This article aims to listen, read and move with the South African musician Abdullah Ibrahim by focusing on various works in his corpus that see him weave together a sonic aesthetic and identify sound, space and time as fundamentally intertwined with and constituted by the experiences of racial violence and anti-blackness in a modern colonial world. Part of our critical pursuit is to highlight Abdullah Ibrahim as a theorist of black geography invested in the everyday sounds ringing through the ghettoes, (...) townships and reserves created as debased and inexhaustible reservoirs for cheap labour by colonial-apartheid regimes. We will also examine how some of Abdullah Ibrahim's music interrogates the status of the black subject through the modalities of a black Islamic sonic aesthetic. This is one of the factors which qualifies it as a layered site of mythical and experimental histories and enables us to identify his body of work as deeply connected with the articulations of loss, suffering, the cadence of change, and hope. (shrink)

Philosophy and the social sciences, at least in modern times, are largely a by-product of the West – Europe and the Americas. This is to say that the West has a monopoly over these disciplines. This may be largely attributed to the colonial conquest of many territories by European powers and the resultant subjugation of the peoples concerned. Africans, by and large, are victims of such atrocities on the part of the West. Hence the question of an “African philosophy” arises, (...) or gains momentum, in the (post) colonial era, or at independence. This is because the impulse to philosophise is inextricably linked to the impulse to gain freedom among the bonded. This paper attempts to show how the present subject, Archie Mafeje, dealt with the question of whether or not there exists an “African philosophy”. In responding to the question, it will also be shown what philosophy really is (indeed, must have to be) and occasion will be had to remark as to its distinctive practices within the African context. This is to be understood as a broader philosophy of liberation which liberates philosophy from the received Euro-American contours and consequently liberates the colonised and oppressed, the African in particular, with its engagement with the (post) colonial, neo-colonial condition and remedies for the (dis)order thereof. (shrink)

The idea for this article was developed in ecumenical discussion regarding the worrisome developments in some neo-Pentecostal ministries where stories of snake-eating, petrol-drinking, false prophecies and so on were being alleged. A burning question during the discussion was: what is it with the hermeneutic of experience that makes it possible for such stories to arise? Furthermore, how can this situation be remedied? The researchers set to answer this question by conducting a literature study on the subject of hermeneutics of African (...) Indigenous Churches, neo-Pentecostalism and Mission Pentecostalism. The inclusion of AICs and Mission Pentecostalism follows the scholarly consensus led by Allan Anderson in which all three together constitute African Pentecostalism. This article offers a critical reflection on the corrosive role of fundamentalist-inspired exclusivism, judgementalism and pride, which feed ignorance of the basic oneness of African Pentecostal Christianity. It concludes that abuse abounds in the divisions and maintenance of the above-mentioned fundamentalist attitudes and raises the necessity of creating awareness of belonging to one community. This community’s historical experience of the activity of the Spirit and Scripture may serve as critical input into its hermeneutic, hopefully lessening if not eradicating abuse. (shrink)