Down River Road

12/03/2025

Braiding Sessions: Zine Making Workshop 💌
— Saturday, the 15th of March (this weekend), from 2:30 pm to 5 pm

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We are inviting you to remember a manifesto for memory that is striving on its way: guided by gentle Ras Mengesha na Mzee Tau, guided by hands — holding and withholding gentleness, the hands — we will take part in the drama of folding and unfolding who, what, where, why, why, when of... Karibuni, let us see.

There will be making, there will be food and drink (chakula, moyo), there will be picture taking and recording.

RSVP, thru the form in our bio
- as soon as you may,
as there is a limit of bodies, due to space and hands 🕑🕝

Fika salama

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The Braiding Sessions are supported by the British Council.

20/11/2024

Small small invitation, to listen in at 2 pm, on the 21st of November, ( https://calotropis.xyz ) 🪻

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Drr invites you, with and thru calotropis radio, to listen in on a choreography of intoxication; on the 21st of November, starting at 2 pm, a few friends will be gathering, attending to intoxication, a question of ruin, and some such invitation to the possibility of a future.

The sound of our gathering will be overheard at and in the Stuart Hall Library in London, in collaboration with ; we would like to invite you, too, wherever you are found to take part in this overhearing.

Our dream is that we will both be attentive and inattentive to the ears that will overhear us: the microphones will receive our chit-chat, our mango-eating, our coffee-sipping, this or that laughter, the possible shuffling if it rains, the silence after the reading, the pauses, the sounds of Umoja, the conversations in the program, the conversation out the program, and, and, and.

After, we will transition to 'the clearing' w/ and our dream will continue eternally.

02/01/2024

Four Poems: Dipe Jola

Survival We all need sadness to survive. the world swells like a birdsong. your gothic dress ruined. you feel upturned; an evacuated garden of butterflies sits in your throat. often sadness is a caged bird. one if not troubled is a safehouse. the world in its glowworm character with its teeth in a c...

02/01/2024

Houses of Stone: Tendai Machingaidze

Once upon a time, or rather as the Shona say, paivapo, there lived a mad king who was bewitched by the whispers of an even madder woman. He was a sickly king who by all accounts should have died fifty times over, but somehow he had managed to repeatedly cheat death and remain fixed on his throne. Th...

01/01/2024

More Things In Heaven And Earth: Barbara Wanjala

There are more things in heaven and Earth, Horatio, / Than are dreamt of in your philosophy. Hamlet, William Shakespeare On the otherwise nondescript day in June last year that I found myself in a mental health hospital, I was convinced that I was a spy. That was fairly tame, by my standards. On a p...

01/01/2024

New Pain Mirrors Old Pain: A Review of The Man Who Cuts Tattoos (Owisu); Wanjeri Gakuru

“Is this what it means to be with someone?” This is the question posed by Michelle, the lead protagonist in The Man Who Cuts Tattoos (Owisu) when we first meet her. Her angst-filled musing aptly summarizes the film, especially as she asks this of herself right before she holds her palm over a li...

31/12/2023

Fruitful Seas: Ally Abdallah Baharoon

Hawa yawned as she grabbed her red plastic cup. She opened the rusting metal tap and water gushed out. She went back to her room. Half her oranges were peeled and rested on a caramel metal tray beside the sky-blue chiffon dress on her bed. The floral pattern caught her eye in the same way it had las...

31/12/2023

Hamza Haji: A Little Lazy

So, who are you? She says with a crooked smile, A smile that doesn’t last, A smile that quickly turns into an anxious grin, Hamza, I say. WHO? She leans closer, I CAN’T HEAR YOU.   HAMZA, your grandson. She looks at my face for a minute, You are a liar; Hamza never had a beard, Hamza was not th...

30/12/2023

How We Remember: Ernest Ogunyemi

Ernest Ogunyemi reflects on loss and memory in this haunting short story.

30/12/2023

Billy Kahora and the Inhuman Untidiness of the Archive: Frankline Sunday

Billy Kahora examines how the gaps, biases, omissions and misperceptions woven into the construction of the archive dehumanizes the characters in the stories we tell about ourselves, trapping us in a cycle of angst and chaos.   In The Unconverted, Billy Kahora’s moving short story, a pastor strug...

29/12/2023

Life Begins At 40: Ray Mwihaki

Poppy is forty. The air outside is sultry. It has been like this since the Anene sold our breath to the Railman. We are no longer allowed to draw on fogged glass windows. Other kids can do it but we can’t. Mummy and Poppy did something bad when they were younger. “It’s Reeha and Mbwei who are ...

29/12/2023

The Rhumba that Follows You: M. K. Angwenyi

M. K. Angwenyi in this upset reality, your soft and now starless body that could once draw music from the sky with its silence is made an abyss – one that could only be filled by the largeness of your eyes. you, for whom the night flower bloomed without asking. in your wake, the scent of golden sa...