A Day in the Life of Idi Amin
By Chimurenga / May 27, 2019
The hot dry breeze is lazy. It glides languorously collecting odd bits of paper, they tease the ground, threaten to take flight, tease the ground.
THIRD CLASS CITY
By Chimurenga / October 5, 2020
South Africa thinks that India owes it one for putting Gandhi through revolution school; India thinks South Africa owes it for sending him over to show the natives how it’s done.
THE BARD OF BLOEMFONTEIN
By Chimurenga / October 5, 2020
Achal Prabhala goes to the heart of the Free State literary renaissance with the “deliberately mysterious and prodigiously talented” Omoseye Bolaji.
Ibadan, Soutin and the Puzzle of Bower’s Tower
By Chimurenga / September 15, 2020
The jingle would survive the event, as the poetry of a battle-cry outlives a war, but that eventuality belonged in the future.
De l’art de vivre l’art
By Chimurenga / August 28, 2020
Goddy Leye nous a quittés. C’était le 19 février 2011, peu après minuit. A Karachi, au bord du désert, où jamais il ne pleut en cette saison, le ciel s’est ouvert. Averse. A l’aube, à l’heure du premier appel des muezzins, il pleuvait encore. J’écris là-bas ces mots pour l’ami, le mentor, le camarade Goddy. Douleur sourde, de celles qui ne passent pas. Qui ne peuvent et ne doivent pas passer.
HOW THE WEST WAS LOST
By Chimurenga / November 6, 2019
If one thinks about it the whole thing goes back to amaQheya; the cultural proletariat… a proletariat with a cultural history that has taught it to be careful of an African existence…
It Begins with a Place
By Chimurenga / July 21, 2012
t would be a very idiosyncratic Harlem! Years ago when I was a teenager I did a course where they had us make maps of places, highlighting what drops out just based on personal experience of a place. I think of this book very much like that – a personal map of the places I went or that caught my eye.
Asia in My Life
By Chimurenga / July 21, 2012
I have always felt the need for Africa, Asia and South America to learn from each other. This south-to-south intellectual and literary exchange was at the center of the Nairobi Literature debate in the early sixties, and is the centerpiece of my recent theoretical explorations, in Globalectics: Theory and the Politics of Knowing.
The Spark of Life: Where Novels Come From
By Chimurenga / July 21, 2012
wani? Manuscript Project, Kwani Trust’s new literary prize for African writing. Including contributions from Aminatta Forna, Leila Aboulela, Ellen Banda-Aaku and Helon Habila, the articles offer advice and inspiration for developing your novel manuscript over the next 2 months. In this, the first article in the series Aminatta Forna explores where the ideas for novels.
Ten Pieces of Advice for the Writing Life
By Chimurenga / July 21, 2012
Read to become a better writer. This sounds like “eat to become stronger” and in a way reading is the food of the creative process. Read for all the reasons a reader reads but also read for inspiration, read to be influenced, read in order to pick up tricks and techniques, read in order to answer the questions, “How on earth did the author pull this off? How on earth did he/she get away with this?”
Like Words For Weapons
By Chimurenga / December 21, 2010
I contacted Comrade Fatso a poet and social activist and founder of MAGAMABA Projects and bandleader of Chabvondoka who is also internationally renowned for blogging for CNN’s on the ground coverage of the controversial 2008 Zimbabwean elections; to gauge his attitude about the current power sharing arrangement and his opinion on the political climate in his country.
Sortir de la grande nuit. Essai sur l’Afrique décolonisée
By Chimurenga / December 21, 2010
« Sortir de la grande nuit. Essai sur l’Afrique décolonisée ». Tel est le titre du dernier livre d’Achille Mbembe qui paraît aux Éditions La Découverte à Paris le 14 octobre. J’ai eu le privilège de lire de manière attentive cet ouvrage riche et très documenté écrit en mémoire de Frantz Fanon et Jean-Marc Éla, deux « penseurs du devenir illimité ».
Fifty Years Of African Decolonisation
By Chimurenga / December 21, 2010
In the half-century to come, one aspect of the role of intellectuals, cultural practitioners and African civil society will be to help in articulating a concept of democracy that takes the current struggles as a point of departure, and in addition to ‘internationalise’ the question of African democratisation
Mafika Gwala speaks to Andrea Meeson about not living in the shadows.
By Chimurenga / December 15, 2010
“I have been always where I am today. Why do they speak of me as if I am emerging from the dark?” Mafika Gwala speaks to Andrea Meeson about not living in the shadows.
Colossal KOUROUMA
By Chimurenga / September 13, 2019
What could have happened in his head to take literally this type of injunction quite common in lands of Africa? A sense of the word given? The desire to take seriously the hopes of children who usually have little voice? Mystery.
Writing Nervous By Brian Chikwava
By Chimurenga / September 17, 2018
One can argue that great literary works are rarely about good sentences […]
Myriem
By Chimurenga / September 16, 2018
an excerpt from Myriem by Boris Boubacar Diop … Fire embassies, it […]
Zinedine Zidane and and the event of the secret
By Chimurenga / January 23, 2018
Grant Farred produces a Derridean reading of Zidane’s world-stopping head butt.
The Trajectory of a Street Photographer
By Chronic / January 20, 2020
My quest for an explanation for this omission in my history education made me appreciate the magnitude of the crime… for the struggle against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting. – Santu Mofokeng
Chimurenga 16 – The Chimurenga Chronicle (October 2011)
By Chimurenga / September 3, 2020
A once-off edition of a speculative, future-forward newspaper that travels back in time to re-imagine the present.
Chimurenga 15 – The Curriculum Is Everything (June 2010)
By Chimurenga / September 3, 2020
Presented in the form of a textbook, Chimurenga 15 simultaneously mimics the structure while gutting it.
Chimurenga 14 – Everyone Has Their Indian (April 2009)
By Chimurenga / September 3, 2020
This issue features words and images on the Third World project and links, real and imagined, between Africa and South Asia.
Chimurenga 12/13 – Dr Satan’s Echo Chamber (Double-Issue March 2008)
By Chimurenga / September 3, 2020
A double-take on sci-fi and speculative writing from the African world, collectively titled “Dr. Satan’s Echo Chamber” after a dub mix by King Tubby.
Chimurenga 11 – Conversations with Poets Who Refuse to Speak (July 2007)
By Chimurenga / September 3, 2020
This issue is about silence, disappearing oneself as act. Though it’s often one of abdication, could it be defiance, resistance even?
Chimurenga 10 – Futbol, Politricks and Ostentatious Cripples (December 2006)
By Chimurenga / September 3, 2020
We scope the stadia, markets, ngandas and banlieues to spotlight narratives of love, hate and the wide and deep spectrum of emotions and affiliations that the game of football generates.
Chimurenga 9 – Conversations in Luanda, and Other Graphic Stories (June 2006)
By Chimurenga / September 3, 2020
For this one we trawled the globe for ink artists/wordists to give us their perspectives on love, life and the multiverse.
Chimurenga 8 – We’re All Nigerian! (December 2005)
By Chimurenga / September 3, 2020
An exploration of a love-hate, admiration-envy, awe-disappointment relationship with “Nigerianess”; Features the “last interview”
Chimurenga 7 – Kaapstad! (and Jozi, the night Moses died) (July 2005)
By Chimurenga / September 3, 2020
A collection of musings – in words, images and sounds – from beneath the processed skin of Cape Town, by Gabeba Baderoon, Sandile Dikeni, Julian Jonker,
Chimurenga 6 – Orphans of Fanon (October 2004)
By Chimurenga / September 3, 2020
A series of conversations, real and imagined, on the “pitfalls of national consciousness” by Mustapha Benfodil, Achille Mbembe, Charles Mudede,
Chimurenga 5 – Head/Body(&Tools)/Corpses (April 2004)
By Chimurenga / September 3, 2020
An issue inspired by the life and work of Bessie Head. Including previously unpublished works by Head, and featuring new writing and art by Jean Claude Fignole,
Chimurenga 4 – Black Gays & Mugabes (May 2003)
By Chimurenga / September 3, 2020
On desire and its discontents. Featuring a new adaptation of Yambo Ouologuem erotica, and new works by Kopano Ratele, Kalamu ya Salaam, Gael Reagon, Rotimi Fani-Kayode, Zackie Achmat,
Chimurenga 3 – Biko in Parliament (November 2002)
By Chimurenga / September 3, 2020
“Mandela was not the only head of state taken in by Koagne. Le king kept snapshots of himself with many a man of power, among them Mobutu Sese Seko and Denis Sassou Nguesso […]
Chimurenga 2 – Dis-Covering Home [run nigga run] (July 2002)
By Chimurenga / September 3, 2020
Home, lost and found. Takes by Mahmood Mamdani, Julian Jonker, Henk Rossouw, Binyavanga Wainaina, Gaston Zossou, Haile Gerima,
Chimurenga 1 – Music is the Weapon (April 2002)
By Chimurenga / April 25, 2002
“…The struggle of black people inevitably appear in an intensely cultural form because the social formation in which their distinct political traditions