PODCAST SERIES

CONVERSATIONS WITH NEIGHBOURS

Conversations with Neighbours is an eight-part podcast series curated by Huda Tayob and Bongani Kona, with production support and editing from Andri Burnett, design work by Graeme ‘Boeta Gee’ Arendse, and design and social media curation by Zakiyyah Haffejee. These podcasts are an archive of conversations, stories, histories and memories of moving, crossing, and living in African cities across geographical and physical borders. 

EPISODE 1
THE ARCHIVE IS A PORTAL FOR REIMAGINATION

In this episode Huda Tayob speaks to Jumoke Sanwo (Nigeria) and Ali Al-Adawy (Egypt) on questions of archives, untranslatability, and opacity. Jumoke Sanwo discusses the importance of confronting history and the colonial baggage of dispossession and points to ways of engaging constructively with the ‘now’ by thinking with and through performance and the body-as-archive. Ali al-Adawy talks to his interest in the relationship between archives, cinema, and contemporary art practices. He suggests that we might think of the archive as an imaginary space of possibility, drawing on the work of Egyptian artist Hassan Khan and with reference to the Egyptian rapper Wegz.

CONTRIBUTORS:
Jumoke Sanwo (Nigeria) is a storyteller, cultural interlocutor, and the creative director of Revolving Art Incubator.

Ali Hussein al-Adawy (Egypt) is a curator, researcher, editor, writer and critic of moving images, urban artistic practices, and cultural history

EPISODE 2
ART IN TIMES OF CRISIS

In this episode Bongani Kona speaks to Princess Zinzi Mhlongo (South Africa), Eric ‘1 Key’ Ngangare (Rwanda) and Omnia Abbas Shawkat (Sudan) about producing art in troubled times. The conversation moves between the DRC, Rwanda, Sudan, and South Africa, raising the difficulties of war and its remnants, and the experience of coming of age in a time of great turmoil. It points to the importance of telling stories that contest history and statehood, discusses forms of silence and organised forgetting , and questions what it means to produce work that can contend with the violence of our times.

CONTRIBUTORS:
Princess Zinzi Mhlongo (South Africa) is a theatre director and co-founder of The Plat4orm, which for many years provided an alternative space for artists in the theatre industry to develop new uncensored work.

Eric ‘1 Key’ Ngangare (Rwanda) is an independent poet, spoken word artist, emcee, performer, actor, and blogger.

Omnia Abbas Shawkat (Sudan) is co-founder of Andariya, a bilingual digital multimedia cultural platform and cross-cultural enterprise.

EPISODE 3
WHAT PERSONAL AND POLITICAL HISTORIES EMERGE VIA INFRASTRUCTURES. OF MOBILITY?

In this episode Egyptian architect and researcher, Menna Agha, gives voice to the Nubian bonds of kinship that survive the crossing of vast territories between Sudan and Egypt, a practice which rejects borders, ruptures and distances; Congolese novelist, Fiston Mwanza Mujila, reads to us from his novel Tram 83, “on trains that have lost all sense of time”; South African writer, Hedley Twidle, shares his journey of traversing the N2 on foot, South Africa’s longest highway; and Ghanaian researcher, Kuukuwa Manful, talks to us of the absences in architectural histories of the African continent.

CONTRIBUTORS:
Menna Agha (Egypt) is an Egyptian Nubian architect and researcher.

Fiston Mwanza Mujila (Democratic Republic of Congo) is the author of the novel Tram 83 (2014).

Hedley Twidle (South Africa) is a writer, teacher and researcher based at the University of Cape Town.

Kuukuwa Manful (Ghana) is an architect and Doctoral Researcher at SOAS University of London examining African nation-building through the architecture of education.

EPISODE 4
WHAT REMAINS OF THE POLITICAL AND CULTURAL IDEAS THAT IMAGINED THE AFRICAN CONTINENT AS THE ‘UTOPIA OF A BORDERLESS WORLD’?

In this episode Ghanaian architect and scholar, Kuukuwa Manful, reflects on the place of minor histories in deepening our understanding of Pan-Africanism; Nigerian writer, Emmanuel Iduma, shares an excerpt from A Stranger’s Pose (2018), and his search of an atlas of a borderless world; and Egyptian sociologist, Sara Salem, unravels the workings of coloniality and capital from the vantage point of the sky in a reading of her essay Fractured Flights (2020).

CONTRIBUTORS:
Kuukuwa Manful (Ghana) is an architect and Doctoral Researcher at SOAS University of London examining African nation-building through the architecture of education.

Emmanuel Iduma (Nigeria) is the author of A Stranger’s Pose (2018), a travel book, and The Sound of Things to Come (2016), a novel.

Sara Salem (Egypt) is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Sociology at the London School of Economics and Political Science and the author of Anticolonial Afterlives in Egypt: The Politics of Hegemony (2020).

EPISODE 5
HOW ARE LARGER HISTORIES OF NON-ALIGNMENT, ANTI-COLONIAL REVOLT AND PAN-AFRICANISM INSCRIBED INTO THE LANDSCAPE?

In this episode Sudanese writer, Jamal Mahjoub reads to us from “Rumble in the Nile”, which chronicles the early years of promise heralded by Jaafar Nimeiry’s ascent to power in Sudan in 1969; And Egyptian documentary filmmaker, Jihan el-Tahri, questions why we date African independence to Ghana in 1957 as opposed to the Egyptian revolution of 1952.

CONTRIBUTORS:
Jihan el-Tahri (Egypt) is a writer, director and producer of documentary films.

Jamal Mahjoub (UK/Sudan) is the author of several novels and the memoir, A Line in the River: Khartoum, City of Memory (2018).

EPISODE 6
WHAT DO LINES OF FLIGHT REVEAL OF OUR SHARED PLANETARY FUTURES?

In this episode Zimbabwean architectural designer and researcher, Thandi Loewenson, digs through filmic and sonic archives and the speculative histories of ‘Black flight’; South African architect and scholar, Ilze Wolff, travels from Cape Town to Nagasaki in search of health, care and Black peace on earth; and composer Victor Gama, speaks to us about tracing the line from Thomas More’s Utopia to apartheid South Africa’s nuclear programme in the unfinished work of Angolan anthropologist, Augusto Zita.

CONTRIBUTORS: Thandi Loewenson (Zimbabwe) is an architectural designer/researcher.

Ilze Wolff (South Africa) is an architect, a scholar, and a writer.

Victor Gama (Angola) is a composer and designer of contemporary musical instruments.

EPISODE 7
HOW MIGHT THE GLOBAL SWAHILI WORLDS REFRAME OUR THINKING OF CONNECTIONS ACCROSS WATERS?

In this episode, Kenyan novelist, Yvonne Adhiambo Owuor, discusses the deep histories of the Swahili seas and the research that led to her novel Dragonfly Sea (2019); Zanzibari architectural student, Halima Ali, reads the work of Haji Gora Haji, a Zanzibari poet and seafarer who could navigate from Zanzibar to Yemen through the recitation of poem-maps; and visual artist Meghna Singh, draws us into the invisible world of mobile populations immersed in new forms of economic servitude at sea at the docks in Cape Town.

CONTRIBUTORS:
Yvonne Adhiambo Owuor (Kenya) is the author of the novels Dust (2013) and The Dragonfly Sea (2019).

Halima Ali (Tanzania) is a Masters student at the Architectural Association in London.

Meghna Singh (India) is a visual artist and researcher with a PhD in visual anthropology from the University of Cape Town.

EPISODE 8
HOW MIGHT WE TRACE THE AFTERLIVES OF THE TRANS-SAHARAN TRADE ROUTES OF THE 8TH CENTURY?

In this final episode, Moroccan writer and translator, Omar Berrada, excavates the deep histories of his once enslaved great, great grandmother; Nigerian scholar, Moshood Mahmood Jimba, retraces the journey from Ilorin to Timbuktu that inspired him to establish a manuscript archival research group in Nigeria; Moroccan musician Amino Belyamani, speaks to us of the healing purposes of Gnawa music in Morocco, and speculates on the deep relationship to Ewe music from Ghana. Omar Berrada extends special thanks to M'barek Bouhchichi, Hatim Belyamani, and NourbeSe Philip.

CONTRIBUTORS:
Omar Berrada (Morocco) is a writer, translator, curator, and the director of Dar al-Ma'mûn, a library and artists residency in Marrakech.

Moshood Mahmood Jimba (Nigeria) is a scholar and director of Centre for Ilorin Manuscript and Culture at Kwara State University, Nigeria.

Amino Belyamani (Morocco) is a founding member of AXIS TRIO and DAWN OF MIDI where he composes, performs, and records original music. He curates Moroccan Tapes, an archive of Moroccan music.