The Chimurenga Chronic

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NEW ISSUE OF CHRONIC: WHO KILLED KABILA – OUT NOW!

Who killed Kabila? The new issue of the Chronic presents this query as the starting point for an in-depth investigation into power, territory and the creative imagination by writers from the Congo and other countries involved in the conflict.

8 years after the assassination of Laurent-Désiré Kabila, rumours still proliferate. But who killed Kabila is no mystery. It is not A or B or C. But rather A and B and C. All options are both true and necessary – it’s the coming together of all these individuals, groups and circumstances, on one day, within the proliferating course of the history, that does it.

Telling this story then, isn’t merely a matter of presenting multiple perspectives but rather of finding a medium able to capture the radical singularity of the event in its totality, including each singular, sometimes fantastical, historical fact, rumour or suspicion. We’ve heard plenty about the danger of the single story – in this issue we explore its power. 

The issue proposes music as the context, the paradigm for the writing. The single story we write borrows from the sebene – the upbeat, mostly instrumental part of Congolese rumba famously established by Franco (Luambo Makiadi).

Similarly, to follow Ousmane Sembene’s method of using multi-location and polyphony as decolonial narrative tools, we invited writers from the countries directly involved and implicated in the events surrounding Kabila’s death (DR Congo, Rwanda, Uganda, Zimbabwe, Angola, and a de-territorialised entity called AFDL) to write one story: the assassination of Kabila.

[mixcloud https://www.mixcloud.com/chimurenga/angolan-mix-word-on-the-street-from-radio-trottoir-radio-one-battery-radio-33-boca-boca/ width=100% height=120 hide_cover=1 light=1]

THIS EDITION OF THE CHIMURENGA CHRONIC IS CONCEIVED AS A SEBENE OF THE CONGOLESE RUMBA – ENJOY THE DANCE!

Who Kill Kabila

We tune into radio trottoir, radio one battery, radio 33, boca boca to get the word on the street from Angola.

For more songs, stories, rumours and anecdotes from politicians of the pavements, barstool historians, ex-army generals, bootlickers and braggarts and informants, mercenaries and Lebanese diamond diggers and Katanaga Tigers, graduates of École des Ponts Pari Tech, soldiers trained in China, Libya, Sudan, Angola, and Cuba, black devils, Rwandan spies and more, get a copy of the new Chronic.

Not in My Neighborhood Film Screening

In Jozi at Keleketla! Library … Chimurenga in partnership with Azania Rizing Productions presents the screening of ‘Not in My Neighborhood’

Gentrification has been constantly, falsely, perpetuated as a process of affirmative social renovation. However, despite these forced agendas, the controversy of displacement, conflict, and loss of affordable housing has led to one communal response: resistance.

Award-winning filmmaker Kurt Orderson offers an insightful look into the lives of those who are struggling against the atrocities of Gentrification, Urban Renewal, Architectural Apartheid and Spatial Violence. He cohesively facilitates an international dialogue by exploring the parallels of the current urban environments in three seemingly disparate cities: São Paulo, Cape Town, and New York.

FESTAC BOOK AND LP ON THE WAY 

Early in 1977, thousands of artists, writers, musicians, activists and scholars from Africa and the black diaspora assembled in Lagos for FESTAC ’77, the 2nd World Black and African Festival of Arts and Culture. With a radically ambitious agenda underwritten by Nigeria’s newfound oil wealth, FESTAC ’77 would unfold as a complex, glorious and excessive culmination of a half-century of transatlantic and pan-Africanist cultural-political gatherings.

Devised by Chimurenga and edited by Ntone Edjabe and Akin Adesokan, this is the first publication to consider FESTAC in all its cultural-historic complexity, addressing the planetary scale of the event alongside the personal and artistic encounters it made possible.

As the tenth title in Afterall’s Exhibition Histories series and the third in Chimurenga’s Chimurenga Library series, the book features a bespoke expanded format and design scheme, and gathers extensive unseen photographic and archival materials, interviews and new commissions by Akin Adesokan, Ugochukwu-Smooth Nzewi, Dominique Malaquais and Elvira Dyangani Ose, among others, and archival texts, materials, images and photographs by Wole Soyinka, Audre Lorde, Allioune Diop, Marilyn Nance, Barkley Hendricks, J.D. Okhai Ojeikere, Betye Saar, Sun Ra and many more.

THE END OF ELECTIONS

albocracy
Government by “white” men or Europeans. The most notorious albocracy in history ended in South Africa in 1994. “White” government is significantly ascribed to “men” in the Oxford English Dictionary.
anasacrous
Pertaining to the puffed up bulges of flesh, or the inflated mounds of cellulite called anasacra. Disraeli, the statesman, spoke with disdain of the anasacra of complacent and self-indulgent politicians.
argentocracy
A government by the wealthy; the rule or absolute importance of money, from Latin, argentum, for “silver”. Plutocrats and argentocrats are politicians that govern a country as if it is a profit-making business.

Willem Boshoff provides all the vocabulary necessary for the coming South African elections in his Dictionary of SA Elections. 

Seeing is no Arab spring. Revolutionary rhetoric is merely seasoning to the brew of drama stirred up by a government after residents of its capital city paralyse the democratic system by casting an avalanche of blank votes…. Paula Akugizibwe reads democrazy via Jose Saramago’s novel.

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