Founder and curator of African Mobilities, Mpho Matsipa, grew up in apartheid South Africa. Lately, she’s been thinking about colonial urban histories and the relationship between blackness, landscapes and the environment: ‘There is a lot that still can and needs to be said about spatial representation, racialized dispossession and imagination on the African continent.’
First Draft is our interview column, featuring authors and other prominent figures on books, reading, and writing.
Our questions are italicized.
What books or kinds of books did you read growing up?
Growing up, my parents signed me up to a children’s reading club and I had books delivered to our home in Gauteng, South Africa’s Katlehong township in the mid-80s. Considering how politicized access to quality education for Black children was during the apartheid era, the reading club felt like a really special club, with packages that arrived specifically addressed to me. The books were mostly fairy tales or children’s stories about fantasy places. But as I grew older, my reading tastes changed—I oscillated between skimming my mom’s monthly medical journals and the associated grotesque medical images, my father’s book collection that consisted mostly of nineteenth- and twentieth-century Eastern European fiction, and my stepfather’s Penguin African writers series...