What I am Reading Now…
Banji Chona
June 2023

To find myself fluttering and floating betwixt pages tinged brown from graceful aging or stained terracotta from remnants of ochre resting in the swirls of my fingertips. To find resonance in voices of the present and the past. To heed echoes of understanding and questions posed yet unanswered. To chart the journey of ancestral foundations and map the future of seeds yet to push through the tilth and turn towards the sun. 

To be drawn in and kept warm by a literary blanket woven together using the fibres of Radical Reimagination. Zambian histories and Zambian pasts told through the unwavering words (or hums) of a six legged omniscient narrator. [1] To learn that “freedom is no fear” in a mere minute of raw vulnerability. [6] To be coddled by the demystification of our ancestors and to unlearn the cold rationality and ‘order’ of occidental education. To hear the affirmation of the existence of foremothers and fathers as “benevolent, guiding spirits that we are and can constantly be in touch with” [7] To know my great grandfather, through speech and text and not touch, to be a man of great wisdom and courage. A man who gave his life to the people he was sworn to lead. Flesh serrated by canines and carnassials. [2] 

To hear trumpets and whistles mimicking the sounds of a ‘train that comes from Zambia and Zimbabwe.. from Angola and Mozambique…from Lesotho, from Botswana, from Swaziland.. from all the hinterlands of Southern and Central Africa. A train that carries young and old, African men who are conscripted to work on contract in the gold and mineral mines of Johannesburg and its surrounding metropolis, sixteen hours or more a day for almost no pay’. [10]

To feel prickles surge through my spine, ushered in and upwards by the sound of Revolution contained in dusty basements and immortalised on chlorine and ethylene. To see a rise and fall, bleak and electric in its composition. A generation grounding and transcending alike, in the blend of the homegrown and the imported. [9] 

Inquisition and curiosity often guide the material I choose to mull over but instinct is really what draws me towards the books, the videos, the music, the people, the feelings. Many of the books on the reading list, sounds and clips on the watching and listening list, I came across by what I believe to be divine guidance. We cannot seek that we do not already know. 

As someone in (re)search of keys to a door of understanding myself and the collective, there’s a thirst to learn through the retracing of steps and revival of existences that came before mine (yours, ours). This being said, I’ve come to find myself circling around the vortex-like gap in stories for us, by us. [11] Power structures embedded within asymmetrical systems of oppression have meant our narratives and histories have been bludgeoned and blurred by those who shaped and decided the trajectory of the archive. I see this beginning to slow and fizzle. 

There is and always has been a swirl of movements of thought and action across the African continent in which there is a burning desire for the purposeful reclamation of the self and the collective. A future in which Black Consciousness, as written by Bantu Steve Biko, is the liberation of the minds of Black People through an inward looking process which seeks to regain and rebuild the pride stripped off our backs by the oppressive whip. It is the reconstitution of rectification of our histories and our pasts. The rewiring of the engine of a vehicle bound for a future in which Black People, in the realest sense, do not consider themselves appendages or products of white society but rather custodians of our own realities.[5] I find grounding in that.