Myriad and alienating bureaucratic procedures often delay the passing of souls in a tortuous passing of time. Florence Madenga recalls the way back home.
an ongoing query on knowledge production via African sound worlds, and long-term research on broadcasting and cultural initiatives by liberation movements across the continent
From 10 – 14 August 2022, we presented another edition of “Liberation Radio”, an ongoing research conducted primarily through broadcasting practice, on cultural initiatives by and through liberation movements operating in the city-studios of Cairo, Accra, Conakry, Algiers, Dar es Salaam, Lusaka and more.
After Cairo and Harare, we landed the Pan African Space Station (PASS) in Dar es Salaam to listen on themes such as the radical history of the University of Dar es Salaam – including Rodney-mentored study groups such as USARF and more; the limits of state-instituted Pan Africanism, as experienced during the 6-PAC of 1974; the spread of Kiswahili through the liberation struggle and its promotion by Soyinka, Armah, Ngugi and other members of the short-lived Union of African Writers; as well as the cultural work enabled by the presence of freedom fighters in Dar – such as the radical output of the Tanzanian Publishing House and the Tanzanian Broadcasting Corporation. But also, smaller but influential projects like the music group Afro 70. And much more.
The sessions were hosted by the illustrious publisher Mkuki na Nyota/TPH Bookshop (24 Samora Ave). Participants included: Pungwe Listening (Rob Machiri and Memory Biwa), Contemporary Image Collective (Andrea Thal and Samah Gafar), Moses Marz, Nombuso Mathibela, Yasmina Reggad and Parselelo Kantai.
In conversation with writers, journalists, musicians and scholars: Walter Bgoya, Maria Shaba, Horace Campbell, John Kitime, Salim Willis and many more.
In the Free State, the most important and pivotal figure in local black literature has been OMOSEYE BOLAJI. Pule Lechesa spoke with him about his awards, general grassroots writing in the Free State, and Black Writing in general.
Conversations with Christian Nyampeta, featuring Hannah Black, Sasha Bonét, Natacha Nsabimana, Olu Oguibe and Emmanuel Olunkwa.
Live on PASS – 24-26 May 2022 – from 6pm
A web documentary, audio-video archive and online cartography, that chronicles continuities and breaks, samples and cuts that link four key moments of Pan-African encounter: Dakar ’66, Algiers ’69, Kinshasa ’74 and Lagos ’77.
In the CFA franc, the French colonial mission in West Africa found a way to ensure a paternalist and pernicious stranglehold on the economies of a vast region of the continent.
The third installment of the Reader explores the unholy trinity of land, property and value – the life force of cities everywhere. In this issue António Andrade Tomás reveals the vice and violence that permeate the act of securing land and home in Luanda;
Skin bleaching is often described as a manifestation of ‘colo-mentality’. However, argues Bibi Bakare-Yusuf, mimesis here is both an affirmation and a contestation of power.
Les Brasseries du Cameroun is the country’s largest industry and dedicated to guaranteeing a steady flow of liquid amber to the vast proliferation of bars, restaurants, nightclubs and other unidentified nightspots – some still in Maquis-style hiding – that have mushroomed all over the city.
A friend, a Chimurenga founding father, an award winning writer, author, journalist, chef, lover, a literary revolutionary and an inspiration. We pay tribute.
In conversation with Binyavanga Wainaina, Kojo Laing talks to a future Ghana by exposing its present, full of the jargons and certainties of one dimensional nation building.
Perfect, perfect, you have solved the problem for me, we have deconstructed the idea of National Theatre. We have taken the national and thrown it in the dust bin.
On January 16, 2001, in the middle of the day, shots are heard in the Palais de Marbre,the residence of President Laurent-Désiré Kabila. The road bordering the presidential residence, usually closed from 6pm by a simple guarded barrier is blocked by tanks.
At the Ngaliema hospital in Kinshasa, a helicopter lands and a body wrapped in a bloody sheet is off loaded. Non-essential medical personnel and patients are evacuated and the hospital clinic is surrounded by elite troops. No one enters or leaves. RFI (Radio France Internationale) reports on a serious incident at the presidential palace in Kinshasa.
Rumor, the main source of information in the Congolese capital, is set in motion…
18 years after the assassination of Laurent-Désiré Kabila, rumours still proliferate. Suspects include: the Rwandan government; the French; Lebanese diamond dealers; the CIA; Robert Mugabe; Angolan security forces; the apartheid-era Defence Force; political rivals and rebel groups; Kabila’s own kadogos (child soldiers); family members and even musicians.
The geopolitics of those implicated tells its own story; the event came in the middle of the so-called African World War, a conflict that involved multiple regional players, including, most prominently, Rwanda, Uganda, Burundi, Angola, Namibia, and Zimbabwe.
So, 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.
The issue is the result of a three-year research project that included a 5-day intervention and installation at La Colonie (Paris), from December 13 – 17, 2017, which featured a live radio station and a research library, a conceptual inventory of the archive of this murder – all documented in a research catalogue.
As this research revealed, 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. We take inspiration from the Congolese musical imagination, its capacity for innovation and its potential to allow us to think “with the bodily senses, to write with the musicality of one’s own flesh.”
However, this editorial project doesn’t merely put music in context, it 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), which consists in the lead guitarist playing short looping phrases with variations, supported or guided by the shouts of the atalaku (animateur) and driving, snare-based drumming.
“Franco, c’est l’inventeur du sebene. Parce que… et à coté il y avait Nico Kasanda, le docteur Nico, qui lui avait plus de technique de guitare mais qui jouait très mélodique, et Luambo c’était le mec qui est vraiment le mec du quartier avec sa connaissance intuitive de la guitare il a inventé cet manière de faire des sorte de boucle rythmique. Sa manière de jouer c’est un boucle rythmique. Le même phrase rythmique qui revient tout le temps. Et c’est ça le sebene congolais. Et jusqu’à aujourd’hui nous fonctionnons par sebene. Même moi même.“
Interview on France Inter : « Le labo de Ray Lema du 16 mars 2014 »
Ray Lema shares more stories and sounds from his life in music with Bintou Simporé onboard the Pan African Space Station. Recorded for PASS in Paris at the Fondation Cartier exhibition Beauté Congo – 1926-2015 – Congo Kitoko. For more visit http://panafricanspacestation.org.za
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.
Working fluidly between fact and fiction, and featuring multiple forms of writing, the contributors – Yvonne Owuor, Antoine Vumilia Muhindo, Parselelo Kantai, Jihan El-Tahri, Daniel K. Kalinaki, Kivu Ruhorahoza, Percy Zvomuya and Sinzo Aanza – use the event-scene of the shooting is their starting point tocollectively tell the single story with its multiplication of plots and subplots that challenge history as a linear march, and tell not the sum but the derangement of its parts.
The issue thus performs an imaginative remapping that better accounts for the complex spatial, temporal, political, economic and cultural relations at play, as well the internal and external actors, organized into networks and nuclei – not only human actors but objects; music; images; texts, ghosts etc – and how these actors come together in time, space, relationships.
This edition of the Chimurenga Chronic is conceived as a sebene of the Congolese rumba – enjoy the dance!
The Chronic is a quarterly pan African gazette, published by Chimurenga.
This edition is part of a larger research project of the Chimurenga Library. It is produced with support from Heinrich Boll Foundation (Cape Town), and in collaboration with La Colonie (Paris), Cosmopolis Bienial/ Centre Pompidou (Paris), Marabouparken Konsthall (Stockholm) and Kalmar Konstmuseum.
For more information or to order your print or digital copy visit www.chimurengachronic.co.za and/or contact Chimurenga on +27(0)21 4224168 or info@chimurenga.co.za.
From December 13 – 17, 2017, Chimurenga installed a library of books, films, and visual material mapping extensive research that ask “Who Killed Kabila“, as the starting point for an in-depth investigation into power, territory and the creative imagination. This book catalogues all the research material produced and collected for this installation.
The equation is simple: the length of a Congolese president’s reign is proportional to his/her willingness to honour the principle that the resources of the Congo belong to others. Mzee Kabila failed.
Who killed Kabila is no mystery either. 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.
So telling this story isn’t merely be 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 – we want to explore its power. We take inspiration from the Congolese musical imagination, its capacity for innovation and its potential to allow us to think “with the bodily senses, to write with the musicality of one’s own flesh” (Mbembe).
The catalogue is now available for sale in the Chimurenga shop.
Nearly a decade on from the worst postcolonial turmoil that saw their currency devalued by thousands of percentage points, Zimbabweans have had to brace themselves as the government introduced another face-saving tender.
Student movements in many African countries have historically confronted contradictions of colonial and post-colonial rule. In Kenya, these movements sent generations of young people into the streets, underground, into exile or death.
Cape Town is a city with a waiting list of more than 450,000 families for low-cost housing, but delivering about 11,000 units a year and criminalising those who attempt to put up their own structures.
Some argue that the new media has forever altered our attention span, that the experience of being completely lost and absorbed, an experience they say you only got from a printed book, has disappeared.
Yemisi Aribisala explores, with mixed emotions, the enduring opportunism of a Nigerian elite that ensures that generations of children claim US birthright. Despite the assumed status that goes with being born “abroad”, the American dream, she argues, is in fact only a Nigerian backup plan.
This print edition is a 48-page broadsheet, packaged together with the 72-pageChronic Books supplement.
Writers in the broadsheet include Jon Soske, Paula Akugizibwe, Yves Mintoogue, Adewale Maja-Pearce, Parsalelo Kantai, Fred Moten & Stefano Harney, Cedric Vincent, Deji Toye, Derin Ajao, Tony Mochama, Nana Darkoa Sekyiamah,Agri Ismaïl, Lindokuhle Nkosi, Bongani Kona, Stacy Hardy, Emmanuel Induma, Ugochukwu-Smooth Nzewi,Lolade Ayewudi, Simon Kuper and many others.
The Chronic Books supplement is a self help guide on reading and writing, with contributions by Dave Mckenzie, Akin Adekosan, Fiston Nasser Mwanza, Yemisi Ogbe, Vivek Nyarangan, Peter Enahoro, Tolu Ogunlesi, Elnathan John,Rustum Kozain, Olufemi Terry, Aryan Kaganof, Rustum Kozain, Harmony Holiday, Sean O’Toole, Gwen Ansell,Binyavanga Wainaina and more.
Oscar Pistorius first gained international fame amid a raging debate over whether prosthetic blades would give him unfair advantage against able-bodied athletes. Today, the track star finds himself in the middle of a more serious controversy: whether he intentionally shot and killed his girlfriend Reeva Steenkamp. Both cases raise serious questions regarding humanity. Gabriella Håkansson* embarks on the slippery-slop of what defines the human.
The metronomes of ancient history, the legacy of war, the wavering prosperity of peace, impending independence and inter-ethnic tensions beat the rhythms of Juba – the new capital of Southern Sudan. Billy Kahora reports.
