AfricaRise is not just four walls and a door. It is a lifestyle, committed to the values of authenticity, innovation and quality without compromise. We are Africans and we have a collective duty to rise.

The idea of dying and returning as stars haunts me, as I go through the pages of Billy Langa’s Tswalo. A one-hander comprising of a body of poems written very eloquently, revealing secrets and clues about who we were; who we are; where we come from; and who we are to become.

The world she created around herself was like the one she came from, one that affirmed womanhood and questioned societal dismissal of the feminine at every turn. She sustained that world with how she lives her life, even the women she surrounds herself with that I regard as aunts

In the mainstream studies there is an argument that no slaves were harvested from South Africa. This is from European tendencies of treating South Africa as if it were separate from the rest of the continent. In his article ‘Slavery, social incorporation and surplus extraction; the nature of free and unfree labour in South-East Africa’ (1981), the late historian Patrick Harries of the University of Basel, Switzerland, observed that, “it is commonly believed that in south- east Africa the Nguni had a natural aversion to both export and domestic forms of slavery”

It takes the funeral of a PAC or AZAPO cde or Sobukwe and Biko commemoration to remember that it is not yet Uhuru; that Azania is still occupied by settler colonialists and the Land has not been returned to its people.

The latter is undertaken, to hopefully record and reflect on the epistimicide I experienced, in my scholarly trajectory, as a ‘Black’ South African.

"The last king of the AmaBhaca people was Inkosi Madzikane ka Zulu. He died in the 19th century in what is now Mount Frere, next to the Drakensberg mountain range. The name "amabhaca" means refugees. They were the refugees from the Mfecane wars that had uprooted the nation from its original home in what is now KwaZulu-Natal.

In itself, there is nothing unsuitable with Black America collaborating with African artists to produce commercial products, as is the case with Beyonce’s Black is King, but we must be under no illusion that Black is King is still very much Beyonce’s.