STAFFRIDER, Tribute Edition, September 2026, Msaki Calls The Tune

75pp., 4to., b/w & colour illus., paperback, Staffrider, Johannesburg, 2026

ISBN: 9770258721002

This tribute edition of Staffrider revives the historic anti-apartheid literary and arts publication launched in Johannesburg in 1978, two years after the June 16 uprising, at a time when South Africa’s political resistance was growing but being forced underground. The magazine created space for community-based writers, artists, photographers and cultural workers to carry the voices, images and arguments of that moment into public life.

In this issue, new and established voices honour those who steered Staffrider across its history: the Ravan Press founders who first risked publishing it, Mike Kirkwood as founding editor, and those who carried it forward as editors and co-ordinators over the years, among them Mothobi Mutloatse, Mafika Pascal Gwala, Chris van Wyk, Ivan Vladislavic and Andries Walter Oliphant, as well as the team at Cosaw Publishers who kept it going until 1993.

Journalist and writer Fred Khumalo is the author of the novels The Longest March, Seven Steps to Heaven, Bitches' Brew, Two Tons O' Fun and Dancing the Death Drill (winner of a Humanities and Social Sciences Award); two collections of short stories, Talk of the Town (winner of the 2020 Nadine Gordimer Short Story Award) and A Coat of Many Colours; and a memoir, Touch My Blood.