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.