Staffrider was a South African literary magazine that ran in 37 numbers from 1978 to 1993, published by Raven Press, Johannesburg. The magazine has been digitised and made freely available by Digital Innovation South Africa at the University of Kwa-Zulu Natal (see the full collection here)
The ALMEDA project is cataloguing each individual literary contribution to Staffrider. By making individual contributions visible and searchable in our metadata, we hope to give a better representation of the hundreds of excellent poets, short story writers, dramatists and novelists who were contributing to the magazine during these crucial 25 years of apartheid South Africa. The full dataset is available on request.
By Max van Loenen and Malin Runefelt During the spring of 2024, we collected metadata on African literary magazines published during the decolonization period of the 60s and 70s. ALMEDA creates data on and then links these ephemeral works. An important aspect of the collection process has been linking authors…
ALMEDA was officially launched with a meeting of all team members and some of the members of our distinguished advisory board. We were also joined by Tinashe Mushakavanhu, who presented a lecture titled ‘Metareading a Country’, in which he spoke about the value of “rogue archival” methods, which create “interference”…
The South African magazine, Zonk! African People’s Pictorial, ran from August 1949 until June 1964, during which time it published 298 literary works, predominantly short stories and photo plays. The rise of the popularity of the photo play in the 1960s is evident in Zonk!, which began publishings 23-page photo…
Edi Ganzel was a prolific writer of serialised novels in late 1960s and early 1970s Tanzania. Ursula Oberst has been using his work in Kenyan magazine Taifa Weekly to model serialised fiction in our metadata ontology. Give her feedback and see her current modelling on our Wikidata project site. Image:…