Side Effects Archives

6Jan

By Onai MushavaNo Comments

Sports Science

Juju, Ganga and Mafia at Dynamos

Zimbabwe’s global avatar has maxed out on grand narratives and pop consumables but occasionally underestimated the place of biography as a long night of the soul. Dynamos Football Club legend Memory Mucherahowa’s new book, “Soul of Seven Million Dreams”, refreshingly does away with airbrushing strokes and puts the health of a national institution up for public scrutiny. A long-serving captain at the country’s most successful football club, Mucherahowa identifies, in the course of his own life story, some of the millstones holding back Zimbabwe’s version of the beautiful game. Even at the high point of its glory days, during the 1998 CAF championship campaign, Dynamos reliably unwound administrative disasters under a management for whom professional basics were stacks of Mandarin. Muche...

Kendrick Lamar – Rhyming at Nobel’s Door?

Kendrick Lamar, the most lethal warhead in rap’s disruptive echo chamber, is ever blazing new territory. He has ego-tripped on Uncle Sam’s toes, emerged as the Pope in a genre not known for its Bible-thumbing, outfoxed Rupert Murdoch’s talking heads and jazzed up black self-love. If hip-hop is the CNN of the black community as Public Enemy hardcore rapper Chuck D puts it, then Kendrick is its Fareed Zakaria, the heavy-duty intellect in the room. The philosopher-king of hip-hop is currently the world’s highest rated musician, according to Metacritic, a website aggregating critical reception across genres. As if the musical kingdom is not enough, 30-year old Kung Fu Kenny’s unsettling jeremiads are coming up for consideration among the generation’s most important literature. Kendrick ha...

Reply to ‘The Case for Colonialism’

I am the savage you want to groom for the Queen’s kitchen, the eunuch in whose presence madams, Helen Zille and Marie Le Pen, can safely undress. I am the collateral damage underfoot grand crusades of civilisation, the scum of the Dark Continent who got away when you shovelled my people into a mass grave for imagining they were full-blooded humans like you. I picked up crumbs of your language when I was a serf on Rhodes’s farm, though my Bantu accent rings discordantly against it, and my dark skin is a synonym for everything wrong with the world. I may be only an ape in a work suit, but I hear just fine when polite society talks about me. The budding humanity in me cringes and my fur stands on end when I see blades sharpened for me in broad daylight. I am not a broiler that innocently ...