African lives have already greatly improved over the past decade. The next...
The Badilisha Poetry X-Change is the largest online archive of African poetry, accessible via mobile phone, in the world. It was originally conceived as an annual poetry festival overseen by the Africa Centre, a pan-African organization based in Cape Town in 2008. Over the following years it grew to become a powerful mouthpiece for showcasing African wordsmiths. And by 2012, the institution decided to move online in an effort to break down geographical borders and open up their diverse anthology to a wider audience in Africa.
To date, the project has collected almost 400 African poets from 31 countries in Africa and across the diaspora, in 14 different languages. Since the relaunch, users are able to navigate the site through a myriad of options including by theme, poet, country, language, emotion or by their Top 10 list, a popular feature curated by a guest poet each month. And it seems their following has embraced the organization's decision to go forward on mobile with an average of 3,000 visitors to the site monthly.