The New Daughters of Africa podcast, a project of InterKontinental, will be anchored by journalist, columnist, and award-winning novelist Panashe Chigumadzi.
InterKontinental, founded by Karla Kutzner and Stefanie Hirsbrunner, is not a new name to many who follow the African diaspora literary scene in Germany. Their most famous contribution to the culture has to be the African Book Festival which sees writers from across Africa and its diaspora making their way to Berlin to commune every since their first edition in 2018. They also have a book store that can be accessed physically as well as online.
The organisation’s newest initiative is the New Daughters of Africa podcast which focuses on Black female authors (including trans and non-binary writers), their works, perspectives, and literary characters. It is about art, the craft of writing, sources of inspiration, the created worlds, and characters, the political, social, cultural, historical, and universally human topics that are dealt with and renegotiated within the texts. The focus is put on topics such as concepts of femininity, gender (roles), feminism, and empowerment.
The series is moderated and curated by journalist, columnist, and novelist Panashe Chigumadzi. She won the K. Sello Duiker Memorial Literary Award 2016 for her debut novel Sweet Medicine (2015, Blackbird Books) and winner of the Ruth First Journalism Fellowship 2015. She is the founding editor of VANGUARD magazine, a platform for young Black women in South Africa, and was the curator of the first Abantu Book Festival in Soweto, South Africa in 2015. Panashe Chigumadzi was born in Zimbabwe, grew up in South Africa, and currently lives in the USA.
Each episode is around 60 minutes long and respectively features one of the daughters of Africa – from various geographical and linguistic backgrounds and generations. The first two episodes of the podcast are already available on popular podcast platforms like Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Deezer, et al. The two already available are Margaret Busby, editor of the (New) Daughters of Africa, and Angolan-Portuguese literary scholar, novelist, and essayist Djaimilia Pereira de Almeida.
