Date: Thursday 5 October 2023
Time: 6pm
Venue: The Commune
You are cordially invited to the launch of Zabalaza Republic by Sihle Ntuli.
Sihle Ntuli’s poems encompass numerous aspects of Black Alienation resulting from collisions with the white world, which despite the ‘zabalaza’ seemingly having been won in 1994, still remains the ruling environment. He dissects the gulf between the Black Psyche (both pre-and post-colonial) and Europe’s imposed culture.
On a more personal note, he also sets out the challenge to prove that he is indeed a Zulu man ‘’whilst never having held a knife to the neck of a lamb”, and to navigate the contradictions of his upbringing: ‘how deep the scars, years of tongue lashings from black mama discipline’’.
Author: Sihle Ntuli, a poet from Durban, South Africa, and a recipient of the 2023
Johannesburg Institute of Advanced Studies Writing Fellowship for Poetry. He is the current editor-in-chief of New Contrast Literary Journal.
Discussant: Maneo Mohale is a South African editor, feminist writer and poet. Their work has appeared in various publications, including Jalada, Prufrock, The Johannesburg Review of Books, The Mail & Guardian, and spectrum.za. They’ve served as a contributing editor for The New York Times and i-D, among others.