Ben Panulo Junior is a writer, permaculture farmer, and lifelong reader based in Blantyre, Malawi. Writing as Hermes Shinben Musashi, he is the author of thirty-six volumes of poetry and the Dark Continent Universe — a fourteen-book Afrofuturist epic rooted in the oral traditions of Lake Malawi.
His reading spans Kabbalah, Hermeticism, Sufism, African cosmology, quantum physics, Jungian depth psychology, and the full breadth of Western and African esoteric tradition. This eclecticism is not academic — it is the lived architecture of a man who grew up believing that the oldest questions deserved the widest possible toolkit.
He trained in medicine and has worked with communities across southern Africa. He runs Maziko Athu Permaculture Farms in the Blantyre region, growing food and building soil in a country that deserves both.
Dark Continent is the book he has been building toward for decades.