Literatea is an interview series which brings together prominent and emerging voices in African writing, editing, publishing, translation, marketing, distribution, and retail to discuss the craft of bringing African storytelling to the continent and the rest of the world. From award-winning novelists and poets to literary agents and editors, from indie publishers and booksellers to prize juries—Literatea pours the first cup and stirs the conversation.
In this conversation about music and migration Kalaf Epalanga explores the sonic resonances and dissonances between movement, urban landscapes, and translation.
Kalaf Epalanga is a musician, writer, and member of the award-winning band Buraka Som Sistema. He has written columns for the newspaper O Público, GQ Magazine (Portugal), and Rede Angola. He currently writes for Quatro Cinco Um, a Brazilian magazine. He h Estórias de Amor para Meninos de Cor (Love Stories For Kids of Colour) and O Angolano que Comprou Lisboa (Por Metade do Preço)—(The Angolan who Bought Lisbon (at Half the Price). Kalaf’s debut novel Whites Can Dance Too was translated by Daniel Hahn and published by Faber in June 2023.
***
RÉMY NGAMIJE: I think the first time we “met” was in your Afrolit Sans Frontiers livestream on Instagram during the global COVID-mandated lockdowns in 2021. I remember Troy Onyago and I had been trolling people the whole time during their sessions and to avoid us you decided Central African Time was not up to your speed and started your livestream earlier. Towards the end of that session you decided to spin some dope lusophone music for those who had tuned in. “Bolo Ku Pudim” by Nelson Freitas still goes down to this day.
In hindsight, with your biography, of course it made sense that you would curate some music. But it—for me at least—set a wonderful and relaxed tone for the rest of that online festival started by Zukiswa Wanner in those desperate and lonely days of isolation. What prompted the inclusion of music in your session?
KALAF EPALANGA: Ha! You and Troy were absolute menaces during those sessions. I loved it, though. The chats were pure chaos, but it made everything feel less like a performance and more like we were just hanging out in someone’s living room—which, honestly, was exactly what we needed in those bizarre lockdown days.
I have always felt it is rude to arrive too early, just as it is annoying to be late. But handling GMT dynamics has never been my forte. And at that time, with my anxious lockdown brain already juggling three different time zones at once, time itself felt too slippery to hold onto. I am sorry if I stressed you out with my poor time management.
RN: Not at all. All of us were amused.
KE: The music came just as naturally. Maybe I was inspired by my DJ friends spinning on Instagram and decided to smuggle some of that energy into the literary space. But really, I have always been trying to connect two of my great loves: music and literature. My private mission has long been to prove that writers can dance too—pun very much intended.
RN: I see what you did there!
KE: When I moved to Europe, collecting music became a form of survival. I started with Angolan classics on vinyl, and those records saved me from going mad during the harsh winters. I felt I was losing memory, and music was the tether keeping me connected to my people back home. And to be serious for a moment: I am from the mixtape generation.
RN: The best generation—we are singlehandedly holding the world together.
KE: I can write essays on the importance of TDK, BASF, and Philips cassettes.
RN: You know the good stuff!
KE: I believed then—and still do—that a good mixtape begins with the quality of the cassette. That is what I miss most in this digital age: the physical effort of putting together a list of songs worth sharing with the tribe. That, for me, is a love language.
And yes, Nelson Freitas’s “Bolo Ku Pudim” is a banger; it is always on heavy rotation in my house. Whenever I get the chance to plug some of my PALOP favourites, I’ll never miss it.
Besides, if Zukiswa could create a space for African literature to breathe during the apocalypse, then the least I could do was provide a soundtrack for people to decompress. Some of us needed words, some of us needed to shake the moneymaker, and some of us needed both to feel human again.
RN: I think writers—all storytellers—have another artistic consciousness (painting, sculpture, textile design, and so many other disciplines) that lends shape, texture, and structure to their thoughts and, eventually, their craft. Music, I think, is one of the more common consciousness and, therefore, might be easier to combine with literature. But I think any other artistic discipline can be coupled to literature. I think it enriches the form in interesting ways.
KE: Agreed.
RN: Not only can writers dance, but writers do dance, man. For about nine years I ran the only full-time salsa dancing collective in Windhoek. I only stopped doing it about three years ago. In the intervening time there has been a hollowness in my life that I cannot explain. For a long time I felt as though dancing was something I did, but it is something that I am. And I am doing my best to get back to a space and time in which I can dance without it feeling like work. And I think dancing, in many ways, informs my writing. Because in the process of being a citizen of literature, I feel as though when I am writer I have been coupled with a reader and, depending on what it is that I am writing, I am the lead directing when and where we go and how we move, or, at other times, when I am the reader, someone else is leading and it is up to me whether I follow or not. And, yet, at gatherings like literary festivals, I am neither leading nor following, but just one dancer on the floor, moving to the rhythm.
KE: I know plenty of writers who do not dance—
RN: The shame of it all.
KE: —at least not with the kind of passion you just described. Some might sway slowly, others stay seated, clapping off beat. I have met so many writers who would rather intellectualise everything about it instead of feeling it.
But in the Global South—if we take that term in its broader, more cultural sense—there is a different expectation. In Luanda, Maputo, Bahia, or anywhere with a strong musical culture, it is nearly impossible to separate the text from the body. Writers dance, or they get mocked until they do—like any individual who dares to socialise in those settings. That is why at every festival I go to, I end up asking: “Where’s the dancing at?” Usually, someone points me to the bar, assuming I mean drinking. But that is not it. I am talking about the dance floor.
RN: I wonder, then, how music and dancing help to shape your writing or how they infuse your writing process.
KE: Music has always been central to my writing process. When I am listening to a song that really hits me, I am at my most free. Writing for me is an attempt to capture that spirit. I fail most of the time, but it is the kind of failure I happily pursue every time I pick up a pen or open my laptop.
I love social dancing as much as any Angolan, but I am also drawn to the wider spectrum of Black music—techno, jazz, and hip-hop. DJs taught me how to listen, how to read a city through sound. They expanded my world and my imagination.
One of my favorite songs is Cesária Évora’s “Angola” remix by Carl Craig. I had heard the song before, but I remember the night the Detroit techno legend played at Lux Club in Lisbon. I must have been nineteen and was starting to expand my music horizons from African music to everything else that intrigued me. So when he dropped the needle on the vinyl and the voice of the barefoot diva filled one of Europe’s most iconic dance floors, it felt like a revelation. It was the first time I had heard Cape Verdean Creole being celebrated on that scale. I was sober, but euphoric. Since then, everything I have tried to do in art is an attempt to reproduce that moment—the pride, the possibility, the freedom.
RN: How do you read a city through sound?
KE: I’ve always believed every city has a sound that reveals its soul. The trick is to walk slowly enough to hear it.
I do not travel the way I used to anymore. With music, perhaps I have reached the age where curiosity has learned to pace itself, tuned now to the familiar frequencies that still feed me. When I arrive somewhere new I listen first, not to what people say, but to what the city shouts: the local radio, a restaurant playlist, a song spilling from a corner shop. Those sounds rarely define a city, but they expose its contradictions—the beautiful, the ugly, the indifferent.
What fascinates me most is the noise a city produces. The constant negotiation between humans and machines as they try to share the same air. The hum of the collective, gathering in the early morning on their way to the city centre, sets the tempo that will govern the day.
In Luanda, it’s the impatient candongueiro horns, the endless buzz of air conditioners and electric generators—we still endure daily power cuts, children’s laughter, and kuduro beats bursting from open windows. In Berlin, it is the low whir of bicycles, the roll of baby strollers on the pavement, the S-Bahn gliding above and the U-Bahn below ground. The streets themselves are eerily quiet. Even the silence feels designed. And yet, I often sense that something is missing.
RN: And how is that sound essential for the soul of a city, especially when writing about it?
KE: When I write about a city, I try to capture both its musical and non-musical soundscape. I became obsessed with sound the moment acoustics began to matter more to me than music itself. A good song played with awful sound is almost unbearable; learning to curate sound, I realised, is the first step toward a more balanced relationship with both music and people.
Sound reveals what statistics cannot: how people move, desire, and survive. The absence of sound speaks just as loudly about loneliness, control, and who gets to make noise. Sound also carries memory. For those of us who live between places, it is how we navigate and find our bearings. Sometimes I will hear something familiar, an old zouk refrain, a Brazilian voice stretching Portuguese vowels in that uniquely musical way, and suddenly I am home again.
RN: I am a fan of urban sounds, especially in big cities. Your observations about the ways in which the acoustic identity of a city is generated by the press of life—or its absence—is on point. The waveforms generated by movement in, through, and around a city are, for me, essential for understanding the underlying rhythm of life in an urban space.
KE: On the page, sound enters the text the way light does—indirectly. I am not trying to describe it, but to let it shape the atmosphere of a scene. I am drawn to how certain rooms carry sound differently depending on who is in them, or who has just left. Footsteps on tiles. The weight of a door closing too gently. I have never known how to write silence directly, but I try to leave space for it, as one might in a conversation with someone grieving. Not out of reverence, but out of honesty.
Portuguese is my writing idiom, but I often face the contradiction of creating characters who are not fluent in it. African bilingualism is real, so I lean into sound, slipping in words that make my translators’ lives a little more complicated. But it is part of the fun. I cannot turn away from the particular way Angolans bend and colour Portuguese. My characters live in those linguistic intersections—where meaning gets lost, found, and transformed.
RN: Miles Davis once said that jazz is “not about the notes you play, it’s the notes you don’t.” I found that a useful way of thinking about characters in stories. There is so much one can say about a person on the page. But more and more I am finding out that in stories people are also defined by what is not said about them, or what they do not say about themselves. What do you think of character silences, and how do they play out in your own writing?
KE: Your reference to Miles Davis is spot on. I think it applies to editing too. I am not sure characters are defined by what they do not say; rather, what they do not say exposes the foundation of who they are. I see silence not as absence but as strategy. The most powerful silences in fiction are not mysterious, they are precise: a refusal, a delay, a protection. In that way, silence becomes an action.
I often read my drafts aloud, searching for the balance between what is said and what is implied, and for the sound of the words themselves. I pay attention to how certain syllables collide or soften within a sentence, and I edit out anything that does not flow. Like Miles’s introduction to Concierto de Aranjuez, it has to breathe.
RN: Sketches Of Spain is an album from Miles Davis that must have; that introduction you mention is transcendent.
I think there is a richness in the way languages are shaped—bent and coloured, as you describe it—by people to whom they are not native. Strange things happen on the linguistic margins between the way that a language must be spoken according to its grammatical rules and the way that it is eventually used by people to whom those rules do not matter as a primary priority. You can sense the structure of the inherited language and the form of a newer tongue. That your writing deals with characters who use language in this way is interesting. And that it makes translating more challenging is, of course, a given. But I think you said once that translation is approximation, or the attempt to imperfectly trace one image over another. When you write, are you intimately aware of (or hoping for) the eventuality of translation?
KE: I do not write for translation, but I know it is inevitable. It is part of the business of literature; if we play it right, that’s one of the consequences. But that should not dictate the kind of stories we tell. I write in Portuguese, knowing the text might one day migrate, but my actual concern is to make it alive enough to survive the journey. A living language has its own resistance; it refuses to sit still on the page.
I have been lucky with translators. They notice the small things editors sometimes miss. The tonal shifts, the rhythm of a sentence, the hidden humour of a word choice. Editors tend to think in macro terms: story, structure, pace. Translators work in the micro, where meaning trembles. They ask questions that make me look again at what I have written. Why this word and not that one? Why break the sentence here?
Even punctuation becomes a topic of debate, and I love that level of surgical attention to language.
For me, translation is not about fidelity; it is about interpretation. It is an imperfect tracing, yes, but sometimes the distortion reveals something the original could not. Writing itself is already a kind of translation, the act of turning emotion into syntax, shaping it through the bias of experience. Even when two people witness the same event, they will always tell it differently.
So when I write, I am not hoping for translation in the literal sense. I am hoping for resonance. For someone, somewhere, to feel close to the sentiment the words are trying to hold.
RN: You know, I think that is the best explanation I have ever read or heard about the mystery, magic, and potential of translation. I have always thought of it as a strange process of attempting to recreate the original while knowing the impossibility of the enterprise all the while, or, just the other day, I likened it to approaching infinity in the sense that one gets close to the original without ever really getting close at all. But your description of the process is so much better.
If, as you say, translation poses all of these considerations for writing and storytelling, do you think this is the same for migration?
As a storyteller who has moved around quite a bit, do you think in your daily life, and eventually, your own music and writing practice, that you engage in this constant process of translation by choosing what aspect of home you take with you and what you leave out, what will be useful to you, and what might cause conflict?
KE: When you move, you are constantly deciding what to take with you and what to leave behind. Not because you stop valuing certain parts of home, but because not everything survives the journey intact.
Some things lose meaning in a new context; others become more charged, more necessary. Every migrant develops this instinctive editorial process. It is not always elegant. Sometimes you overpack emotionally; other times you realise, years later, that you misplaced something essential.
In daily life, I feel that negotiation all the time. The way I speak shifts depending on who I am with. My humour changes. Even my silence changes. Migration is not simply movement, it is modulation. You are tuning yourself to new frequencies while trying not to lose the original mojo.
That inevitably influences my writing and my relationship with music. Both become tools to reconcile the versions of myself that geography has scattered. Every text I write carries something I have smuggled from home—a word, a phrase, a memory. That alongside the things I have learned elsewhere. I do not know another way.
RN: Is there a context to which you have relocated and found it near impossible to adjust to? A place that was so inhospitable that memory, words, and sound failed you?
KE: I remember visiting a coastal city in Portugal—170,000 people, beautiful light, exceptional food, and not a single bookshop anywhere. I have been to towns in Angola and Cape Verde without bookshops, and that never surprised me. But this Portuguese city unsettled me in a different way. I kept walking those charming streets thinking, “How can a place this alive have no room for books?” Something felt absent from its emotional architecture. I couldn’t settle in; the silence felt wrong.
Moscow was another place where the energy was funny. Maybe it was timing, maybe it was me, but I felt a coldness I couldn’t translate—not the weather, but the posture, the distance between things. Words did not help. I moved through the city as if tuned to the wrong frequency entirely.
Then I arrived in Saint Petersburg, and something opened. Still Russia, still haunted by the same ghosts, but the atmosphere had more room to breathe. I could imagine myself there: wandering, writing, catching fragments of conversation on the street despite understanding almost nothing.
So yes, there are places I simply cannot decode. Where memory, language, and sound all refuse to click. It is humbling, honestly. As storytellers we like to believe we can read any city, but some spaces remain opaque no matter how hard we look. And sometimes the most honest thing to say is: This one is not for me.
RN: That is such a valuable observation—that some places are not for everyone, even though other people might have a different experience of them. I like what you said about frequencies: that sometimes you are not picking up the right bandwidth. That seems apt. I, too, have been to some places that just did not resonate with me. I have found, though, that connection with people has helped to dispel “the distance between things.”
What are places that you have been to where you have felt right at home, in a manner of speaking?
KE: Lisbon was one of the first. Not because it was simple. Lisbon can be a labyrinth of contradictions, but because I recognised something immediately in the way people tell stories there. The mix of humour and melancholy, the unhurried conversations, the African presence, and even the sense of affordability back then. It felt familiar without pretending to be home.
Berlin surprised me. On paper, it should not have worked: the stiffness of winter, the silences, the rules. But Berlin gives you space. Space to reinvent yourself, space to think, space to be quiet without disappearing. I felt oddly at ease in that expanse as if the city had room for all the versions of me.
São Paulo is one of my favourite cities because of the vibes. A friend of mine from Rio once explained the difference better than any sociologist ever could. He said that in Rio the city is the protagonist. If you try to meet someone to talk business or do anything remotely boring, people will look at you like you’ve committed a sin. “Why aren’t you at the beach? Why aren’t you out in nature enjoying the most beautiful city in the world?” São Paulo, he said, is the opposite, the city is the antagonist. It is a concrete jungle that nobody romanticises, so people bond in the effort to survive it. There is a sense of collective coping that creates deeper, warmer connections. And maybe that is why I love São Paulo because in the middle of the chaos, the people become the beauty.
And Praia, in Cape Verde, gives me a similar feeling, though from the opposite end of the spectrum, and I am not even an island person. There is a warmth and a musicality to everyday life there that aligns with something in me. Like meeting a relative you had never seen but somehow already know.
RN: During the course of this conversation we have talked about translation and its rewards, migration and its challenges, and music’s influences on your writing. In this latest season of your literary and sonic production, what is the wildest vision you are currently working towards?
KE: I feel like every new season of my work demands a different kind of madness, so the bar keeps rising. At the moment, the project taking up the strangest, most exhilarating corner of my brain is a collection of essays on the African presence in Venice. The book is part of a series the honourable Maaza Mengiste is coordinating for Wetlands/Afterwords.
I have been visiting Venice and pushing myself out of my comfort zone by writing about contemporary art. It is a completely different way of thinking. Literature and music demand one set of instincts, but art, especially the kind we encounter during the Venice Biennale, requires another: a slower looking, a willingness to be confused without rushing toward resolution. There is something liberating in that confusion. It opens new rooms in my mind that I did not know were there.
So, at the moment, my “wildest vision” is learning to write about art without pretending to have all the answers. Letting myself be changed by the work instead of trying to dominate it with interpretation. I am basically letting art teach me how to sit with questions longer than I am used to.
What is yours?
RN: Mine is trying to get you to come and visit the absurd comedy that is Windhoek?
KE: It is about time I meet my brethren and sistren from across the border. I am ready.