Strange Cargo: Essays on Art is a collection of forty essays by Ashraf Jamal. It can be regarded as the twin of Jamal's previous book, In the World: Essays on Contemporary South African Art (2017). Both form part of a single venture to celebrate and entrench the rich complexity of South African artists in a global imaginary. The artists that Jamal chooses to reflect upon refuse to fit into a predictive algorithm. He has written with equal intensity about artists old and young, dead or alive, famous or relatively unknown, black or white, trending or not. Love and empathy-his indifference to difference-is his engine room, and much like the artists featured, Jamal does not only write for the moment we are in, but for a readership to come.
