Crossroads

Koni Benson is a historian, organizer, and educator. She is a lecturer in the Department of History at the University of the Western Cape in Cape Town, South Africa, where she is committed to creative approaches to history that link art, activism, and African history in her work with various student, activist, and cultural collectives in southern Africa.

Robin D.G. Kelley is an American historian and academic, who is the Gary B. Nash Professor of American History at UCLA. During the academic year 2009–10, Kelley held the Harmsworth Chair of American History at Oxford University, the first African American historian to do so since the chair was established in 1922. He was awarded the Guggenheim Fellowship in 2014. Author of Freedom Dreams: The Black Radical Imagination; Hammer and Hoe: Alabama Communists During the Great Depression; Race Rebels: Culture, Politics, and the Black Working Class; Imagining Home: Class, Culture, and Nationalism in the African Diaspora; Into the Fire: African Americans Since 1970; Yo’ Mama’s DisFunktional!: Fighting the Culture Wars in Urban America; Three Strikes: The Fighting Spirit of Labor’s Last Century; and Thelonious Monk: The Life and Times of an American Original.

André Trantraal is a writer, illustrator, and translator from Bishop Lavis, Cape Town. He is the writer of the comic books Coloureds and Stormkaap. His work has been exhibited in Amsterdam, Hamburg, and Cape Town and his political cartoons have appeared in a range of South African newspapers.

Nathan Trantraal is a poet, cartoonist, translator, playwright, screenwriter, short story author, and columnist. He was awarded the Ingrid Jonker Prize for poetry, and his work has been exhibited in Cape Town, Munich, and Amsterdam. His comics have been published in various South African newspapers. He is currently a lecturer at Rhodes University at the School of Languages, where he specializes in Kaapse Afrikaans and the graphic novel.

Ashley E. Marais is a comic book artist, designer, and painter. With the Trantraal Brothers, he was coauthor and illustrator on the graphic novel Stormkaap and the comic book Coloureds, both of which are in the Cape Afrikaans language. Also with the Trantraal Brothers, he is joint illustrator of Safety, Justice & People’s Power, a book about the Khayelitsha Commission, written by Richard Conyngham.”