Book Reviews & Literary Criticism

Four days from death in December 2013, Nelson is in an advanced state of dementia and refuses to eat. Graça Machel, his third wife, invites his estranged second wife, Winnie, to be with him, noting that she was “Nelson’s great love”, and it’s Winnie who feeds him.

This is a book about celebrating ourselves, acknowledging where we come from, crying at our pain and laughing at the hilarious moments. It is a story about our rocky rough times and the smooth silk moments stored in our hearts: Rough Silk.

The story starts nearly 200 years ago with the kidnapping of Songoro by slave-catchers — a 12-year-old boy from Ngindo in present-day Malawi. His journey across distant lands began in the mid-1800s as a captive of Salim bin Abdullah, a Swahili-Arab slave trader and the progenitor of the Nkhotakota Slave Route, with a thousand other captives, herded across thousands of kilometers to Kilwa in present-day Tanzania, to be loaded as cargo in slave ships headed for Zanzibar.

The resurfacing of more than 60,000 negatives as well as other documents, including notebooks, has led to the publication of the new edition of Cole’s landmark book by the Aperture Foundation.

If Nairobi is a woman, Silas Nyanchwani is the lecherous poet who praises the curve of her thigh and the fullness of her breasts. Nairobi is not a woman.

This year marks the centenary of the publication in 1922 of Abantu Abamnyama Lapa Bavela Ngakona (The Black People and Whence They Came), the first book-length history of black people written in isiZulu.