Rofhiwa Maneta's Essay Collection is Here

Introducing: Your Father, The Hip Hop Head

‘Essays on Hip Hop and Fatherhood’

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“For reasons I’ll probably discuss in another book, I had started 2021 deflated. I was emotionally, financially and physically spent. I decided that, if people only read one published work of mine, I wanted it to make their head bop in the same manner that 90s hip-hop did during my adolescence. I wanted my work to be a site of contemplation and honesty, a mix of the highbrow and the everyday. “

On days I love Twitter, I really really love Twitter. Today is one of those days. A friend tweets about Rofhiwa Maneta: he’s dropped his essay collection. It feels like Phumlani is super close. I think he is. How dope does this look?

“ I did not set out to write a book about fatherhood. This book is a compilation of rejected articles that use rap as an entry point to discuss fatherhood, its joys, challenges and frustrations.”

— Rofhiwa Maneta

I love Rof’s writing. Wry and fucking intelligent, Rof’s writing is the opposite of pretentious and the embodiment of a damn good read.

Consider this:

“Those on the left of the political divide would ask: who created the conditions that made that day possible? Why do some of the country’s most dangerous townships also have the least number of policemen? Why hasn’t there been a more determined effort to root out the conditions that compel young men to hold knives to other people’s throats?

It’s a Ferris wheel of questions we have no easy answers for.

What I know for a fact is I have always been fiercely overprotective of you. Before you were born and more so after the day of the knife. This fear was inherited from your grandparents – who both worked as police officials for twenty plus years. Much like trauma, fear (I believe) is an epigenetic heirloom handed from father to son throughout the generations.

And what, exactly, were my parents so scared of? “

I’m already on my third essay in the collection, and I’m hooked. That’s why I’m writing about this on my website: you need to download Rof’s collection, and you need to tell everyone you know to do the same.

Download it here.