Welcome to The Jacana People’s Africa Month Festival of Writers and the start of the Book Club book sale. With a full, invigorating and illuminating series of Don’t Shut Up conversations, there is something to suit every interest. Don’t forget to register for the Book Club book sale – for book clubs of any size – to take advantage of the 50% discount.
1. Why we’re not on our own: The rise and rise of Black Consciousness
Date: Monday 17 May
Time: 18:00 (SAST)
Join us in a frank talk to celebrate the launch of the revised and updated second edition of The Black Consciousness Reader. Authors Baldwin Ndaba, Masego Panyane, Rabbie Serumula and Paballo Thekiso – who will be showing his award-winning photographs – will be talking with prize-winning writer, lecturer and development specialist Malebo Sephodi about the power of mass solidarity amongst black people, forging a new consciousness.
Register here to join the conversation.
2. Sol Plaatje’s Mhudi: Celebrating a centenary of one of Africa’s earliest novels
Date: Wednesday 19 May
Time: 18:00 (SAST)
Sabata-mpho Mokae and Brian Willan discuss the meaning and relevance of Mhudi today, how the issues of language, gender and land dispossession in this novel provide us with ways of looking at history. Sabata-mpho Mokae is an academic, translator and writer. He writes mainly in Setswana and occasionally in English. He teaches creative writing at Sol Plaatje University, Kimberley. Former publisher Brian Willan is an extraordinary professor at Sol Plaatje University and North West University.
Register here to join the conversation.
3. Africa and the ambivalence of seeing
Date: Sunday 23 May
Time: 18:00 (SAST)
Patricia Hayes and Gary Minkley will offer a virtual walkabout using the collection of photographs from Ambivalent to show how photography itself is a historical subject and will provide us with the frame for thinking about questions of photography and visibility in Africa. Patricia Hayes is National Research Foundation SARChi Chair in Visual History and Theory at the Centre of Humanities Research, University of the Western Cape. Gary Minkley is the SARChi Chair in Social Change in the History Department at the University of Fort Hare. Look out for the student discount on this book.
Register here to join the conversation.
4. Rethinking Africa: Indigenous Women Reinterpret Southern Africa’s Pasts
Date: Monday 24 May
Time: 18:00 (SAST)
Award-winning author, journalist and filmmaker, Sylvia Vollenhoven will be in conversation with editors Bernedette Muthien, first Fulbright-Amy Biehl Fellow at Stanford University, and June Bam, head of the Khoi and San Unit, Centre for African Studies, University of Cape Town, together with other contributors from this edited collection. They will talk about the importance and necessity of this collection – the first of its kind in Africa – with essays written by, with and for indigenous southern African women from matricentric societies.
Register here to join the conversation.
5. Out-raging Africa
Date: Tuesday 25 May
Time: 18:00 (SAST)
Otosirieze Obi-Young, Nigerian writer, editor, culture journalist, curator and editor-in-chief of Open Country magazine, talks queer biography with Chike Frankie Edozien, a Nigerian American writer and journalist, currently director of New York University, Accra, and author of Lives of Great Men, and Jamil F. Khan, Johannesburg-based Critical Diversity Studies PhD candidate, researcher, columnist, poet and author of Khamr: The Makings of a Waterslams.
Register here to join the conversation.
6. [BR]OTHER: No African is a Foreigner in Africa
Date: Wednesday 26 May
Time: 18:00 (SAST)
James Oatway, independent South African photographer and formally chief photographer and picture editor of the Sunday Times, and news and documentary photographer Alon Skuy, whose work on xenophobia, together with Oatway, remains on permanent exhibition at the Johannesburg Holocaust & Genocide Centre, will walk us through images in their newly published book [BR]OTHER. The book is dedicated to all those who have been affected by violence, intolerance and hatred, and the echoes of Achille Mbembe’s statement ‘Africa is where we all belong’ will resonate long after this talk. [BR]OTHER is a visual record of the xenophobic violence that has swept through South Africa over the past decade.
Register here to join the conversation.
7. The Jacana Book Club Sale
Date: Wednesday 26 May – Thursday 27 May
Time: 06:00 (SAST) (26 May) – 00:00 (27 May)
We’re celebrating Africa Month, and we’re celebrating book clubs. As our thank you for promoting African literature, building communities of readers and acknowledging local writers, book clubs will be able to buy any Jacana book at a special 50% discount. This offer runs for two days only!
Whether you’re a book club of one, a few or many, register here to receive your Book Club Sale coupon code.