New Daughters of Africa - The Podcast

Our latest project is a homage to the ground-breaking anthologies "Daughters of Africa" and New Daughters of Africa" edited by Margaret Busby, containing essays, short prose, poetry and memoires each containing more than 200 female authors from Africa and its global diaspora. The podcast series focuses on Black female authors and their work, perspectives and sources of inspiration. The focus is on political and social topics such as gender roles, feminism and empowerment and how they are renegotiated within literature.

The series is curated and hosted by Panashe Chigumadzi, a journalist, columnist and author born in Zimbabwe who grew up in South Africa. Her debut novel Sweet Medicine and her Essay Theses Bones Will Rise Again were critically acclaimed. She is the founding editor of VANGUARD magazine, a platform for young Black women in South Africa and was the curator of the first Soweto Abantu Book Festival in 2015. Currently, Panashe is a doctoral student at Harvard University.

In the first episode Panashe kicks off with editor Margaret Busby herself. They talk about her background, her visions and the difficulties she faces in publishing as the first Black woman to found a publishing company in the UK. In the second episode, Panashe interviews Carolyn Cooper, who has introduced the study of Jamaican Dancehall culture and lyrics to academia. She is the author of "Noises in the Blood" and "Sound Clash". An inspiring conversation on Black womanhood, Dancehall culture and the ties between Black communities on both sides of the Atlantic.

In the third episode, the focus is on the Angolan-Portuguese literary scholar, novelist and essaiyst Djaimilia Pereira de Almeida. She is the author of ten books, among them Esse Cabelo that has been translated into English and published as That Hair in the US in 2018. Listen in for a lusophone perspective on Black womanhood, the craft of writing, as well as the relationship between writing and freedom. In the last episode, Panashe explores the gaps that historiography has left with Black women's histories through fiction with Ghanaian-born, Senegal-based writer Ayesha Harruna Attah. She is the author of the novels "The Harmattan Rain", "Saturday's Shadows", "The Hundred Wells of Salaga", "The Deep Blue Between" and "Zainab Takes New York".

Listen to all episodes here!