A few years ago, while researching the political history of Congo/Zaire/Congo via the country’s music archive, particularly through the output of Luambo Makiadi aka Franco, we turned to the legendary record collection of “Jumbo” Donald Vanrenen – a scholar of late-style rumba and early soukouss (a sound he helped construct via various A&R gigs in the-then burgeoning studio scenes of Paris and London). Jumbo didn’t only lend records for this mix, he offered advice, contacts, context. That is the kind of man he was – to his last day here, ears tuned to what is next. Go well, elder..

From 9 – 12 November, the Pan African Space Station (PASS) landed in The National Gallery of Zimbabwe (NGZ) in the centre of Harare.

In collaboration with visual artist Kudzanai Chiurai, who launched his first ever solo exhibition in his home country titled ‘We Need New Names’, Chimurenga installed the PASS studio as a public research platform towards a Zimbabwe focused issue of the Chimurenga Chronic.

Looking into the inventions of Zimbabwe, the programming examined music as the paradigm through which the country and region’s political history is told and archived. Whatever Zimbabwe is, and is becoming, already exists in the sound-worlds produced in the region. PASS in Harare invited musicians, artists, writers, cultural producers and rebels based in Harare and beyond in studio to uncover these worlds.

Now replayable: #PanAfricanSpaceStation Harare sessions, recorded/broadcast live from National Gallery of Zimbabwe. Featuring The Monkey Nuts, Weaver Press, Tinofireyi Aero5ol Zhou, Chirikure Chirikure, Netsayi, Kudzanai Chiurai and Pungwe Nights. Tune in for conversations on Zim Rock, Literary Initiatives, Post-Chimurenga Postures and (why) We Need New Names.

In her 30 years of exile, Miriam Makeba redefined pan Africanism – performing and speaking around the world, informing the Black Power movement, forwarding the liberation struggle, and participating in events that shaped public cultures on the continent and around the world.

She was a woman with nine passports and honorary citizenship in 10 countries.

The grave of the Martinican poet and theorist Edouard Glissant

carries the inscription “Nothing is true, everything is alive.”

Starting from this paradox, Moses März, imagines a conversation

between Glissant and his friend and fellow writer Patrick

Chamoiseau about the Philosophy of Relation. Illustrations by

Graeme Arendse.

Moses März is a contributing editor of Chimurenga.

Graeme Arendse is the design editor of Chimurenga P30 The Chronic, the Corpse Exhibition

Forged from a rare metal found only in Africa and South America,

the Afro-horn is an instrument to open the mouths of the gods.

It was invented by ancient Egyptians, who called it the Tun-tet.

According to Brent Hayes Edwards’ imaginative essay on the

mythical instrument, there are only three Afro-horns in the

world: one in a museum collection in Europe; another guarded

jealously by an indigenous community on the West coast of

Mexico; but the third is in New York, in the collection of Rahsaan

Roland Kirk.

P46 The Corpse Exhibition

Native Maqari is a Nigerian graffiti and comic artist based in Paris.

London Kamwendo In Amos Tutuola’s sly satire of spectral global capitalism and Afromodernity, debt is paid off with body parts traded on the open market, human flesh carries magnetic appeal and beauty is fatal.

London Kamwendo is a comics creator based in Lusaka. P69 The Chronic, the Corpse Exhibition

Featuring the maverick Ejiogbe Twins Photographed by Owen Logan Told by Uzor Maxim Uzoatu What Nigeria offers in the Michael Jackson business stares you in the face. And here in black and white is our unique scheme. Believe it when I say we struck like tropical noonday thunder!

The craft bearing us came down on the Nigerian tarmac with a screech that shook the corporate capital. The megastar in me disembarked and kissed the soil of his ancestors before stepping on the red carpet and spreading his gloved hands wide, beckoning on the people to behold. There could not have been a greater epoch-making event, trapping the annals and centuries of

history and geography in one magic moment. Up from slavery and rising to the giddy heights of universal pop superstardom, Michael returned from death as the local boy made good. He is alive in me and I am here, on our terra firma of some 250 peoples imperiously cobbled together and named after the River Niger by Flora Shaw, the solicitous paramour of Governor-General Lugard, past master of indirect rule.

This and other graphic Stories available in The Chronic, Graphic Stories.

“The Third World was not a place. It was a project,” writes Vijay Prashad in his book the Darker Nations: A People’s History of the Third World. We map the project via its multiples manifestations and imaginings – from Bandung and Cairo as the Capital of African Liberation Movements, to the Planetary Assembly in Tanzania,on to the Non Aligned conference and failed 2nd Bandung, to the Solidarity Conference of the people of Asia, Africa and Latin America, in Winneba, Havana and Conakry to its termination in Algiers, along the way the Sino-Soviet conflict, tri-continentalism and the Afro Asian Writers Association. This and other maps in In the new Chronic, On Circulations and the African Imagination of a Borderless World.

Forgive me if the facts are screwed, Y days were heady and chaotic. I think it was the late summer of 98 when it all started. In the precinct of Time Square, in Yeoville there was not much square and all the clocks had all stopped. That suited us fine, it was African time.

I was in this corner café, diagonally across on Rockey Street, talking to the newsstand. The shop was on its third owner since I had arrived in Johannesburg. In a matter of months, two owners had been taken out in armed robberies. I was berating the newspapers and magazines for the failings of the timid, greedy, unimaginative pale old men in charge of them when a tall dark man with a beard tapped me on the shoulder. “Excuse me,” he said, stepping back in a half-bow, “I think you should write for us.”

Us was Y magazine, just starting up. The tall man was S’busiso Nxumalo commercially known as The General. He was a DJ, social luminary – comfortable anywhere, uneasy in the right places and a jolly good writer. He had been made editor of South Africa’s FIRST BLACK youth magazine. But Nxumalo is generally lax to say the least and so he pulled someone slightly more qualified for the job, insisting the publishers make Itumeleng Mahabane editor with him as general roust-about.

When I say heady, one day Mahabane was toasting his first published piece in some women’s rag with cognac and a cigar – which made even the punch bag whores run by ex-CCB officers raise their eyebrows from their brothel balcony above the square where the Ghetto Luv girls were tantalizing ex-MK soldiers eating Yemese bread while they debated meaty issues of transformation – and the next he was editing a magazine.

Every cover stated evocatively “Ubuza Bani?” which you could translate as “you want to know?” but the best way to describe it is: “If you have to ask you’ll never know.” Contrast this to the payoff line on sister (white) publication SL that stated: “everything you know is wrong”.

Over the cold expanse of ten years, it’s difficult to encapsulate the sheer exuberance that accompanied those times and danced from the pages in staccato, machinegun prattle prose that stretched the boundaries of what was then considered magazine journalism.

Excuse me, I need some kwaito playing while I write this. Y mag had a soundtrack, abrasive in parts and with more than fragments of the toyi-toyi coming through, but it was largely kwaito that set the rhythm. Bennie was making us mal, Brenda was very much alive, TKZ were huge, Mdu was the man, Ghetto Luv and Ismael and Roots 3000 were nascent, blk sonshine were just jamming at Monday Blues and MXO was a little boy fresh from Dwezi (Ibayi) sleeping rough in a Mahala hotel, dreaming of getting onto that stage.

Y Fm had been wrestled from community and Youth League interests and was now a full-tilt commercial success, the fastest growing radio station in Gauteng. Y Fm opened the media planners’ sleepy white eyes to the market presence all those young black people might hold, and it was suddenly cool to be black – especially if you were white. When the magazine launched, the media world was all a twitter, here was a publication for black youth, by black youth. The thing is Y mag was never a black journalist’s association, which explained my presence among the regular contributors.

This was before Mandoza pulled in and crossover was in thin streaking veins across Johannesburg’s inhospitable chiefdoms. So the concepts of black and white youth were still vastly segregated. The publishers decided on separate development approach where one day SL and Y would merge and become SLY. That never happened.

I think I did my best work ever for Y magazine, especially in the early days when we were really pushing the boundaries. Look it was pretty crude stuff…but beside the fashion and horoscopes and practical jokes by the editorial team, there was some extraordinary journalism. I recall the brilliant, subtle story Nxumalo wrote about Lance Stehr of Ghetto Ruff records and Mahabane’s piece on the youth of Richmond. There were lots of voices that you had never heard before, all excited all vibrant, all pushing to be heard, and as far as I know it was lapped up greedily by an audience that had never been addressed in its own language before.

I never went inside the cool clean offices on lime street in Aukland Park, never beyond the reception area to collect a cheque, but what came out of those offices – and most business was in bars and in cars and under stars – was a new voice, sharp and collected, politically aware yet unaffected. I gather the office was party central, as it would have to be, to come up with cover lines like “WHY BLACK people SHOUT.”

We heard of attempts to dumb it down, and I remember that when I produced a piece of friction in two parts the publishers were aghast…we don’t do that, they said, and were overridden, and it was done. Despite the frantic grappling that was afoot, to package and sell a user-friendly version of black youth, Nxumalo and Mahabne held sway. We got wind of attempts to dumb it down, but we kept using words ike dilettante alongside moegoe and tito.

For me as a writer, it was a golden time. I never have had, nor I suspect will ever again, the space that was provided on those glossy pages, to speak in a voice that came naturally, that caused kak, or maybe I was just full of kak, maybe we all were.

An Essay by Lesego Rampolokeng
May 2008

Down from a couple years beyond 30/30. it was the age of cerebral haemorrhage.

The oppression monster was thirsty. YET tabloids were in flight on slaughtered chicken-wings, darkest science witchcraft… Could only track rites of human sacrifice… caught between bullet & gullet, turn to what?

It came from that time when the mind was contraband…
Before we had the need to pretend different.

1994 Ravan Press ran rejection slips that said they did not publish ‘that type of thing anymore’. I battle still with what that meant. Coming down Rabasotho street, turn that. Away from the dumping ground, parallel the rail-line (was a time when you found babies on both (the trash or the tracks, that is… your choice, Sandile) & get to where Mthuthuzeli Matshoba passed for the back-cover photo of his one book, Mzimhlophe station, Orlando West.
Famed, Nobel laureates, wilful amnesiacs, first millionaires, years soweto’s only legit nightclub, the super-astral, the subterranean, original spot-runners, groaners & croakers, mass child-murderers, priests pimping for more than just Jesus, blades having dice & eyes vie for space in the dust between the intestines & the worms… boots squashing all… muddy beginnings, those… Call Me Not a Man, the searing bleeding cry of a book was titled… chopped & cut up bits first floated to surface in Staffrider.

None of it plastic… the flames saw to that.

Mandlenkosi Langa in the midst of ghouls that gloated over human passings… Ingoapele Madingoane… when slaughter reduced language to human waste, black rain took different definition… & seed was gone to the toxic wind:
khumbula my child, that’s where you were born… calling remembrance upon the seed.the genesis vision. Behold My Son called up the dawn of Afrika day… & then soon gone down.
Matsemela Manaka called out ‘Let us create & talk about life… That was before the slime-light glow of The Word as fashion-show. Let Art be Life… same expression today bought. auction blocked up. The slaves chain themselves to it. The business muse tilts the justice scales.

To staff-ride means taking or shaking the train, on the hoof… back-front-sideways.death-dance down the years wrapped in romance, here… mutilation, there… amputated limbs. Staffriders hip-hopped before the fact while their heads got lobbed off. Hormone-charged on top of the whistles of watchers, sometimes grannies & tannies claiming them for the girlies in the backyard. Proclaimed Abakhwenyana… sons-in-law, until they were maimed. Or worse, would never run again in reverse.or forward ever!
Those whistles were Mission Station Identification crackling thru past the clanging metal on shrieking skull… isiparapara… sound of takkies flapping across concrete. Slip, fall, get mashed up & watch the audience get tickled to cackling. And banana peels sought to turn the sick humour on. & keep the revolution green.

And then… speak to someone out the side of your mouth & you’ll be warned not to staffride. So there we go, sliding down this platform.

Form & content standing in contest?
Sometimes the message came in headless.
Or the messenger-tongue sick of aesthetic talk, took it to the street.

Think Regina Mundi… allah poets. Spirit us black in time.
Before political expediency metamorphosed little victims until smoking revolutionaries.

Nape Motana distilled pain.
Setuke’s marathon man was in bondage.
Eugene Skeef, Malopoets… .when blood on skin was mural.
Ignoramus splashed senses across the sheets, Tshilidzi!
(80s states of emergency saw versions of retrogression.
young lions drew their roars from antiquity… 90s and on bodies in the mine can’t compete against platinum concerns. irrelevance.)

young frustration was turning a line against the book-binding. Or the book-bound. Perception up from the Shakespearean., to hit the brain-boil-blood-bubble equilibrium in a three strike body-slam.
Most was ‘creating on the trot’.
The enraged freedom-beast lashing torn appendages against the cage… but… ah, it was just the page, man.

Night of the white termite’s no b-horror title but Shaka’s prophecy come again, yet again. this time in prose. it was years later the red-ants came. Under newer skies. But we had the blackjacks then, of whom ‘call me not a man’ spoke.

On the graphics-front…

It was surreal coming down, before the -isms.dark, in whatever sense. Magadlela, hassan, mogale, nhlabatsi. Bleeding pencil drawings, serrated woodcuts, it seemed. Dipped in life/death-fluids. The bravely informed call some naÔve. Put it all in cubes & the prism-shine.
Shebeen scene. Gunbeams refracted off glasses to light prison.
Ghetto dusks where the sun was bodies going down.
Brute police to the baton at Africa, the continent sprouting tentacles digging in & outward to touch the universe.
           It was “I am an african’ before the coming (back) of the Renaissance-Man.
           Or (as BC had it, then): wine in London was still blood to the Sowetan.
           Confuse that road not with the way of the Christian.

out of Rondebosch came the god-statement : there are no black poets. Ok then, steeping up prose-front:

Joel Matlou, Careless Man Was a Useless Man the magic rendered closest enough to the ground for Tutuolaphiles to get orgasmic on, without being adult-toy approximation. Future gone past without passing -ism.
Plus it came with its own illustration just in case minds present couldn’t tune in without de pikichas.
No external force for any change…
& sticking it to legend’s depths, Bheki Maseko’s Mamlambo… the township gone astral rolled in The Word as Deep Space Music.

No editorial intervention except from within. As freestyle as origin.
(back-twisted hindsight would perhaps deem that bound-to-go-boom)
as it came so it was tossed into the commune.
Solo duo group creation.
(perhaps also programmed to shelf-destruct, it was not on the stock of any book-chain that had commercial respect)
thus also ran its distribution, sale-point were also the individual labs, contributor-distributors would have been it, except then was no BEE sneak-talk.
For its reach the mag hit the dust-patch.

Re-vision frelimo on a portuguese bum-rush.
& the great Zimbabwean was inspiration drawn, before jongwe became fried chicken. Lancelot Maseko came staffriding from Zim down south.
& now of course the rusted battle-axes are out, they wash them in blood, they are to lay claim.
& that juice doesn’t colour today’s ink.

Staffriding time we were tripping out on inverted weeping willows. Much like the stone-pillows resting on crushed skulls.
Gutterflies decked out in scatological colours.

Gears changed & Chris van Wyk, installed as editor, declared ‘africa… breast of mother’ imagery dried up. Saw malnourishment in that, called time-out for a re-fuel. the engine’s stalled, since.
Yes, how many drums can you beat before the palms split?
Tears falling/rolling upward.
Perverse romantic. Death of lyric?

The spot of ground we trod. Context. Time’s great dictation. Got it all locked down. Still, mediocrity knows no excuse. Apartheid created some. & when it played “dead & past” they went extinct. The others continue to ride our hell’s wagon.
well, those who swallowed the cross bleed vinegar, thus say the Black Scriptures
as quoted by Reverend Narcissus Nigger. Also, Lord of the Spies used to be lowest curse, but now is king of the high-rise. So it goes, travelling nowhere.
In this fiddle-verse era, baby-butt-soft song itching for hardcoreness going vibratobetween his vaseline lips, word-warrior worms on his own dong, self-bone-enthroned ‘raised himself from the bottom’ (they say who know left right & wrong)to make a diddle-arse career… .out of middle-class hysteria…
massa-man vibration, yeah ya… fi real.
So, is there a free-zone magazine on the horizon, furthest away from Pig Business, Literary -Politan & politician with fartistic ambition?

Cosaw & Andries Oliphant tried to put kindling to the latent & the dormant, to dead avail. the railway sleepers had been carried off. Up freedom hill… portend nothing, never be another, that is, without the cosmetic surgery/advertisement.

by Peter James Hudson

November 2010

Spear: Canada’s Truth and Soul Magazine launched in Toronto in 1971. Soon after, the Royal Canadian Mounted Police’s secret service wing opened a dossier on the magazine labeled “General Conditions and Subversive Activities Among Negroes (Canada).” But the RCMP never really considered Spear (aka publication 4060) much of a threat. Spear, they observed, “contains generally non-political articles and bright pictures featuring black models, marriage and other happenings in the black community in Toronto.” It was an assessment in line with the aims of publisher Dan Gooding, Jr. and 

Spear: Canada’s Truth and Soul Magazine launched in Toronto in 1971. Soon after, the Royal Canadian Mounted Police’s secret service wing opened a dossier on the magazine labeled “General Conditions and Subversive Activities Among Negroes (Canada).” But the RCMP never really considered Spear (aka publication 4060) much of a threat. Spear, they observed, “contains generally non-political articles and bright pictures featuring black models, marriage and other happenings in the black community in Toronto.” It was an assessment in line with the aims of publisher Dan Gooding, Jr. and editor J. Ashton Brathwaite.

In an early editorial Brathwaite declared Spear‘s middlebrow ambitions. He wanted to create a Canadian version of Ebony, Jet, Tan, and Essence, the pretty, vacant African-American rags appealing to Black upward mobility and the iridescent accessorizing of Black Power as Black consumerism. However, budget constraints restricted the design of Spear‘s first issues, generating a rather modest aesthetic. With their duotone covers, amateurish layout, and often lackadaisical copy-editing, Spear‘s initial numbers more resembled a self-published “little” magazine than a slick gazette announcing Toronto’s nascent Black middle class.

But few “little” magazines published centerfolds. Fewer still sponsored the Miss Spear competition. Its contestants were drawn from the pool of Black models gracing the magazine’s pages, their photographs accompanied by short, leering, Playboy-esque captions written by Brathwaite focusing on the dimensions of the models’ “fine brown frame[s].” An example: “Wow! Sister Lyn, you sure got a fine brown frame. Your hot pants look fine too, but with a figure like that who do you think will bother about whether your pants is hot or cold! Hmn!” Or “The Sister with the hotpants on is Vie Anderson, a receptionist aspiring to be a model. Quite a hot pair of pants! But that brown frame is definitely a much hotter item!”

Yet Spear, which, incidentally, Brathwaite described as a “family magazine” that avoided “carrying stories on violence, crime, obscenity, and other items which we think will offend the moral standards,” was more than just female pinups. For good measure, it published beefcake photographs of shirtless brothers flexing their muscles at the local gym. It also contained a mish-mash of profiles of local Black personalities, reviews of local Black cultural events, and opinion pieces on the nature of race and racism in Canada, the vexed relations between West Indians and Afro-Canadians, and the pressing issue of interracial marriage and dating. Brathwaite, whose self-published Niggers This is Canada is perhaps the greatest ever novel on the Black Canadian experience, contributed an International Rap Up, a wry digest of political dispatches from the Black World. He also wrote a series of long opinion pieces, including an unanswered “Open Letter to Horace Campbell,” that decried the purported intellectual snobbery of the Jamaican pan-Africanist, and an essay that posed the question, “How Black is Angela Davis?” Not very, according to Brathwaite: she’s a Communist. Meanwhile, the awful Black nationalist poems by one “Negrophil Osopher” made way for those by Sister Dionne, a teen-age Dionne Brand making her poetic debut. Sister Dionne’s “Behold! The Revolutionary Dreamer” contains the fire, if not quite the elegance, of her later, award-winning verse:

How can you be a stoned revolutionary
Look at every nigger on the street
Maybe in your dream periphery
In your existence contradictory
You can see, can imagine
Yourself to be
Holding in one fist power and speed
But it’s only horse power you see
Instead of the great human power it could be
Soon the man is gonna see
If he hasn’t already
That, nigger, you’re a weak freak
WEAK — FR—-E—AK
Cool, nigger, can you see your dreams creak?

After Brathwaite changed his name to Odimumba Kwamdela and went into self-imposed exile in Brooklyn, Brand was one of a number of editors, including Ghana-born journalist Sam Donkoh, future Share publisher Arnold Auguste, and the Guyanese-Canadian polymath Arnold Itwaru, who manned the helm of Spear through to the 1980s. With the changes, the journal’s quality improved and Spear‘s pages came to embody something of the cultural paradoxes of Black Canadian middle-class being. Thus, celebratory wedding notices were paired with Femi Ojo-Ade’s dense, theory-driven treatise “The Throes of Black Alienation.” Advertisements for living room sets combined with a three-part interview on white supremacy and capitalism with Roosevelt (Rosie) Douglas. Douglas, the late Prime Minister of Dominica, was at the time sitting in a Canadian jail waiting trial for an arson charge associated with student protests at Sir George Williams college in Montreal. Sometimes the juxtapositions were sublime. Spear occasionally found a sort of harmonic convergence of the parallel galaxies of Black political and aesthetic radicalism. In one issue, a profile of Jamaican diva Grace Jones ran next to an interview with Trini Trotskyite CLR James.

The moment wasn’t sustained. By the early 1980s, whatever radical edge Spear maintained was dulled. The advertising from local business was dwarfed first, by announcements from the Canadian government’s multicultural programs, and then by full-page spreads (replete with Black consumers) from Air Canada and Molson’s, the Canadian brewing conglomerate. The Black World dispatches disappeared (as did the Miss Spear centerfolds), replaced by recipes for Christmas cocktails and pensèes on proper table-settings. For the final few issues before it suspended publication in 1987, what was once Spear: Canada’s Truth And Soul was re-tagged as Spear: Canada’s Black Family Magazine. Brathwaite’s initial vision, and the RCMP’s early impression, appeared fulfilled.

by Nancy Rose Hunt

Beginning nearly fifty years ago, in 1968, Kinshasa has seen an explosion of underground street comics and the man regarded as the master of this form is the self-proclaimed Emperor and Majesty, Papa Mfumu’eto the First. From 1990 to the early 2000s, Papa Mfumu’eto produced over 200 comics, in 115 separate titles, with some series comprising up to 40 instalments, and nearly all of them have been in Lingala, the vernacular of Kinshasa’s streets.

Papa Mfumu’eto first rose to fame with his comic about a cannibalistic urban dandy. This big man transformed himself into a predatory boa in his bedroom to consume his sexual prey: a young woman who unwillingly accepted his invitation home. A sequel playfully engaged with Papa Mfumu’eto’s own sudden popularity in Kinshasa, with depictions of his readers eagerly buying Super-choc no. 2 to learn whether the boa-man is fact or fiction. True he was, they soon learned, as the snake-man vomited up his meal of a woman as cash. Dollar bills by the hundreds filled the big man’s bedroom, while shocked Kinois readers, shown in the final frames, stayed glued to the unfolding news.

Readers interpreted this snake-like figure spewing out dollars to be Mobutu, the head of state, long rumoured to combine money, women, and sorcery with power.

These were common terms in Kinshasa’s vernacular – ingestion and expulsion, power and eating, wealth and malevolence. Idioms about the abuse of power were salient during the last moneymad Mobutu years, as rumours swirled about his use of poisons and other nefarious technologies to eliminate enemies and keep his grip on power.

Over the years, Papa Mfumu’eto has captivated diverse audiences with a varied output about the everyday and spectacular in Kinshasa. His comic booklets tell of the visible and invisible, of ancestors, spirits, and of scary creatures acting upon lives in decisive, mystical ways. His trajectory of fame is part of his narration. He often talks and writes about himself in the third person, portraying himself as a special, fantastic hero, and referring to himself as the First or “your much beloved” when addressing fans.

Irony, too, is everywhere in Papa Mfumu’eto’s comics, manifesting in strange, mixed-up, animalhuman creatures clutching deadly technological objects. His hierarchies are subtle and everyday, moving between well-dressed bigmen, famous musicians, a ruthless head of state, and ordinary women and children.

Papa Mfumu’eto’s prolific production has continued into the 2000s when he has begun painting as well. But he hasn’t entered the global comic or art circuits, almost wilfully circumventing them to keep his focus on his Lingala-speaking publics in Kinshasa and the Lower Congo region. His print technology remains simple and monochrome (except for covers in bright colours).

His output is almost miraculous, given the difficulties of sustaining production, but he has never sought an audience in more lucrative markets elsewhere. He remains true to his readers, captivating them with stories drawn from the reality of their everyday existence.

His comics have long contained an impulse toward diagnosing medical, social, and spiritual problems. He likes to intervene with a guardian touch, extending moral messages about domestic and sexual lives to his readers, often through eerie stories that produce laughter and unease. He represents adultery as an occasion when occult forces intervene. In Likambo ya Ngaba, for instance, during a clandestine visit to a hotel for sex, a woman becomes fastened to her partner by a machine with a lock device.

Permeability between life and death is another recurring theme and it’s at the heart of his longestrunning series, Tshilombe Bernard, about a character oscillating between life and death. The series lasted three years, 20 issues in all, with the hypermodern subject dressed in suit and tie flickering between living and dying, while the pages filled with caskets, graveyards, fancy clothes, and other signs of life, death, and fame. Mwasi ya Tata shows continual misunderstandings between a small boy and the wife of his father. The theme of a child caught between a parent and a new lover or spouse appeared again in his famous series, Muan’a Mbanda, about children growing up in a household of cowives, at risk of rivalry and its results: hate, hunger, and revulsion. Papa Mfumu’eto’s comics about children have always had a strangeness to them. In one, a baby born in the night merges with her old grandmother into a new being that possesses a young wife, Nzumba. Soon this spouse and her husband are beset by calamities and disorders, while not realising the mysterious baby is the responsible, poisonous agent.

While his style has varied over the years, Papa Mfumu’eto’s comics all include strong images and striking covers. His texts are carefully rendered and sometimes excessively detailed, the tiny words often filling an entire page. His innovative layouts produce the surprising tempo of his plots, whether in a single booklet or across a series. Household troubles and national grief, whether rooted in sorcery invasions, sexual rivalries, or human animosities, combine with wondrous flashes of celebrity and power. Through all of it the selfproclaimed Emperor and Majesty chronicles life in Kinshasa: past, present and future.

This article first appeared in Chimurenga Chronic: The Corpse Exhibition & Older Graphic Stories (August 2016) 

Spearman… Lance Spearman – the name synonymous with the intrepid hero of the photo-comic staple, African Film, started by the publisher of South Africa’s Drum Magazine, produced by fledgling writers and read voraciously by 1970s Nigerian schoolboys, including Uzor Maxim Uzoatu, who dreamed of wars and victories other than those around them.

The Biafra War had just ended in January 1970, but at the age of nine I felt none of the general despondency that gripped the country. All I could think about was war and heroism. So much so that I fabricated fibs to my credulous mates of how, in the company of some diehard Biafran war commanders, I had brought down enemy Nigerian planes from the sky with the aid of a special magnet called Magnetor.

It was against the background of lapping up heroes in the post-war broken city of Onitsha that I came into the unforgettable company of Lance Spearman. I met Spearman through a dog-eared copy of the photo-magazine African Film, given to me by Jude Akudinobi, who was then a secondary school student at Christ the King College, Onitsha, where his father taught alongside my uncle, the linguist J.O. Aginam. Shortly after seducing me into the arresting world of Lance Spearman, alias Spear, the selfsame Jude took me with four of his younger brothers to Chanrai Supermarket and asked us to pick any novel of our choice. Remarkably, I chose a book, The Good, The Bad, The Ugly, without any knowledge whatsoever of the classic Western movie starring Clint Eastwood and Lee Van Cleef. The daredevilry of the novel’s toughie, Desperado Tuco, became aligned to the intrepidity of Spear in my imagination and came to define my growing-up years.

It nearly led to a tragedy. One of the local Onitsha boys who could not bear my hyperactivity brought a friend of his to fight me. The entire neighbourhood gathered to watch. It took no time at all for me to floor the boy, using him to “stone the ground” as we used to say. The boy passed out, and the fellow who had brought the floored fighter was now accusing me of killing the lad, saying, “Have you seen what you have done to him?” It took some heart-stopping moments for the boy to be revived. Reality invaded my fantasy world and the threat of a stint in jail or even the hangman’s noose effectively marked the end of my brief career as the local Lance Spearman. Witnesses of the incident still rib me about it to this day, especially Jude Akudinobi who, perhaps unsurprisingly considering his love for African Film, would take a doctorate in film studies, and now lectures at the University of Southern California at Santa Barbara.

In the heady days after the Nigerian Civil War the look-read photo-magazine African Film starring the dapper Lance Spearman was our hebdomadal staple in Onitsha, the overpopulated township that earned its mark in the world of letters on account of the market literature available there. Some Monday for sure, as Nadine Gordimer would put it, the paterfamilias of the Akudinobi family shelled out one shilling for a copy of African Film magazine, and another shilling for Boom magazine starring the Tarzanlike Fearless Fang. Scores of us had to make do with each edition of the magazines until finally the wear and tear triumphed over our reading.

Spear was our darling crimebuster par excellence, a cigar-chomping champion who was a serial lady-killer in the mould of James Bond 007. Riding in his Stingray coupé with his trademark Panama hat on his head, Spear showcased the urbane and the modern. Talking through his walkie-talkie and drinking scotch-on-the-rocks, Spear was indeed the toast of the generation. The breathtaking car chases were grist to the Spear mill that kept us hooked for weeks on end. The modernity of technology added cubits to the appeal of Spear as the role model of the new age of ultra-modern architecture, sharp women and sharper criminality in Nigeria.

Given the anti-apartheid politics of the era, no mention was made that the magazine originated in South Africa. A Lagos- Nigeria address was on hand as the place of publication. It was only much later that I learnt that African Film was originally produced out of South Africa by the legendary publisher of the influential Drum Magazine, Jim Bailey. In the manner that Drum offered fledging writers, such as South Africa’s Can Themba, Nat Nakasa and Nigeria’s Nelson Ottah their break in magazine writing, African Film provided work for about 25 writers, some of whom were students of the University of Lesotho. Initial photo shoots were undertaken in Swaziland, and the strips were then sent to London for mastering before their eventual transnational distribution all over Africa. In the end the publishers had to settle for printing by local subsidiaries. The leading man who starred as Lance Spearman was a fellow named Jore Mkwanazi, a former houseboy doubling as a nightclub piano player, who had been discovered by the white photographer Stanley N. Bunn. Spear had for ready company Captain Victor, the police honcho who forever wore his uniform. Spear’s swanky lady assistant, Sonia, was a study in independent womanhood. His young sidekick, Lemmy, lent to the cast a measure of humane and vulnerable precocity not unlike the role of Jim Hawkins among the pirates of Robert Louis Stevenson’s Treasure Island.

You would always trust Spear to get out of all troubles, given that Captain Victor, Sonia or Lemmy could pull a string or two on their own to stave off the enemy. The dialogue was hip and contemporary, in the manner of the racy thrillers of James Hadley Chase, the hottest writer we cherished back then. The lines were indeed riveting, such that one readily committed them to memory. For instance, the thug bearing down on Sonia gets the following words from Spear as he steps forward for a fight: “Woman-beater, try me for size!” Before the hoodlum can get to the races, Spear lands him the sucker-punch, saying, “You have a glass jaw!” With the fallen thug crying “Aaaaaargh!” Lemmy would congratulate Spear thus: “Attaboy, Spear!” The archetypal antagonist of Lance Spearman was Rabon Zollo, who had lost an eye and thus wore the hideous black eye-patch. Zollo was menace in overdrive. There were other villains like the Hook-Hand Killer who, as the name suggests, killed with the evil hook on his hand. The criminal mastermind was known as Dr Devil. There was Mad Doc with the bespoke serum that had the power to shrink people. Who will ever forget the antics of Professor Thor, who could read the thoughts of people through his vile machine? There was the other professor, Rubens, who used the organs of animals to produce the werewolf. The menace of the Cats almost overwhelmed Spear; it was quite daunting doing battle with cat burglars in black masks and claw gloves that could climb and scale all heights. Hilda “the Head Huntress” was yet another villain who left a mark on the adventures of Lance Spearman. It was the thrill of a lifetime to savour the spells of Spear’s confrontations with diabolical insurance agents, sinister diamond thieves and baleful power syndicates. The cosmic, end-of-the-world wars of Lance Spearman reverberated and resonated with us in an increasingly corrupt post-war Nigeria. Spear offered hope. He stood as the positive force that could save humankind.

Then hope vanished suddenly. It was in the course of 1972 that the supply of African Film stopped, for no reason whatsoever. We were not abreast of the high-wire politics of apartheid, the Cold War and suchlike. The rumours flew fast and free that Lance Spearman had died. We couldn’t believe that Spear could ever die, for as all Nigerians know, “Actor no dey die!” We had to make do with smuggled back issues of African Film dating to the years of the Nigeria-Biafra War. We devoured the back issues, waiting for the inevitable day when the unbeatable Lance Spearman would make a triumphant return.

We are still waiting. We have yet to see the return of Spear, of hope, of the final triumph of good, but the memory lingers of the dynamic action scenes, the assorted camera angles and the ever suggestive sex acts. Black like all of us, Spear served up a counter to white images of heroes such as Superman. In the age of the so-called Blaxploitation films featuring Richard Roundtree as John Shaft and the former American football player turned film star Jim Brown, who beat the living daylights out of white folks, Spear was akin to the local boy who made good, an exemplar of the middle class youth culture of the race. A potent symbol of a possible future for Nigeria – still within grasp, but forever illusive.

This article first appeared in Chimurenga Chronic: Graphic Stories (July 2014), an issue focused on graphic stories; comic journalism. Blending illustrations, photography, written analysis, infographics, interviews, letters and more, visual narratives speak of everyday complexities in the Africa in which we live.

July 2008

The premiere issue of Black Images: A Critical Quarterly of Black Arts and Culture announced Toronto as an unlikely centre of the Black World, proclaimed the arrival of a beast called Black Canadian culture, and served as the vehicle for its elusive, visionary editor, the Jamaican-born Rudolph “Rudy” Murray – and his literary alter ego, R. M. Lacovia. Murray, along with a group of West Indians and West Africans mostly associated with the journalism program at Toronto’s Ryerson Polytechnical Institute, founded Black Images in 1972. It wasn’t the only black publication in Toronto at the time. Periodicals like Harold Hoyte’s Contrast and E. Ashton Brathwaite’s Spear already served the growing black community in the city. But Black Images differed from these rags with its explicit Black internationalism and its self-conscious literariness, in many ways taking up the mantle of Jan Carew’s extraordinary Cotopaxi, which published a single issue in Toronto in 1968 and counted Murray as an associate editor.

The early issues of Black Images paired coverage of Toronto’s Black arts scene with more theoretical expositions on pan-African culture. Profiles of Black Canadian artists like playwright Lennox Brown and musician Richard Acquaah-Harris appeared next to essays on the African roots of New World Black music and critiques of Cheikh Anta Diop. They published a history of black Canadian publishing from its origins in the nineteenth-century newspapers like The Dawn of Tomorrow and an extended interview with Brazil’s Abdias do Nascimento. Poetry by Jamaica’s Cliff Lashley, the Puerto Rican nationalist Alberto O. Cappas, and Ramabai, a “Young Poetess from Trinidad,” (and one of the few female contributors to the journal) appeared alongside Robert A. Hill’s introduction to the “The Negro’s Fullest Part,” Marcus Garvey’s speech before the Eight International Convention of the Negro Peoples of the World, held in Toronto in August 1938 at the UNIA’s local headquarters at 355 College Street.

Black Images‘ first issues were rangy, energetic, and irreverent – if not always good. Lennox Brown’s important if somewhat self-regarding manifesto “A Black Castle: The Crisis of Black Culture in Canada” veered between inspired poetry and leaden sociology. In his review of Austin Clarke’s 1971 novel When He was Free and Young and Used to Wear Suits, Keith Jeffers complained that the book was “strained and contrived” and “corny in expression.” He goes on to accuse Clarke of depicting Barbados as if he were a tourist “striv[ing] painfully to create an exoticism,” before criticizing him for not being Black-Power enough. JoJoh Chintoh, apparently mystified that Toronto’s John Belfon was a painter and a Jew begins his profile by stating that “John Belfon is painter and a Jew” and over the next few paragraphs says little more than that.

With the publication of the second volume of Black Images in 1973 a noticeable shift occurs. Though still based in Toronto, the Canadian content is reduced. And while still under the stewardship of Rudy Murray, the cadre of Ryerson J-School hacks is jettisoned (as is the iffy writing, the poetry, and the puff pieces) and a group of newly-minted PhD’s, the first generation of post-Independence, professionally-trained West Indian and West African academic literary critics, takes their place. Consequently, Black Images loses its amateurish vim and becomes more coolly professional and its reactionary polemics are replaced by considered, occasionally staid, scholarly appraisals. The focus on the Black World remains, but the journal becomes noticeably less pan-African and more pan-Caribbean with a significant portion of its pages given over to the giants of Haitian and the French Antillean literature, to Jacques Stèphen Alexis, Renè Maran, Aimè Cesairè, Frantz Fanon, Édouard Glissant, Lèon Damas, and others. Meanwhile, a loosely articulated theoretical stance developed within the journal that saw a break with racial nationalism and an attempt to chart a more diverse, pluralistic, and complex set of aesthetic and formal lineages of black literature. This position is exemplified by J. Michael Dash’s “Marvelous Realism – the Way out of Negritude,” where he argues that Jacques Stephen Alèxis’ notion of writing Haitian history through le rèalisme merveilleux, introduced at Prèsence Africaine‘s Black Writers Congress held in Paris in 1956, offered an early, if tentative attempt, to come out from under the overbearing tenets of Marxism and break the consanguinary shackles of Negritude.

This professional transformation was reflected in Black Images‘ design. The first issues were eight-and-a-half by eleven inches in size. Its black and white covers had conceptual but bold designs while inside, its three-column format made use of photographs, line drawings, and provocative call outs that disrupted regularity of the page grid. Its layout made judicious use of white space, especially when formatting the poetry, though occasionally, the text was reduced to a barely-readable size to ensure that longer articles fit within their allotted page assignments. By contrast, later issues of Black Images shrank to a digest format. Its text was set in a wide, rigid single column. The cover designs were made up of simple announcements of the theme of a given issue while the line drawings and call outs of the early issues were largely excised and its pages held unbroken blocks of type.

Through these changes at Black Images, Rudy Murray remained a constant, though perhaps paradoxically, anomalous, figure. For reasons unknown, Murray adopted the pen name R.M. Lacovia and in the brief period of Black Images existence, from 1972 to 1975, writing as Lacovia, produced a body of writing that is astonishing in its breadth and original in its approach, yet remains practically unknown today. In the early issues, Murray/Lacovia writes on Trinidad’s Ismith Khan and Jamaica’s Roger Mais and traces the influence of Fanon’s thought through Hegel, Marx, Kojeve, and Sartre before reading the Martinician’s work from a “Neo-African” perspective. He revelled in making startling and unexpected juxtapositions in his writing: he compared Shaft to Klute; Georgia, Georgia, written by Maya Angelou and directed by Swedish director Stig Bjorkman (who he calls “another Gunnar Myrdal“) to Antonioni’s Blow Up; and V.S. Naipaul to Canadian media prophet Marshall McLuhan. But Murray reserved his finest work for that most difficult of Caribbean authors, the Guyanese novelist Wilson Harris. Over the course of two extended essays, Caribbean Aesthetics: A Prolegomenon, and Landscapes, Maps and Parangles, Lacovia attempts a systematic, if gnostic, exegesis of Harris’ writing. Caribbean Aesthetics traces the African, Asian, and Amerindian resonances on Harris’ poetics while Landscapes, made up of a collage of quotations from Kant, Averroes, and Ghazali, sutured together by short bursts of theoretical prose, grapples with Harris’ use of geography, space and metaphysics. Visually, Landscapes is a strikingly beautiful work. While both it and Caribbean Aesthetics appeared as separate monographs under the Black Images imprint, Landscape‘ text is reversed, white on black, offering a graphic illustration of the principles of reversibility and doubling in Harris’ writing.

Murray contributed to almost every issue of Black Images but besides an essay in the Journal of Black Studies and another in The Black Academy Review, he didn’t publish anywhere else. After 1975, with the appearance of the final issue of Black Images in 1975, he apparently stopped writing altogether. Still, though Black Images, like Murray’s writing, are practically unknown, despite its short life it remains the most audacious and smart Black journal to have emerged from the white north.

an essay by Vivek Narayanan

[Note: while preparing this piece, I benefited greatly from the ideas of Rashmi Sadana, in her essays and in personal conversations; her book about the literary sphere in Delhi is now in preparation. Though the inevitable and even willful distortions are my own, I’d like to thank her for that.]

Thus far, there have been five episodes of Civil Lines, operating in that valuable grey area between “journal” and “anthology”. Like the short-lived but influential India Magazine that came just before it, it is loved and mythologized and kept still going not, alas, by the easy currency of its issues, in its homeland or elsewhere, but thanks to the loyal memory of a relatively small, intricate and probably shockingly incestuous network of middle- and upper-class Anglophone Indian intellectuals, many with a Delhi connection, a network of which, I guess, I myself am now a late-coming member. There it is. So it goes. You might choose your politics, but you don’t choose the circumstances of your politics. The name “Civil Lines” points not just to a disciplined and polite ethics of argument, but also to a location, a part of Delhi where the non-military White people used to live that has now been smoothly transitioned by institutions of higher education, intellectuals, and a brown-skinned English-speaking liberal elite, a place of lovely lawns and space and bungalows in sharp contrast, for instance, to the intense, knotted, and sometimes anguished streets of nearby Old Delhi. The cover of CL 2 featured a photograph of a western-style commode in an Indian-style open air setting. Indeed.

The first thing that was ground-breaking about a journal like Civil Lines in India, then, was precisely this: it revealed exactly where it was coming from, its hybridity, limitations and possibilities, without shame, without deception, without fronting, without pretensions to subalternity, without abandoning politics. Case in point: Dilip Simeon’s thinly disguised memoir in CL 3 about his years as an underground Maoist, when he worked as a trucker’s dogsbody. It’s an experience that gives the elite, English-speaking Simeon (and, by extension, us leisurely readers) deep insight into the everyday life of a long distance trucker who, despite having an instinctive aversion to greedy policemen and other forms of authority, shares neither Simeon’s politics to the letter nor his love of books and ideas received through English and French. There is a bond that develops between the two, as well as an enduring distance. If it weren’t for Simeon’s political inclination, such an encounter would not have been possible; and yet, if Simeon had not later left the Maoists and their strict ideological living, if he were, for example, still waiting for the latest cues from Peking about what to think, he would not have been able to write the experience, at least not with the honesty, depth and texture that is achieved in this piece.

Strangely, in the advertisements of the first pages of the first issue itself, we find a catalogue of both friends and enemies. On one page, there is an ad for an early book by Shobha De, writer of slightly juicy pulp (the sexual innuendo laughably timid by non-Indian standards) who has now become almost, not quite, an apologist for India’s neo-colonial rise and its new, sickeningly filthy rich- her new over-promoted bestseller is called, disturbingly, Superstar India (she was skilfully skewered by Amit Chaudhuri in CL 5). On another page, there is an ad for Yatra, a well-meaning journal, interesting in flashes and in a survey-sort-of-way, that was deeply mired in the time-honoured, simplistic and often bureaucratic polemical lockjaw against Indians writing in English, and in favour of Indians writing in “Indian languages” or, at the very least, writing somehow like bonafide natives. Unfortunately, the deep irony was that the journal had to make its point, on the national stage, in English, and the journal, like others of its ilk, could never sing true in English; its translations were usually more dutiful and hollow than luminous or gripping. An unsigned piece of verse in the editorial of CL 4 (later revealed to have been written by Mukul Kesavan) showed that the debate was so old it could now be summarized cheekily in rhyming stanzas:

[…]The trouble is our lives are polyglot,
to write them down we have to
cheat a lot.

Where life occurs in more than one notation,
all writing is a kind of
translation.

… and so on. Civil Lines agonized about identity too – whether or not it was to be about India, by India, from India, in India, into India etc., but usually happily relaxed into the answer, “Whatever,” with the rider, “whatever- as long it’s good writing.” This was the second groundbreaking thing about Civil Lines: it felt free to explore where it was going without a set programme or a five year plan. That wasn’t a small achievement, you understand, in an India painfully awakening from Nehruvian dreams.

Where exactly the good writing was going to come from, though was a difficult and ongoing question. This was perhaps, in part, why the journal began with the intention of having two issues a year and eventually stalled for years at a time: there was the conviction that, unlike capitalism, literature involved waiting, for the right texts to arrive and take shape. Fair enough. Of course that in turn meant, I suspect, that the editors didn’t always cast their net far enough: the table of contents, in the earlier issues especially, look suspiciously like a roster of drinking buddies.

Still. There was the question of what constituted good writing and this, in the case of Civil Lines, very often meant non-fiction. This particular brand of non-fiction, carried on from India Magazine, was the third ground-breaking thing about Civil Lines. Oh, they published a token couple of poems, and they published fiction by writers who would later become well known, but in my opinion, much, not all, of the fiction tended to be fuzzy and shapeless, still working itself out.

The need of the hour, in the early nineties that is, was texture and detail that came from observation- Indian writing needed something to bite and chew on. Remember that, post-independence, Indian self-understanding was under risk of being no more than a smudge of hand-me-down colonial wisdom pummelled by a mindless native aspirational, often Brahminical, geekiness- see, for instance, Dharma Kumar’s anecdote about the contents of her son’s Indian history textbook in CL 2. What first saved us from this fate, then eventually limited us, was radical history and social science, the non-doctrinarian Marxists and their descendants, the feminists and the subalterns. By the time Civil Lines came along, however, some of these strands were beginning falter too, stifled by disciplinary machinations or utterly lost among the funhouse mirrors of postmodern theory. There was a need for texts, the editorial of CL 2 said a little wearily, that were “written for the lay reader and free, therefore, of long abstract words and the fatiguing apparatus of contemporary learning.”

The pioneering publisher of Civil Lines, Ravi Dayal was spearheading this defection of academics to something called “literature”, a bit of a con, at times, but signifying total freedom. The editorial board of Civil Lines was clear proof of such conversions: Dharma Kumar was an economist by training; Mukul Kesavan, a historian-turned-novelist; Rukun Advani had edited the subalterns and other theorists / social scientists while at Oxford University Press, then mercilessly parodied them in his novel, Beethoven Among the Cows. Among the contributors was Amitav Ghosh, later a Ravi Dayal staple, who had taken a Ph.D in anthropology. Ramachandra Guha’s famous essay, “An Anthropologist Among the Marxists”, appeared in CL 1, and made hilarious hay out of orthodoxy. The result of writing “for the lay reader” was at times not so successful- spineless and vaguely poetic or worse, awful assignment-like essays worthy of graduate school, like Amitav Ghosh on “the Indian story” in CL 1 or M. Krishnan on Tamil verse in CL 2. (Both authors later made up for these lapses- Ghosh with his wonderful translation of a Tagore ghost story in CL 2 and his novels, and Krishnan with his surprising, delightful and deeply perceptive account of his years as a wildlife photographer in CL 3.) Interestingly, in the pages of Civil Lines at least, non-programmatic, literary autobiography became the best way for converts- Dilip Simeon, historian, Andre Beteille, anthropologist, and so on, joined by non-academic civilians like Sheila Dhar – to explore writing that was at once detailed, varied, imaginative and honest. Soon this style circled back into innovative travel writing by the likes of Allan Sealy and Kai Friese (who had been at the helm of India magazine and joined the Civil Lines editorial team from CL 5). By then, gradually, the pages of Civil Lines had become more full of frustrated journalists than frustrated academics, and yet another wave was upon us.

Now, of course, we are struggling to transcend these legacies too. Indian English writing’s “sociological obsession”, as Amit Chaudhuri has noted, is no longer necessarily a good thing, nor (as Rukmini Bhaya Nair has noted) is the subordination of literature into merely another extended arm of glorified journalism. These modes that shaped us and made us distinctive could now be holding us back. These are still modes of writing that we do well, and are still getting better at, but I believe it’s time to also take bigger risks, and to take on the nature of consciousness and perception, as art has always done. At the same time, it’s not just new aesthetic challenges that today await the editors of Civil Lines and other contemporary Indian literary journals. When the first issue of Civil Lines came out, every kid with literary fantasies who saw it thought, “Great! Now I don’t have to spend all my living days courting editors in the US or Britain with my very Indianness!” Civil Lines, at its inception, was among the first to imagine, when it was still practically impossible to imagine, an Indian market for imaginative Indian writing in English; it saw the value of this, when it didn’t even quite know who it was speaking to. That was the fourth ground-breaking thing. It was as labour-of-love as labours of love get. It was sending a message out in a bottle, hoping someone got it. Today, with new publishers in India opening and also closing faster than you can say, “Dot-com?”, everybody’s trying to get a piece of the projected pie. The market, even the market for English books in India, is rapidly growing bigger and badder than pretty much anyone predicted. But the irony is-now that it’s here, what this new baby monster really wants is blockbusters. “Superstar India”! The dreamed-of market- the markets- have arrived, but their idea of “literature”, I fear, is very, very different.

An Essay by Achal Prabhala

At some point in the 1980s – I can’t remember exactly when – curiosity led me to pick up The Illustrated Weekly of India from a pile of newspapers and periodicals that constituted my parents’ daily reading. The middle pages contained photographs of two totally naked women, one Indian and the other blonde. The last pages were given over to the erotic fiction of Khushwant Singh; a young sahibís afternoon tryst with a sweaty female construction worker whose navel smelled of damp mud. And I was hooked.

The Illustrated Weekly existed in an incredible time. A middle-class family in Bangalore could sit down together and read this, an intelligent popular magazine that was equal parts sensational, sensual and just plain strange. (And definitely edited by Men). No one seemed to notice that I was about fifteen years old, or that my other reading consisted of such lusty classics as Margaret Mead’s Coming of Age in Samoa and Germaine Greer’s The Female Eunuch, the latter unwisely chosen on the basis of certain misleading clues on its cover.

The finer traditions of The Illustrated Weekly are continued today by the wildly popular Crime & Detective. A cornucopia of all things criminal and carnal, my favourite section is the soft-core photo-story (“With the pen of my desire, I want to write the story of our intimacy on your alluring body. Would you permit me?”) But those with an instinct for baser things – such as “New Writing from India” – will be offered little satisfaction in the magazine marketplace.

This is a puzzling phenomenon in a country with a thriving, linguistically diverse publishing industry (Though I only speak for the Indian language I know best, English). It wasn’t always so. Imprint and Quest paved the non-academic highbrow way until the mid 1970s, when they gave way to New Quest. The 1960s also saw the emergence of a slew other magazines, most important of which was A.D. Gorwala’s celebrated Opinion. Anglophile intellectuals in India often subscribed and contributed to Encounter, of Spender-Lasky fame, and later, of CIA-funding notoriety.

The Illustrated Weekly shut shop in 1993. Kai Friese’s India Magazine created a distinct cultural excitement until it was jettisoned by careless proprietors in 1999. New Quest soldiers on as a staid shadow of its former self. To be sure, contemporary intellectual life still has some wriggle-room in English-language media. Outlook magazine has hosted a number of public spats; Biblio intermittently winks at its non-octogenarian fans; Economic and Political Weekly steadily publishes the dignified academic left; the Journal of Arts and Ideas, while it existed, pushed the academic envelope to include cultural studies; the Sarai Reader pushes the cultural studies envelope to include critical accounts of popular media and street life. And so on.

Imagine my excitement then, on discovering a copy of Civil Lines back in 1994. Finally: a literary magazine. Here was Dharma Kumar, dryly alarmed at her daughter’s history lessons: “‘Ancient India was very civilized. Men took daily bath and used eye make-up.'” Or the sublime short fiction of Telegu writer Caso, published in translation. And the warmly comical literary journalism of Sheila Dhar. Mukul Kesavan, a founding member of the editorial collective, was probably only half-joking when he wrote in the introduction to its fourth instalment that “besides carrying pieces by the already famous (Khushwant Singh, AK Mehrotra, Amitav Ghosh, Allan Sealy), Civil Lines also published the early works of Manjula Padmanabhan, Ruchir Joshi, Raj Kamal Jha and Susan Vishwanathan. They’ve all gone on to write and publish successful and celebrated books of fiction… and Civil Lines basks shamelessly in this reflected glory.”

A magazine that is really a journal and is actually a book. No wonder that it exhibits an unflappable insouciance in the face of taxonomic transgressions. In his introduction to the fifth instalment, Mukul writes, “Civil Lines advertises itself as New Writing from India. This is misleading (as most advertisements are) because in its short life Civil Lines has been host to old writing newly translated, writing by not-Indian writers, writing by Indians Elsewhere and so on….But to return to the question of content so that anyone who plans to write for Civil Lines (or, for that matter, to read it regularly) will have some sense of what it is likely to publish. Civil Lines will publish good writing by desis (loosely defined to include all kinds of south Asians), it will publish anyone (Indian or otherwise) whose work has something to do with our part of the world and (just to make things really precise) it will publish anything the editors like.”

So far, so wonderful. For many years, Civil Lines sustained my belief that writers actually existed in India. Then it fell off the map, transforming from a publication into something that might be best described as a fervent hope. Five issues have been published (in 1994, 1995, 1997, and two issues in 2001). The astute will observe a trend, and perhaps, also the bucking of it. The astutest will recall that we are now in 2008. This march of time – and the mild indifference of this publication to march along – indicates that at least one challenge facing Civil Lines is the new “New”. Or whatever; you get the idea. Itís all a bit confusing and how it will work out is still a mystery. But having thrown in my lot with the folks who make up the editorial collective, I can happily report that Civil Lines 6 is imminent and no longer merely immanent.

For over a decade, the man born as Elliot Josephs terrorised Cape Town in his literary avatar, Zebulon Dread. This was only appropriate; he was, after all, the original “cultural terrorist.” His weapon of choice? A zany, unpredictable, hand-drawn, hand-printed journal he made himself, called Hei Voetsek! which he thrust upon willing and unwilling and bewildered people who invariably found themselves becoming patrons of art. His art. Then, some years ago, Zebulon Dread was sacrificed to make way for a long-standing dream: Swami Sitaram. Whether in Bonteheuwel or Observatory, or indeed South Africa and India, this profoundly original thinker, writer, philosopher and rabble-rouser has no parallel. Make way for the spiritual terrorist. Ingrid Masondo documents him at home, and at large.

For more Dread get a copy of Chimurenga Chronic: Graphic Stories (July 2014) Print

And now for an important travel advisory. Planning to visit Johannesburg or Holland for the hols? Don’t. Zebulon Dread is away – and hating every minute of it. Enough with elsewhere! PMS is thrilled to present this extract from the never-published Hei Voetsek! Issue No. 10.

Part 1: JO’BURG – OU’BURG – KAK PLACE – KAK PEOPLE – KAK CELEBRITIES – KAK FOOD – KAK MUSIC – KAK SKELMS – KAK SABC

Three or so years ago I eventually arrived in Jo’burg with magazines, books and oodles of personality to see if the Great North is capable of handling pure unadulterated Cultural Terrorism and Lord of Hosts, do I get the surprise of my life!!!! I hand magazines and books to some black Arts Editor from some black newspaper only to be told that eish! brother, that’s a lot of reading. Maybe you can like give us one book, you know and then I’ll pass it around. I stand aghast, take a hard look and see, for the first time, the dullness acquired from too much sex, too much pap and meat, too much beer and it’s well, too much!

I arrive in Melville and there, on the corner of 7th and 4th, I think, is Spyros. Outside of Spyros sit some of the not so black elite wanting to be the black elite and all they do, these black elite, is ogle pussy! Yebo yes! Pick up your Vodacum and ooze sperm into the ether. In between sipping the legacy of Johny Walker, actually I lie, it’s mostly cheap white wine, they quaff lots of alcohol, from whoever is buying, and spout inanities like a flowing river of sewerage. There’s your wannabee singer insisting that her CD is played, much to everyone’s embarrassment! There’s your average jock. There’s your great plan maker. There’s just so much drivel it could drive a gecko down the wall, never mind up!!! It’s Jo’burg and fuck it stinks! The air is filled with the acrid pong spewing from so many 4×4’s, huge cockroaches with funny tentacles, taking over the asphalt kingdom, it’s actually laughable! And everywhere you have those absolutely demoniac taxi’s, those dumb numbskulls called Metro Police. Never in my life have I seen so many huge big butt police men and women anywhere. Great living demons.

Hei, you drive and laugh at this ugliness personified. Yes, it’s Jo’burg, capital of The Rhema Church where uncelebratable humans parading as celebrities come to pay homage to the God who allows them to be filthy rich, dumb as a fucken toadstool, yebo yes, and not feel guilty about it while filling the pockets of the funniest white man clown ever seen anywhere who goes by the name of Pastor Kreepy Crawley. Shit, I hope I got his name right. Yes, Pastor Kreepy Crawley who will wash out your heart with the most inane crap in the name of religion as long as you simply give him 10%! 10% and you can be saved. Shit, I feel, after a short while, that I want to be saved from them and not by them. And then there’s those god awful dumb beauties. Sexy! Yes, oh God! Are they sexy well yes, until of course they open their mouths!!! Oh Lord, it’s enough to make you lie down in the middle of the road and have a huge cockroach drive over you!

Serious! Seri-arse! Fuck the irascible Jo’burg kugle, here comes the dumb arse black bitch! Gucci, Cardin, Diesel, Klein, you name it and they’re in it Just put a sassy name to your garment and they’ll splash out because well, it’s Loxtion Culture. It’s my culture to be beautiful! Now I can smoke, fuck anything and anyone I want because hey, I’m free!! Free to do with my pussy just as I please!! Free to die for and with my pussy!

Sister, fuck your pussy because if no one’s told you yet, you are not your pussy! You are not your body, although you have a body! You are not the made up beauty that wakes up so butt ugly in the morning that you have to paint all over it, wear skimpiest of skimpy clothing to attract the attention of BEE fuckwits simply dedicated to business to acquire as much of your butt ugly pussy as possible. You are a spiritual being! You are an important living entity! You are special because you are in the human form of life and that depends not on anything you dress in but rather on what you drape your mind in. It depends on intelligence. Actual intelligence! And if you don’t have that, you still have your humanity, your decency, your self respect. Fuck, I was amused to see so many useless individuals with too much money or rather with flashy credit cards simply basking in the glory of wanting to be. Oh, I should name and shame them but of what use will it be when I’m simply naming and shaming idiocy?

Part 2: WHEN I WENT TO HOLLAND

Sometime in the neo dark past I was invited to The Winternacht Literary Festival in Holland and God of God of Gods, was I bored? Ek snak na my asem! I gasp for breath. No almighty wonder those Boere came and colonised our wonderful comer of the earth. Lord Almighty, I was absolutely petrified that I might become as petrified as them. It was held in The Hague. I ended up watching dumb white women screwing the lily livered penises of equally dumb men. Hey, it was satellite TV and I sure as hell wasn’t going to pay for this.

I also ended up smoking some terminal shit in the coffee shops while trying to amuse myself. It rained in the morning, in the afternoon, at night and throughout the night. It was dark at around 9 am and everywhere everyone wore black and held their coats tight against the wind. The food was absolutely tasteless and so kak that I became very constipated. Antjie Krog read the Oracles of Africa and I sat in amazement at the kak those cretins spouted afterwards. I cannot even begin to tell you how fucked I was that it was these people’s forefathers who had colonised us and caused so much kak that it took nearly four hundred score years to unravel. How did they do it? Was it the Jesus muti? The Big Black Book Bible muti? What? I stood in sheer disbelief and wondered if our forefathers were just stupid, lazy or simply couldn’t give a flying tuck since they had so much to eat, so many women.

Yes, Hol-land!!! Van Riebeeck was the first Hol-lander to land on our shores! Ag nee fok. And to crown it all, I smoked just too much expensive zol and hash in the coffee shops, missed my fucken plane and had to spend two days in European airports trying to get home that cost me an extra R750. Now that was one fucken expensive smoke. As for the dagga! Got wiet! Fokken hydroponics kak that taste of sewerage. No one can pay me to fokken go there gain. Nee fok, nee!!!! One thing I must say is that those trains are unbelievably nice. It’s because the bloody fucken smooth thing glided so softly that I simply glided past Schipol, after a zol session in Amsterdam, and ended up back in The Hague which I had left earlier that day. Fok, and I am an old dagga-roker at that!! Djirre, I laughed at myself so lekke, I somma kicked my own arse! Djy, pasop!!

Want more Zeb? Visit Zebulon Dread a.k.a Swami Sitaram at home or read about Hei Voetsek! in the Chimurenga Library or get a copy of Chimurenga Chronic: Graphic Stories (July 2014) Print

All my life, I wanted to be either a writer or a musician – or failing that, a painter. Back in 1966, or thereabout, after doing the kind of work artists call slavery, banking on my part, I was lucky enough to be accepted into the then called Nairobi University College to do the only thing I felt I was capable of doing, when the spirit moved me.

Back in high school, I had written several stories, and the only place I could take them, in those old colonial times, was to a weekly magazine called Kenya Weekly News, published out of Nakuru. My first story to be published by that colonial magazine was “Father Come back,” which has since featured in a book titled Potent Ash, co-authored by my brother Leonard Kibera.

While in the University, I was always juggling between the fine arts and singing my soul out on TV, with my band, including artists like Paul Kanywe, who is now one of Kenya’s leading architects.

It was in the university that I met an Englishman called Terry Hirst, who gave me the rudiments of graphic design and fine art. He was a rather shy character, very unassuming for the kind of Englishmen who had colonized our country, a special kind of man, armed only with a pencil and the desire to teach us how to use it as an invaluable tool of expression. Fine art led me into working for Kenya Broadcasting house, the same place I had been welcomed in with my guitar.

I had no idea that Terry Hirst and I would meet again, but we did, after I had come back from Glasgow, where KBC had sent me to study TV production.

On coming back, I came across Joe, a startling magazine, the first of its kind in Kenya. Reading it and seeing the kind of stuff Hirst and his friend Hilary Ngweno were turning out, I felt I had to be part of that humourous bunch. The two friends had conceived the kind of magazine all young artists wanted to contribute to. They gave me a column called “From My View” through which I discovered a funny bone I never knew I had, in my rather melancholic soul.

Both of them became my friends, and Hilary gave me a chance to express some of our music, into a film he was doing for Child Health Organization. Later on, I was to fly to the Habitat Conference in New York carrying his film about Lamu Island and another one I had directed for KBC.

Joe magazine was still alive and kicking some great jokes about the kind of places our films and writing was all about, about the holy and lowly wretched of the earth.

Hillary was to move on to launch Kenya Weekly Review, certainly the best political weekly of its time. Terry struggled on with Joe, trying to beat the odds against a comics magazine in Africa. He usually waved away those kinds of odds: the worst being the fact that Kenya was not ready for humour, as a new-born country too busy building herself and trying to reconcile the old colonial past and the youthful vigour. Few wanted to advertise their yield in that mag. They might have enjoyed it but they also thought of it as frivolous flighty and flippant, in the serious world of nation-building.

Young artists didn’t think so, among them a young school-leaver called Rose Kimotho who worked for a while there, many years before launching a radio station and thereafter a TV station, K24, one of the best in the country.

Joe, the character in the magazine, drawn always in an old coat and with rough beard bald patch on the head was a character everyone seemed to know intimately: the old peasant elderly guy next door; a kindly uncle, only more gifted in wit than your real one and more acerbic. Ask him a foolish question in one of his cartoon strips and you were gladly rewarded with an even more foolish answer…

Terry Hirst and his Joe magazine gave young people of that era a great opportunity to launch their own teething talents into the bluest skies of their highest artistic dreams. Through the magazine, I nursed my own writing talent, and Terry, I’m proud to say, did the cover of my second novel, Lover In The Sky. He also illustrated one of my early short stories.

Few artists, especially cartoonists, in Kenya today do not owe Joe magazine and its creator, Terry, a load of thanks for showing them how to draw and write, in a humourous way, the teething problems of Africa’s toil, as we fly into the future and its challenges.

June 2008