Clouds It was the year 1954 when the “Department of Tropical Architecture“ was founded at the Architectural Association (AA) London, by Maxwell Fry, Jane Drew and their colleague James Cubbitt. Tropical architecture had been a topic before the study programs foundation, large conferences like the “Conference on tropical architecture” March 1953 at University College, London or two years before in Venezuela had established the issue internationally. The AA Tropical Architecture study program ran till 1971 and was afterwards transferred to the University of London and proceeded there as the “Development Planning Unit” that is active till today. The AA program included lectures ...

A unique blend of travelogue, photographs and poetry, A Stranger’s Pose draws the reader into a world of encounters haunted by the absence of home, estrangement from a lover and family tragedies. The author’s recollections and reflections of fragments of his journeys to African cities, from Dakar to Douala, Bamako to Benin, and Khartoum to Casablanca, offer a compelling and very personal meditation on the meaning of home and the generosity of strangers to a lone traveler. Inspired by the author’s own travels with photographers between 2011 and 2015, the Iduma’s own accounts are expanded to include other narratives about ...

There is a statement, “Africa is a country,” used to satirize Western‘ preconceptions about Africa. With billions of people, thousands of ethnicities, several colonial histories and varied post-independence struggles, the continent is spoken of as a single plane that is beset by bad leadership, unending poverty, and the odd scenery. Yes, the continent has these, and yes, there really are some similarities across the different countries and cultures. But, the question remains: Is that all that can be said? And there is another question: How can you represent what truly is Africa? For us at Saraba, we set out to have ...

Pick up any academic or popular publication that deals with urban life in Africa and be prepared to be overrun by caricature, hyperbole, stereotypes and moralistic hogwash. Urban Africans are either bravely en route to empowering themselves to attain sustainable livelihoods or the debased perpetrators of the most unimaginable acts of misanthropy. Explanations for these one-dimensional distortions vary from historical path dependency perspectives, to the vagaries of the peddlers of neoliberal globalisation agendas, or to the glorious agency of digni ed actors who persist with their backs straight, chin up despite the cruelties bestowed by governmental neglect and economic malice. ...

Afronik N’ko font is a display font supporting only the N’ko alphabet used to write Manding languages of West Africa. Souleymane Kanté created the N’Ko (ߒߞߏ – N’Ko) alphabet in 1949 to suit the sounds of the Mande languages — including Mandika, Dyula, Bambara and related languages.Neither the Latin nor the Arabic characters have enough breadth to encompass the nuances of African speech. Both writing systems lack symbols for some of the phonology, in particular the subtle but distinct tonalities. When transcribed with the foreign scripts, which have no adequate way of marking precise vowel tones, the meanings of words can ...

Proverbs for Decolonized Consciences Ali Jimale Ahmed is a Somali poet, cultural critic, short-story writer, and scholar. He is Professor and former chair of Comparative Literature at Queens College of the City University of New York, where he also teaches for the Africana Studies Program and the Department of Classical, Middle Eastern, and Asian Languages and Cultures; he is also on the Comparative Literature faculty at the CUNY Graduate center. His books include The Invention of Somalia (1995), Daybreak Is Near: Literature, Clans, and the Nation-State in Somalia (1996), Fear Is a Cow (2002), Diaspora Blues (2005), The Road Less Traveled: ...

It‘s a shame and a sham to lose experiments. You could say that this is an experiment, black and white and lines, and a slight shade of blue. But on the larger, more intricate, scale, it is an experiment to see how much success we can make from failure, and how much introspection we can make from goodwill. This job—without pay—has taught us to believe in creation, and to look upon our creation with wonder, awe and intensity. That is, if this is still our creation. You discover that it has become the creation of a larger audience, even French ...

We think that to deal with art we ought to present it, not talk about it. For four months we opened our window to artists producing the finest work in Nigeria, Africa and elsewhere, and the result is what you will see. Seeing is ultimately a trafficking in subtlety, especially if that process of seeing is influenced by art. What, exactly, is art? Since at Saraba we’re open to this kind of questioning that is essentially a voyage, the kind that assembles literary content, art is a process as well as an outcome. Art is the reverberation of colour; art is ...

Beyond ICT4D: New Media Research in Uganda is a collection of ethnographic reports from diverse perspectives of those living at the other end of the African ICT pyramid. Crucially, these texts refocus on the so-called “ICT4D” debate away from the standard western lens, which depicts users in the developing world as passive receivers of Western technological development, towards Ugandans whose use and production of technologies entail innovations from the ground up. It is this ‘other’ everyday point of view that is too often missing in the ICT4D debate: valuable voices that put technologies, projects and organizations into their proper context. Conducted ...

Quito Swan’s forthcoming book Pasifika Black: Oceania, Anti-colonialism, and the African World (NYU Press, March 2022) beautifully encompasses the type of internationalist solidarity our 39th issue The Ocean… From the Black Atlantic to the Sea of Islands would like to convey. As such, this interview about the struggles of liberation in Melanesia (in particular West Papua, Kanaky, and Vanuatu) constitutes a cornerstone of the issue, for which we are deeply grateful to Quito. Hailing from the island of Bermuda, Quito Swan is Professor of African American and African Diaspora Studies at Indiana University Bloomington. An award-winning historian of Black internationalism, he ...

This exhibition is comprised of sculptures rendered in cacao, drawings, a video piece, and a reading room that provides information on how and why these artworks came to be. The participating artists belong to the collective Cercle d’art des travailleurs de plantation congolaise (CATPC) and work together to make their individual artworks, with the support and guidance of outside collaborators who help get their expressions out into the world. They live in Lusanga, formerly Leverville (named after William Lever, the early twentieth-century Belgian founder of the local palm oil plantation that turned into the modern day Unilever corporation), in the ...

The way to begin is on a tiny road with no traffic, no nothing, perhaps only a flicker of light at the end of the road. This is the summary of Saraba for this second issue, and one is tempted to end it there. We received fewer entries than the first, and we could not get a Guest Editor. Our box was almost as empty as we left it. That is why there is a very high tendency for us to get despondent, end this all, easily, pocket our losses, and who can say anything? But Saraba deserves more than ...