished the book I took up a three month residency in Paris and after I returned I visited a store to buy this African incense that I fell in love with in Paris and I starting speaking to the shop owner in French and suddenly a door that was previously closed, because I didn’t know the language, opened up. So the book is also about my limitation. It’s about how someone slips into my life and I slip into there’s. I didn’t have an experience which is such an important part of contemporary Harlem. So Africa is there and it isn’t. It’s there in its absence – like a dare!

It’s impossible to think Harlem without thinking music. What role did music play in the book – in its content but also its rhythm, its sound?

 Music is a touchy issue because I didn’t write about music in the book and I wanted to. I’ve always rejected the narrative in black American culture and social life that music is the pinnacle. It always makes me very angry, people always saying things like, ‘the thing we should all be aspiring to is a John Coltrane solo.’ That always felt like a cop out for me. And an insult to me as a writer – that I shouldn’t even try, should just give up in advance because the only thing that articulates this thing is music. But now being here, with all these records, listening to all this music, I’ve started to wonder if maybe I’m wrong about all that….

You’ve been spending some time in Cape Town – a city that truly is “nowhere” – apart from Africa yet not really a part of Europe. A city composed of multiple cities-within-the-city. What has your experience of Kaapstad been?

 I’ve seen so little of it so it’s hard to say anything, but one thing that jumps out at me is that it’s a place where history is written on bodies. It’s a place where you always think about history because you’re continually wondering: how did you get here? What the hell are you doing here? Where do you come from? That important to me because I don’t write about race I write about history. But if you talk about history you have to talk about what happened and if you can talk about it maybe you’ll want to do something about it instead of just saying, oh, its a question of identity. That’s been on my mind a lot in this place.

Will we ever reach a point where Harlem is everywhere?

 I’ve always thought the implied inverse of the title is Harlem is Everywhere and certainly the contemporary question of gentrification – which is an over-used, not very useful word – but questions of displacement, of over-development, of poor people being pushed out of cities is everywhere! That’s why I always come back to the question of land, physical space not being negligible. Where you live is always going to be important. The things you do in a place – eating, sleeping, living, loving and the things that grow of that… it begins with a place.

Join us in Cape Town to launch long-time Chimurenga collaborator, Kwani? founding editor and celebrated writer, Binyavanga Wainaina’s groundbreaking new memoire, One Day I Will Write About This Place.

December 2 from 6.30pm

at the Slave Church on Long Street, Cape Town

Wainaina will read from his book followed by a discussion session with Centre for African Studies Director, Prof Harry Garuba.

“If words, in English, arranged on the page have the power to control my body in this world, this sound and language can close its folds, like a fan, and I will slide into its world, where things are arranged differently.”

Seven years in the making, spanning Wainaina’s middle-class upbringing in Kenya, his failed attempt to study in South Africa, a moving family reunion in Uganda, his travels around Kenya, music, soccer, food, politricks, beauty, tragedy, fragile ripeness, sexual fantasy, love and philosophy, One Day I Will Write About This Place has been released to widespread critical acclaim.

‘Binyavanga Wainaina is a singer and painter in words. He makes you smell, hear, touch, see, above all, feel the drama and vibrations of life below the brilliantly and concretely captured surface of things in Kenya and Africa. The memoir bursts with life and laughter and pathos in every line and paragraph.’ – Ngugi wa Thiong’o

‘Brilliant… Wainaina’s beautifully elastic sentences fizz and crackle, pounce on their meanings, stretch and snap back into place, and evoke not only the self-replenishing wonders of childhood but the more complex wonders that follow. An outstanding book, bursting with life and full of love.’ – Teju Cole, author of Open City

‘Fascinating memoirs are now appearing from a new generation of Africans, born after the independence struggles and cultural conflicts that defined their parents’ age … Wainaina’s book, which typifies the new trend, is politically and socially engaged – that is, it attempts to explain Kenya and Africa, but it does so without a knee-jerk resort to colonial woes, and this is very welcome …’ Helon Habila, Guardian

Binyavanga Wainaina is a Kenyan author, journalist and winner of the 2002 Caine Prize for African Writing. He is the founding editor of Kwani?, a leading African literary magazine based in Kenya. He has written for The EastAfrican, National Geographic, The Sunday Times (South Africa), Granta, the New York Times and The Guardian (UK). Wainaina has taught at Union College and Williams College, and is currently the Director of the Chinua Achebe Center for African Literature and Languages at Bard College.

Harry Garuba is the Head of Department and Associate Professor in the Centre for African Studies. In addition to being an author and poet, he is a member of the editorial advisory board of the Heinemann African Writers Series and one of the editors of the newly established electronic journal Postcolonial Text. His recent publications have explored questions of mapping, space and subjectivity within a colonial and postcolonial context and issues of modernity and local agency, especially the nature and form of African inflections of the modern