For a New Humanity: A Conversation … in Two Acts Interview with Makhosazana Xaba

This interview with Makhosazana Xaba, renowned South African feminist poet and writer, centers on Izimpabanga Zomhlaba (2024), Xaba’s isiZulu translation of Frantz Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth (1961). Excerpted from a longer conversation, Act 1 of the interview dwells on the practice and politics of translanguaging and the relationship between peace, freedom, and translation among African vernacular languages. The incomplete nature of freedom and the persistence of structural, social, and political violence in postcolonial, postapartheid, contemporary South Africa are recurrent themes in Act 2 of the interview. Fanon’s assertion that decolonization makes and requires “a new humanity” and the possibilities and limits of recuperating humility, tenderness, and solicitude for the sake of a new humanism—one that refuses to mimic Europe or America—take center stage as this conversation with Xaba concludes.