BlackHouse Kollective (BHK), in collaboration with Lit Culture Books and Black Ghost Books, calls the community to gather.
Frank Wilderson tells us that Blackness is not a cultural identity to be celebrated. It is a structural position. A relation of ontological death. The slave did not become human after emancipation. The world simply adjusted. Violence saturates Black life at every scale of abstraction.
Bra Perfect Hlongwane wrote from within that position. Jozi (2013). Sanity Prevail (2022). A voice that told the truth about the city, about madness, about us. Without flinching. Without permission. He did not write to be rescued into humanity. He wrote because the writing had to be done.
Wilderson asks us to refuse the fantasy of resolution. There is no restorative solution to the hatred that abounds. Only acknowledgment. Only the clarity that comes from naming the thing as it is.
So what does it mean to read a writer who has passed? If the work is an antagonism, not a conflict, then reading is not about healing. It is about staying present to the wound. It is about refusing the silence that would make the wound disappear.
We gather to read his work aloud. In community. The way writers, artists, activists and readers have always gathered. Around the work. Around each other.
Come. Bring your voice. Bring your silence if that is what you have. Bring a passage that moved you, or come to be moved for the first time. We are not here to solve anything. We are here to read. To listen. To sit with the work and with each other.
The circle is open. The work is waiting. And so are we.
Our Tribute Readers
We are honoured to be joined by writers, poets, critics and thinkers who carry the work forward in their own distinct registers.
Lesego Rampolokeng is a poet, novelist, playwright and performer whose work has been a defining force in South African letters since the 1980s. His collections include Horns for Hondo, Talking Rain, The Bavino Sermons, and A Half Century Thing. A dub poet in the tradition of the Black Consciousness movement, his work carries the influence of Frantz Fanon and the oral traditions of resistance. He has recorded albums with The Kalahari Surfers and collaborated widely across music, film and theatre.
Unathi Slasha is a writer and literary scholar from Despatch, Port Elizabeth, whose work reimagines and subverts Nguni folklore. He describes his project as exploring “The Unlanguaged World,” focusing on aspects of Black life that resist conventional literary language. He is the author of the novella Jah Hills and the chapbook Much with the Dead & Mum with the Dying, and won the Iskanchi Book Prize for his novel The Hollow Sound of Lightweight Bodies.Esinako Ndabeni is a writer and traditional healer. She is the co-author of Born to Kwaito: Reflections on the Kwaito Generation, a collection of essays that interrogates the meaning of the genre in post-apartheid South Africa. Her 2024 book Sacred Earth Philosophy is an experimental memoir and manifesto on ecospirituality from the perspective of African indigenous knowledge systems. She also launched Riotzine, a digital archive for the post-1994 generation.
Sfiso Atomza, born Sifiso Sibusiso Buthelezi, is a musician, writer and communications practitioner from Tsakane on the East Rand. He is a founding member of The Muffinz, the internationally renowned band whose socially conscious work blends Afro-soul, jazz and hip hop. As primary songwriter and guitarist, he has always understood music as a form of mass communication, a way to transmit meaning through words animated by sound. Beyond the band, he has released solo work including the EP Amulets & Tin-Foil Hats, and leads SekenHand, a collective rooted in the townships of Daveyton and Tsakane. His writing and music explore masculinity, tradition, the politics of freedom, and what it means to be human within this condition.
Marzia Milazzo is a writer, critic and Professor of English at the University of Johannesburg. Her award-winning book Colorblind Tools: Global Technologies of Racial Power examines how white people disavow racism across national boundaries to maintain power, tracing continuities in structural racism from colonial modernity to the present. Her work engages Black radical thought and Afropessimism, and she is currently writing a book on the racial politics of post-apartheid South African literature.
Percy Mabandu is a poet, artist-writer and journalist working at the intersection of art, jazz and political economy. He is the author of Yakhal’inkomo: Portrait of a Jazz Classic and his writing has appeared in the Mail & Guardian, Sunday Times, NewFrame and elsewhere. He is an art historian based in Tshwane.
This reading circle is the vision of Unathi Slasha, curated by Zandi Radebe, co-founder and director of BlackHouse Kollective Soweto. It will be facilitated by *Menzi Ka Gudu Maseko, a Black Power Pan Afrikanist, member of BlackHouse Kollective and founder of Green Ankh Works. It is hosted by Lit Culture Books at Breezeblock Cafe, 3pm on Sunday 20th September 2026.
Ends.🖤💚🩷✊🏿
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