MALIKA LUEEN NDLOVU is an internationally published South African poet, playwright, performer and arts project manager. For several years, she was the live festival and online curator / presenter for the Africa Centre’s Badilisha Poetry X-Change which pioneered an exclusively African poetry podcasting platform. As a founder-member of Cape Town-based women writers’ collective WEAVE (1998–2004), she co-edited WEAVE’s Ink @ Boiling Point: A selection of 21st Century Black Women’s writing from the Southern Tip of Africa. In 2004, she initiated And The Word Was Woman Ensemble. Her poetry collections include Born in Africa but (1999), Womb to World: A Labour of Love (2001), Truth is Both Spirit and Flesh (2008), Invisible Earthquake: A woman’s journal through stillbirth (2009), and CLOSE (2017). Her published plays are A Coloured Place (1998) and Sister Breyani (2010). She features prominently in Our Words, Our Worlds: Writing on Black South African Women Poets, 2000–2018 (UKZN Press, 2019), edited by Makhosazana Xaba, and in Collaborative Conversations: Celebrating twenty-one years of The Mothertongue Project, edited by Alex Halligey and Sara Matchett (Modjaji Books, 2021).
Originally from KwaZulu-Natal, she has lived in Cape Town for twenty-seven years, where her applied arts practice, specifically within the NGO sector and University-associated programmes, has grown wide and deep roots. She features in UCT’s Medicine and the Arts: Humanizing Healthcare MOOC, which continues to feed into a global conversation on the multiple merits of an interdisciplinary approach using the arts within clinical settings. This MOOC served the development of the Critical Health Humanities in Africa course as part of the MA degree programme in Health Humanities and the Arts, launched in 2022. For WITS University’s Drama For Life 2018 conference, Malika’s keynote address and performance was entitled Poetic Navigation: Mapping creative pathways through trauma, grief and re-membering, using poetry as an integrative process of release, documentation and memorialization. Via her poetic memoir, Invisible Earthquake: A woman’s journal through stillbirth (Modjaji Books, 2009) and website invisiblestill.co.za, Malika has also become a passionately vocal advocate around pregnancy-related loss, bereavement support and maternal health.
Some of Malika’s presentations and collaborations in this sphere /arena include the BAHI (Borrowed Angels Healing Initiative) annual concerts, Saving Newborn Lives, Compassionate Friends CT Chapter, Mowbray Maternity Hospital, Cape Town Midwifery & Birth Conference, Zulu Birth Project at the Human Rights in Childbirth (HRIC) 2015 Africa Summit and the Women Deliver 2019 Conference, the world’s largest conference on gender equality and the health, rights and wellbeing of girls and women, held in Vancouver, Canada. Malika’s story and insights on this subject feature in internationally published articles and interviews, including the Lancet Medical Journal, SANDS (Miscarriage, Stillbirth & Newborn Death Support) Newsletters, BBC World Service, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation’s ‘Impatient Optimist’ and WHO’s April 2017 World Health Day online campaign on depression and other mental health issues. In 2019, as the pandemic lockdowns began, she joined the Arts in Psychosocial Support CoP (community of practice), a national network of arts therapists, applied artists and community arts facilitators, and co-hosted its online series called Courageous Conversations. As a member of this CoP and NGO Sp(i)eel Art Therapies Collective, Malika was part of an international research project team which produced Arts For Health South Africa (artsforhealthsa.org.za), funded by UNICEF’s Youth Empowerment and Health / Economic Responses to covid-19 (YEaH). As a community voice and trans-disciplinary practitioner, Malika is a member of the National Management Committee of the UBOMI BUHLE National Pregnancy Exposure Registry Project, contributing to their medical staff training course in the form of a module centred on maternal loss, grieving well and care for the caregivers. ‘Dancing with Mountains’*, her 2020 article on poetry as healing practice, was published by UNISA Press in Education as Change 24.1 (2020) on Decoloniality in/and Poetry.
Passionate about poetry as a form of research, Malika features in Voices Unbound: Poems from the 8th International Symposium of Poetic Inquiry with her three-part event harvesting poem, a commissioned work published by HSRC Press and African Sun Press in 2023. Her multi-modal keynote entitled Re-turning to Ourselves, Our Wealth: Poetic Reflections opened the 2023 Inaugural Conference of the African Humanities Association at UCT. Malika sees her trans-disciplinary work, site-specific ritual performances and multi-media collaborations with various artists as both activism and ancestral medicine work.
*This title references ‘We Will Dance with Mountains’, the work of Dr Bayo Akomolafe: bayoakomolafe.net.
Author photograph: Kamal Ndlovu
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