SELECTED WRITING
2023 ZAM Nelson Mandela Lecture: Nixolisa Ngani? (With what are you apologising?) (Amsterdam International Theatre, February 2023)
Co-authored with Cornel West - Black Spirit, Black Struggle: When Tutu reconciled James Cones’ Black theology and John Mbiti’s African theology (Boston Review December 2022)
Can white South Africa live up to Ubuntu, the African philosophy Tutu globalised? (The Guardian December 2021)
Sankofa Dialectics and the Afterlives of Makere (Los Angeles Review of Books December 2021)
Ilizwe Lifile! The Cry of Black Worldlessness (Africa is a Country October 2021)
Our Debt to Charlotte Maxeke: Political black motherhood and the radical women-centered “Ethiopian” vision of black independence (Sunday Times April 2021)
Hearing the Silence (from Surfacing: On being Black and feminist in South Africa) (Johannesburg Review of Books April 2021)
Who is Afraid of Race? On Isabel Wilkerson’s Caste, Apartheid Modernity and the Transatlantic Nadir (Boston Review March 2021)
In Zimbabwe, two political prisoners are a symbol of a repressive state (Washington Post August 2020)
BBC Radio: "The Animals and the Linguists: A new poetics of relation" (January 2020)
TEDxEuston: “Hearing the silence” (November 2019)
Voices as Powerful as Guns: Dorothy Masuka’s (w)ri(o)ting woman-centred pan-Africanism (Johannesburg Review of Books May 2019)
Why I’m no longer talking to Nigerians about race: On writers, empathy and (black) solidarity politics (Africa is a Country April 2019)
You can’t eat beauty ( New York Review of Books February 2019)
After Protests, a bloody crackdown in Zimbabwe (New York Times January 2019)
Old Zimbabwe is the new Zimbabwe (New York Times August 2018)
[RADIO] "The New Face of Zimbabwe" (BBC Cultural Frontline August 2018)
Zimbabwe's enduring fear of women independent of male control (New York Times July 2018)
A lifetime in a photograph (Literary Hub July 2018)
Five Books on Zimbabwean History (The Guardian July 2018)
Whatever's happening to interracial love? (New York Review of Books June 2018)
Murimi Mhunhu: The pain and patriarchy of Zimbabwe’s land reform (Chimurenga April 2018)
BBC Radio 4: "Shosholoza": The train that keeps moving (Letters from South Africa) (December 2017)
Soap and South Africa's 'Fatal Intimacy’ ( New York Review of Books November 2017)
History Through the Body: Rights of Desire, rights of conquest in JM Coetzee's Disgrace (Johannesburg Review of Books October 2017)
Giving voice to South Africa's enslaved (City Press September 2017)
Lauretta Ngcobo's black womanhood (City Press April 2017)
Behind the Comparison of Zuma’s South Africa and Mugabe’s Zimbabwe (New York Times April 2017)
Why is South Africa still anti-black, so many years after apartheid? (The Guardian March 2017)
“Ain’t I A Woman?” On the irony of trans-exclusion by black and African feminists (Afropunk March 2017)
Rereading Toni Morrison (City Press February 2017)
Peter Abrahams - A life of telling freedom (City Press January 2017)
The Stunning Literariness of Solange Knowles (For Harriette November 2016)
White Schools vs Black Hair in post-apartheid South Africa (New York Times October 2016)
Moving beyond white femininity: Black hair and identity (City Press October 2016)
Can I live? Tupac and Mandoza on black life (City Press September 2016)
Zimbabwe needs a pro-black, pro-land alternative to ZANU-PF (City Press July 2016)
Private White Death, Public Black Death? (City Press July 2016)
Small Deaths (Transition December 2015) [FICTION]