Neta Bomani

Neta Bomani is a Tanzanian-Malawian zinester based in Brooklyn, New York, U.S.

On January 28th 2021, as part of a grad school class called 100 Days of Making, Bomani began making one zine every day and documenting each one on a dedicated Twitter thread.

The first zine in the series focused on jazz pianist and composer Mary Lou Williams, while their last zine (published on May 8th, 2021) was a "storybook for children and adults" focusing on computational history and technology, called Dark Matter Objects: Technologies of Capture and Things That Can’t Be Held.

100 days / 100 zines

What follows is comprehensive list of Bomani's 100 zines, derived from her Twitter thread.

• Day 1: A paper study and meditation on jazz pianist and composer Mary Lou Williams. (view)

• Day 2: A zine made from a poem Bomani wrote called “one box two another”, which was about “a year of virtual still” due to the COVID19 pandemic and her experience of her first Zoom funeral. (view)

• Day 3: A zine about the component parts of basic circuitry, which featured copper tape (and a circuit) throughout. (view)

• Day 4: A zine meditation on actor, model and author Cicely Tyson, who had recently passed away. (view)

• Day 5: A focus on a zine from Bomani's personal archive: Black Women & Self Defense (Thoughts on Personal Space & Reclaiming Our Streets by artist and author Naomi M Moyer. (view)

• Day 6: A one-page zine featuring a photocopied spread from Zong! - a series of poems by M. NourbeSe Philip reflecting on the fragmented history of slavery, which was paired with images from documented slave ship diagrams. (view)

• Day 7: A zine called The ABCs of Black Radicals which featured "an inexhaustive list of black radicals, socialists, communists, separatists, pan africanists, abolitionists, feminists, etc." (view)

• Day 8: A zine paper circuit collage of Invisible Man Retreat - a photo by Gordon Parks taken for Ralph Ellison’s book the Invisible Man in 1952. (view)

• Day 9: A zine featuring a selection of FBI documents on Trayvon Martin, Prince, MOVE, Fannie Lou Hamer and Toni Morrison, which was kettle stitched together on pastel yellow paper. (view)

• Day 10: An algorithmically-generated fanzine of Fred Moten in conversation with Transformer - a “modern neural network” programmed with the function to complete text prompts. Bomani asked Transformer questions, scraped from Moten’s book The Universal Machine. (view)