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The cultural and historical context in which African art is produced is over-determined by dominant relations of power and powerlessness. Anything in between gestures toward negotiating the terms by which African art is thought of as art from Africa. Art from Africa is probably amore honest definition of what is contemporarily understood as African art for two reasons. First it is axiomatic to say that Africans produce their art in spite of the conditions of dominance or because of the need to survive the politics of power and the powerless in the production of knowledge. Second, not all art produced in Africa and that is described as African art ferments with the spirit of what is conspicuously ‘African’ and ‘cosmopolitan’ at the same time. Geography and ideology therefore are amongst two factors that define what is African art.We may add another understanding when we recognise that African people also consume artefacts from outside the continent, a fact that results in such appropriations of foreign art being inflected and reworked with new meanings for Africans. It is in these contextual redefinitions of what African art is that we can properly understand Breytenbach’s useful but unfinished elaboration of the dialectical relations of African art from whoever its producers are, to whoever its consumer becomes. Refereed/Peer-reviewed

This article is a prelude to other articles in this issue that provide multiple interpretations of the Rwandan genocide of 1994. The article explores how history, travel writing, autobiographical accounts, media and philosophical perspectives can draw attention to the many ways in which the Rwandan genocide can be understood. While this interdisciplinary methodological approach may not claim to be exhaustive, it teases out some important works written so far on the subject matter of Rwandan genocide. Historical accounts provide insights into factors responsible for the genocide, while the genre of travel writing uses journalistic perspectives based on eye-witness accounts. Media perspectives use concepts of framing and salience in reporting the genocide while the autobiographical approach focuses on experiences of individuals who bore the brunt of genocide. Each of these approaches attempts to provide solutions to the methodological problems in analysing the Rwandan genocide.

This issue of the African Identities journal is devoted to understanding the Zimbabwean crises, and many more books on the crisis tend to rightfully focus on secure institutional sites such as the economy, governance, politics, culture and human rights. While these have received a fair amount of attention, what has not been explored is how resilient ordinary Zimbabweans are surviving and leading successful and fulfilling lives. This reorientation of focus does not belittle the fervent and highly engaging critiques of the crises. But when voices of people who bear the burden of the crises are not captured, the danger is that writing about the crises may lose some of its richness and usefulness. In this article I make the modest implication that research needs to redirect itself towards the local and explore the experience of those worst affected by such crises who display not only survival but also success and fulfilment. To this end I interview a Zimbabwean artist, himself an ordinary as well as a not-so-ordinary person, in the sense in which the word is used in Marxist circles to refer to being part of the masses. The focus of this paper is to report on the hands-on efforts I have witnessed in this artist’s(Albert Chimedza’s) contribution to the Mbira Centre in Harare. There are many like Chimedza, living the crisis who are not always involved in ‘land politics’ or governance politics’. These are some of the voices that organize themselves outside the constant and corrosive, gnawing quarrels of the state, which is responsible for the crises, or the ethereal critiques of scholarly works attempting to describe the crises, in the arena of the local and the ordinary. I argue that what is now needed in Zimbabwe is less describing of the facets of the crises and more engagement with how some resilient Zimbabweans themselves are successfully addressing the effects of the crisis and living in a way that we can all learn from.

How do we know when a state is rehearsing genocide? This question has been answered in spectacular fashion in contemporary Africa: the veiled language of the Biafran war in Nigeria, which masked mass murder; the state-sponsored near-annihilation of the Tutsis within 100 days in Rwanda; the unbridled love for power by Islamic militias in Somalia that has rendered the country stateless; and the violation of Darfurians with impunity in Sudan. Such obvious cases make Africa appear to be a place where anything that can go wrong will destroy social norms overnight. Such instances also mask the violations of humanity occurring in neoliberal democracies such as South Africa. For example, the xenophobic attacks on resident black Africans from elsewhere are the product of the revived neurosis of separate development in the aftermath of 1994. South Africa's black middle class condones xenophobia and colludes in the state's failure to deliver real independence to the masses of unemployed South African blacks. Many of...

In moments of stalemate, unpredictability, and despair on the pitch and terraces, a seemingly platitudinous comment that inspires hope and has become a natural component of soccerlore is: ‘the ball...

Ethiopia has a much longer history of self‐rule than any other African country. The 1896 Battle of Adwa at which Italy's colonialism succumbed to Ethiopia has been memorialized by Africans as one o...

The aim of this article to is explore the origins of the Beta Israel people; analyse the conditions of their existence in mainland Israel; and critique the notions of displacement and diaspora as applied to their historical experience in Ethiopia. Scholars of the Beta Israel in Ethiopia and Israel tend to project them as a marooned community, one without roots in Ethiopia and yet denied the right to live decently under Israeli law. In rethinking the agency of Beta Israel it is important not to adopt a theoretical perspective that is romantically uncritical of their struggle for human dignity. Nor should their struggle for identity formation be belittled in any way or simply dismissed as a negative fait accompli. This article argues that the existential experiences of the Beta Israelis can best be described as diasporic. Diaspora is in fact the language of those on the margins of history; those who nevertheless insist on having their stories told from their point of view. Diaspora acknowledges the possibil...

The aim of this article is to offer a critique of Kwame Anthony Appiah's article, ‘New literature, new theory’ (2000), and Achille Mbembe's On the Postcolony (2001).These two critical voices have become widely accepted in European and African academia. However, little scholarly work has been carried out to scrutinize the theoretical assumptions on which these works are based. In this paper we examine Appiah's critique of nativism and argue that his insights on the contradictions of the discourse of nativism offered by some of Africa's cultural nationalists cannot be ignored. However, we take issue with his general thrust that appears to minimize the overall contribution of the politics of nativism in the struggle for liberation in Africa. We then link Appiah's critique of nativism to Achille Mbembe's convictions in On the Postcolony: that African leaders and those over whom they rule are caught up in an unbreakable cycle of violence. We argue that Mbembe's grasp of the theoretical issues relating to evolv...

An able political leader, profound cultural theorist and provocative philosopher of the African struggle for freedom, Amilcar Cabral remains one of the significant African revolutionaries. His theoretical works, particularly National Liberation and Culture, Return to the Source, Identity and Dignity in the Context of the Liberation Struggle and The Weapon of Theory have influenced the direction of creativity in African literature in significant ways. An application of the theoretical insights of this work to African literature helps to understand and critically elaborate the spirit of struggle captured in Africa's diverse arts. This article analyses four creative texts of literature from Africa. These texts are Mission to Kala (1958) by the Cameroon‐born Mongo Beti, Harvest of Thorns (1989) by the Zimbabwe‐born Shimmer Chinodya, Devil on the Cross (1982) by the Kenyan Ngugi wa Thiongo, and Nervous Conditions (1988) by Tsitsi Dangarembga from Zimbabwe. We have deliberately not considered any texts from Lus...

In 2005, Filip Reyntjens published a controversial article titled ‘Rwanda, ten years on: from genocide to dictatorship’. In this article it is suggested that although the Rwandan Patriotic Front le...

If one looks at the news, it appears that Zimbabwe is a country in lonely crisis. When the world does pay attention to Zimbabwe, it is to sanction its leaders. This issue is solely about Zimbabwe a...

The struggle for the control of the meaning of life is at stake during every moment when identities are acted out, re‐enacted and performed in the private and public domains of social life (Hounton...