An InterActive Africa Day Commemoration

Annual Africa Day celebrations globally on the 25th May are, amongst other goals, intended to affirm African unity in diversity.

Badilisha Live’s Poetry Beyond Boarders is an invitation to reflect with our eyes, ears and minds on this notion of celebrating Africa as common ground literally and figuratively.

In South Africa who is the “other”? What real or perceived boundaries define insiders and outsiders? Are we not all the “other” when we move away from home, the known, our comfort zones … into the new territories where we could also be viewed as immigrant, alien, visitor, foreigner?

Audiences are invited to engage with poetry created in response to these questions at the Cape Town City Library, from 12h30on Africa Day, Tuesday 25th May 2010. The entire performance will be broadcast over the PA system, performed in various spaces and captured on the page.

Africa Day will feature both the Badilisha LIVE 2010 guest poets along with local poets who participated in the X-Cavate masterclass, held on the 19th to 24th May. They will lead us on a poetic journey through the Library, navigating with their words and symbolically shifting, distorting and exposing the fragility and humour of our stereotypes – about ourselves and each other. We will also showcase Email to the Ancestor’s, a multi-media poetry collaboration between Cape Tow’s own composer-musician extraordinaire, Hilton Schilder and Red Eye events curator and writer Suzy Bell.

In collaboration with the Badilisha Poetry X-Change, Chimurenga Magazine, will present their Chronicles project which aims to reflect and stimulate discussion on the two-year span since the eruptions of xenophobic violence in South Africa in May 2008. The Chimurenga Chronicles project will be launched in May 2011.