The significance of the periodical for historians belies its short life. Far from simply a nationalist party organ, Uganda Renaissance is part of the history of Cairo’s ascendency as a radical Afro-Asian hub. Kale’s office – officially that of the Foreign Mission of the Uganda National Congress – on Ahmad Hishmat Street was one of several offices for sub-Saharan liberation movements housed here by the end of the 1950s. Resident activists shared meals and debates with Egyptian intellectuals through the ‘infrastructures of solidarity’ surrounding the recently formed African Association. The publication of a periodical was an obvious activity for such an office: Gamal Abdel Nasser’s government provided office equipment and financed printing at Mondiale Press, and from 1957 the multi-lingual periodical Nahdatu Ifriquiah (African Renaissance) served as a model for budding editors like Kale.

Kale was no stranger to publishing when he arrived in Cairo in late 1957. He had spent the previous months working for the Uganda National Congress at their office in Katwe, Kampala, where Ugandan press ventures like Uganda Eyogera were struggling to inform readers of the fast-moving political scene amid repressive permit laws under British colonial administration. Kale had been involved in publishing at Makerere University College too, where student magazines were launched and banned recurrently in the 1950s – until he was expelled in 1956 for attending a conference of the Soviet-sponsored International Union of Students. Uganda Renaissance was quickly added to the list of proscribed publications in British colonial East Africa.

The pages of Uganda Renaissance demonstrate the editorial experimentation that was possible in an ecology of print where the usually prohibitive start-up costs of publishing were met by an anticolonial patron. Far from simply reproducing dominant anti-imperialist slogans, Kale cut and pasted material from his own pamphlets and brought together eclectic content to follow his interests: the 1916 poem ‘Africa’ by Rabindranath Tagore and a liberation song from central Kenya; an account of the plight of Batutsi refugees in East Africa, and a copy of the Sanniquellie Declaration that was the basis for the Ghana-Guinea federation… read more

Christopher Ouma and Madhu Krishnan

The small magazine has held a significant but understudied effect on not only the project of imagining Africa in the long twentieth century, but also of articulating projects of solidarity, intimacy and political action. As a key node within larger ecologies of print culture, the small magazine is notable for the ways in which its flexible form and sometimes eccentric modes of circulation trouble what have come to be seen as ‘orthodox’ or received wisdom as to the nature of self-fashioning and modernity on the African continent. While the ‘smallness’ of its form underlines its context as a site-specific platform of cultural production, it’s networks of circulation and the audiences and publics it convenes point to a wider and much more ambitious intention which cannot be reduced to simplistic or one-dimensional systemic models of understanding. As ‘form’ and therefore a ‘genre’ in the long twentieth century of African cultural production, the small magazine has convened various platforms for the articulation and intersection of various projects, often in intersectional logic; anti-colonialism, pan-Africanism, Anti-apartheid imagination and broader project(s) of decolonization during the second half of the twentieth century. This project seeks to examine how small magazines are able, through the networks they create scale up and scale down their visibility through various strategies of curation and self-fashioning which evolve and transform over time and space. It is the specific nexus of scalability, in tandem with the curatorial potentiality of the small magazine through various models of formal juxtaposition and intellectual patterning, we argue, which has lent it its importance as an archive of the present with respect to African models of intellectual production. Such strategies account for the longevity, political and cultural potency of the form which has had a significant footprint in the long twentieth century of political and cultural organization and the imagination of identity in the continent. The project draws from example in magazines such Transition, Black Orpheus, Nexus/Busara, Chimurenga Chronic, Kwani? amongst many others, exploring how media, platform, visibility, publicness, form and genre come together in the small magazine to produce new understandings of African models of modernity, coalition and solidarity.

Since the late 1930’s, when Columbia Records art director Alex Steinweiss invented the concept of album covers and cover art, it has become a driving force in shaping popular culture, counter-culture and collective imagination. Before the popularization of television and the advent of the internet, album art was the primary visual accompaniment to sound recordings, and would often times become an inter-textual extension of the music, and the themes and ideas explored within a particular recording. It also provided the primary pre-text for engaging with the sonic. With this performance I aim to highlight and discuss the counter-cultural role of album art in conceiving of a future that is less hostile to black people than the past, and the present. It will explore and analyse album art that inscribes and projects black people into futures with new possibilities of liberation, equality and self-determination. I will draw on, and highlight the works of a multitude of popular sonic and visual artists in the African diaspora, and on the African continent who have contributed to our contemporary understanding of a future-oriented Black imaginary.

The Journal of Black Theology in South Africa was a bi-annual academic journal which ran from May 1987 until November 1998. In a context of legislated (at least initially) anti-black racism and repression, it sought to be “a vehicle of communication and a forum for exchange of ideas… (to) hasten the dawning of a new day of freedom” through stimulating “creative thought, lively theological discussion and… (reorienting) the social life and political action of the black community” (Mofokeng, 1987).

This paper will firstly situate the journal within the historical and political context out of which it emerged, mapping and positioning it within the history of black theology in South Africa. Next, the paper will go on to detail some of the journal’s particularities with regard to (among other things) how the journal began, who was involved, what it aimed to do, the role that it played, how it was distributed, its readership, why it ended and how it was structured. The paper will then engage with some aspects of the journal’s content. This of course cannot be covered comprehensively, as such, I have broken it down into the following four sections which will be covered in brief:

1. How the journal develops a hermeneutics/framework/lens of black theology through bringing scripture into conversation with the black experience.
2. How the journal uses a hermeneutics/framework/lens of black theology to explore topical issues such as land, gender, economic justice, colonialism, black identity, racism, labour, negotiations, culture, etc.
3. How the journal brings South African black theology into conversation with other historical and contemporary global expressions of liberative praxis.
4. How the journal uses a hermeneutics/framework/lens of black theology to critique and challenge dominant theology and ideas within in that perpetuate the unjust status quo.

Finally, the paper will look at how the journal imagined the future of black theology in South Africa and put this in dialogue with the actual landscape of black theology in South Africa today, concluding with some tentative thoughts about a way forward.

This paper considers two periodicals published by black radical activists in the United States during the “New Negro” era of the early 20th century. Amid the outbreak of World War I, the Russian Revolution, and the stirring of anti-colonial movements in the global South, black Americans struggled to find new strategies for their liberation. This period in the U. S. was characterized by virulent Jim Crow segregation and discrimination, widespread racial violence, and the resulting “great migration” that fueled the movement of millions of black people from the rural South and the Caribbean to the urban North and West. Out of this maelstrom emerged a generation of New Negro Militants who deployed the press as a critical tool for organizing and critique. They forged a black radical imagination through print culture that, in keeping with the themes of this workshop, supported a black counter-public, alternative forms of cultural expression, and transnational projects.

​The Messenger was founded in 1917 by A. Philip Randolph and Chandler Owen, young migrants from the South who sought intellectual and political inspiration in Harlem. They found it in the burgeoning Socialist Party which actively sought black participation in the quest for universal brotherhood. The Messenger brought together artists, poets, journalists, and activists who linked black American’s condition with the rapacity of empire and capitalism, and with the cause of anti-colonialism. Over time the magazine shifted its emphasis from socialist transformation to advocacy for black solidarity through trade unions. The Crusader, created by Caribbean-born activist Cyril Briggs in 1918, was a monthly magazine that blended black nationalism with Communist Party doctrine in calls for autonomy and self-determination. Briggs established The Crusader to “promote the idea of self-government for the Negro and Africa for the Africans,” he wrote in an early issue. Briggs is best known for his leadership of the African Blood Brotherhood (ABB) founded in 1919, a quasi-secret society linked to the Communist Party that advocated armed self-defense. The Crusader would become the ABB’s official organ in 1921. The two magazines debated—often virulently — the merits of black nationalism vs. interracial cooperation while also sharing an overlapping network of editors and contributors who moved among ideological camps. In the process these periodicals created and sustained a radical black public sphere. These editors and their periodicals grappled with the same challenges as their 21st century counterparts — state repression, lack of resources, and disagreements within their communities.