Video: Black Futures

What Black futures do you envision?

In October 2021, we hosted a panel discussion, in partnership with the Atlantic Institute, to launch Moya.

Focused on Black futures, the event featured two contributors to the first issue—Johannesburg-based Atlantic Fellow for Racial Equity Alex Fitzgerald, and Jamaican-American writer Alistair Scott—alongside London-based cultural commentator Jason Okundaye, and Nairobi’s Saida Ali, an activist and Atlantic Fellow for Social and Economic Equity. The discussion kicked off with this question from Saida, our facilitator: What Black futures do you envision?

Click on the video above to watch a recording of the event.

More from Moya

Art

Entrance to the Garden (2021)Entrance to the Garden (2021)

Using a mixture of mylar, ink, pigment, and glitter, M. Florine creates depictions of voluptuous bodies that appear weightless-floating, as if transcending some higher plane.

By M. Florine Démosthène

United States of America

Feature

Cosmopolitan Africans, Before ColonialismCosmopolitan Africans, Before Colonialism

Have African relations with the wider (often whiter) world always been marked by subordination? Sebabatso C. Manoeli-Lesame and Christopher L. Brown uncover unexpected episodes in Africa’s past, prior to colonialism, in which African elites related with the world as cosmopolitans. They argue that histories of un-colonial power relations have the potential to unlock new decolonial ways of imagining the future.

By Christopher L. Brown and Sebabatso C. Manoeli-Lesame

Issue 04

Spotlight

Our fourth issue draws attention to the ways in which race – specifically Blackness – is chartered and codified across different geospatial terrains. In our lead feature, writer Lindokuhle Nkosi draws on Zora Neale Hurston’s famous 1928 essay “How It Feels to Be Colored Me” to reflect on the Season 2 finale of our podcast Race Beyond Borders. Her essay brings into sharp focus the many ways geography impacts the experience of Blackness. Musicologist Willemien Froneman from the Africa Open Institute at Stellenbosch University introduces us to Refentse Morake, South Africa's first Black boeremusiek icon, to invite a deeper, more critical, understanding of musical interracialism. Specifically, Froneman argues that while music is often portrayed as a great unifier, in fact, an examination and deconstruction of the patterns of power underlying its cultural production yields a different reality.