Preface

At 44 Stanley, a chic complex of boutique stores, swank offices, and chill restaurants, in downtown Johannesburg, there is a meeting place called the Library of Things We Forgot to Remember.This unique cultural space was created in 2017 by Kudzanai Chiurai, a Zimbabwean mixed-media artist, as an interactive audio-visual archive of materials (vinyl records, posters, pamphlets, and so on) drawn from various collections and representing sonic and visual histories of African liberation.Indeed, the library itself, Chiurai says, is conceived as a "form of liberated zone." 1 In early October 2024, while I was a guest, courtesy of Victoria Collis-Buthelezi, of the Johannesburg Institute for Advanced Studies of the University of Johannesburg, I was invited by the young scholar-activists Nombuso Mathibela and Thabang Manyike to participate in a conversation around my work, including the work of Small Axe.The conversation took place in the Library of Things We Forgot to Remember.Thabang and Nombuso are part of an initiative called Black Intellectual Praxes, an interdisciplinary collective of Black intellectuals and artists founded in 2023, and which is in the process of launching a journal called Black Praxis, committed to innovative, critical rethinking about the settler-colonial and apartheid past and the postapartheid present.For them, there are dimensions of the past struggle to create a liberated future that the present has not merely (passively) forgotten but (actively) forgotten to remember.