‘It’s sweltering for the moment in Zambia,’ writes Mwape Mumbi in his email. ‘This is typical of Octobers in Zambia. I’m heading for in the nearest water pond or pool. Writing and reading can be quiet a battle in such conditions, but I think I am winning the battle thus far’. Mwape Mumbi is a multi-talented cultural knowledge worker: a trainee nature and social independent documentary filmmaker, a freelance literature critic, art and culture promoter, creative multi-media producer, a researcher in African cultures by travel and free-study. He also has a background in the financial services industry – banking and stock broking. Already widely travelled within Zambia, Southern and East Africa, the US and Europe, he aspires through project “Separate Traveller” – his in-progress cultural documentary film – to highlight the mediation and alternatives proffered by nature and the aesthetics for personal, communal, traditional, cultural material and knowledge production and social transformation, an appreciation of achievements in pre-colonial sub-Saharan Africa in giving a rooted base and judicious illumination to contemporary societal pursuits, as inspired by temperate endogenous thought. (more…)
