Neta Bomani

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

On January 28th 2021, as part of a NYU grad school class called 100 Days of Making, Bomani began making one zine every day and documenting each one on a dedicated Twitter thread. Their zines were characterised by their innovative use of materials and textures, as well as their focus on topics such as Black public figures, social justice, radical politics and African-American culture.

The first zine in the series focused on jazz pianist and composer Mary Lou Williams (pictured), 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

Cover of Day 1 zine, Mary Lou Williams (Jazz Pianist & Composer)

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.

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

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

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

• 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.

• Day 6: A zine featuring a photocopied spread from Zong! - a series of poems by M. NourbeSe Philip about the fragmented history of slavery - paired with slave ship diagrams.

• 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."

• 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.

• 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.

• Day 10: An algorithmically-generated zine of Fred Moten in conversation with the Transformerneural network, which was asked questions from Moten’s book The Universal Machine.

• Day 11: A 'remix' of a collaborative zine Bomani had made years before, called ‘’Radical Black Woman of Harlem: A Walking Tour’’.

• Day 12: A one-sheet zine consisting of a photo essay by photographer Marilyn Nance about African spirituality in Birmingham, Alabama, U.S.

• Day 13: A zine of five random search results from scraping the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History & Culture for “African-American”, under the “labor” topic.

• Day 14: A zine inspired by the Black Panther Party’s ‘10 Point Program’, reminding people to familiarise themselves not only with the points, but the party’s thinking behind them.

• Day 15: A video zine using javascript medium p5xjs to explore the poem ‘Black Art’ by Amiri Baraka alongside visuals of free jazz musician Milford Graves enacting kung fu moves.

Cover of Day 1 zine, Mary Lou Williams (Jazz Pianist & Composer)

Cover of Day 46 zine, Black Women Librarians

List input in progress - last updated May 8th, 2021.