Items

• Stranger's Voice

  Hugo Young interviews Oswald Mtshali on his poetry collection, "Sounds of a Cowhide Drum," which sold over 16,000 copies. Young writes that Mtshali is "the poet of oppression--humorous, often bitter-sweet, rarely vengeful but still a unique chronicler of apartheid from the black underside of it."
• Relative Values

  "If he he turns out to be a Ben Okri. I'll be very sad. ben is my homeboy but I think he' lost the plot slightly."
• Into the melting pot

  "African art organizers have to negotiate a minefield of black intellectual objections."
• A plea for polyphony

  The introductory editor by this, the first book of the new series that seeks to cover the collected works of noted single authors of Afro-Carribean background, speaks unhelpfully of "black literature," a term whose ghost haunts the whole book.