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The Myth-Science of Blackness with Kumbirai Makumbe

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The Myth-Science of Blackness with Kumbirai Makumbe

“ I’m not real. I’m just like you. You don’t exist in this society. If you did, your people wouldn’t be seeking equal rights. You’re not real. If you were, you’d have some status among the nations of the world. So, we’re both myths. I do not come to you as a reality; I come to you as the myth, because that’s what Black people are. Myths. I came from a dream that the Black man dreamed a long time ago. I’m actually a presence sent to you by your ancestors.”

- Sun Ra, Space is the Place

In the first episode of this season of Race Beyond Borders, Nigel Richard and artist Kumbirai Makumbe draw from the range of scholarship about Blackness to make some pretty bold claims about its future.

In the first of a 4-part essay series, writer Lindokuhle Nkosi centralises that scholarship to take the conversation further, drawing explicit connections to the work of other Afrofuturist thinkers. 

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Ballenesque: Becoming Eponymous Part Two

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Ballenesque: Becoming Eponymous Part Two

“Can I live with myself?” Roger Ballen asks a writer for The Guardian when questioned about his alleged exploitation of poor and mentally unwell South Africans in the production of his work. 

“I can,” he responds, answering his own question. Where the writer once travelled to small towns in South Africa, shooting poor people in cramped spaces, he began to create elaborate staged sets in derelict housing structures and boarding houses occupied by those society frequently chooses to forget. He uses like them props, posing them with animals like birds, snake and mice, putting chalk in their hands, instructing them to draw on their walls, on their floors.

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