WMI Plus At Home - Thandiswa Mazwai with Farima Kone Kito

WMI PLUS At Home Experiences are free of charge, but you must register to reserve your space. You will receive an order confirmation once your registration is complete that includes the link to the event. Only registered participants will receive email instructions on how to join the event via Zoom online. Bring your questions! The presentation will be followed by a Q&A session with attendees posting their questions electronically for live answers.

Thandiswa Mazwai is one of the most influential singers in South Africa. She began her career in 1996 with music groups Jack Knife and Bongo Maffin, one of the pioneering bands of the dance genre Kwaito, a musical and cultural movement that originated in Soweto in the late 1980s celebrating the new freedom of post-Apartheid South Africa. Thandiswa’s latest album released in May entitled Sankofa (a Ghanaian word meaning ‘to go back and fetch what has been left behind’) was recorded in Soweto, Dakar, and New York City and features samples of field recordings, notable speeches, and indigenous instruments, connecting the past, present and future of Africa and its diaspora.

Farima Kone Kito is a Burkinabe writer, researcher, and cultural producer, currently based in New York City. Her storytelling and producing work is primarily guided by her research on the process of identity reconstruction within a “post-colonial” West African context. Holding music and visual arts as focal points of exploration, she pays particular attention to African and Diasporic arts and histories. Farima is the founder of Petite Monsieur Studio, an organization dedicated to producing and propelling work concerned with the recognition and emergence of strong African and Diasporic creative economies.