Panashe Chigumadzi

You Can’t Eat Beauty

Carefully, Tsitsi made her first pleat, overlapping the material at the back of the Mother’s neck, bringing it forward to middle of her forehead, taking it back again, and fastening it tightly on the Mother’s head. The Mother beamed under her new crown. Its imposing height and weight fit her so well that she soon came to feel naked without it in public.

Whatever’s Happening to Interracial Love?

At Meghan and Harry’s wedding, Bishop Curry made sure that he invoked not only King, but the slave trade—in a room full of the chief beneficiaries and heirs of the architects of imperialism and slavery—to remind us that love without justice is not really love at all.

Soap and 'Fatal Intimacies'

When I think about those laboring black bodies in white homes, this “fatal intimacy” seems strange and contradictory: If black people are so repulsive that you require this apartheid, why have them in your homes?