The Chronic is a one-time only edition of Chimurenga which takes the form of a speculative newspaper. Back-dated to the 18-24 May 2008 – the first week of the xenophobic violence across South Africa three years ago, the Chimurenga Chronicle is an opportunity to provide the depth of reporting and analysis that should have appeared during this period. The newspaper also looks outward – covering events, scenes and situations from around the world during this period. And it launched today!
It was Sun Ra who said it a long time ago: “Equation wise, the first thing to do is consider internal linktime as officially ended… we’ll work on the other side of time… we’ll bring them here through either isotope, internal linkteleportation, transmolecularzation… ” . The time was 1974 and Space was The Place. A prolific jazz composer, bandleader, philosopher, afronaut and historian, Ra was ahead of his time.
Almost four decades later, it is increasing clear that time, once thought continuous, is actually marked by radical disjunctions and overlapping time-spaces. What’s more, the tools we have at our disposal, particularly in the area of knowledge production, do not help us much to grasp that which is emerging.
What we need now is a Time Machine! A device that will allow us to work “on the other side of time”, to discover possibilities for new ways thinking through the “having been and yet to come.”
The Chimurenga Chronicle such a machine, a once-off edition of a speculative, future-forward newspaper that travels back in time to re-imagine the present. Both a bold art project and a hugely ambitious publishing venture, the Chimurenga Chronicle comprises of a 96-page multi-section broadsheet, the stand-alone 56 page Chronic Life Magazine and a self-contained 96 page Chronic Book Review Magazine.
By imagining the newspaper as a low-tech time travel machine, our aim is not only to reanimate history, to ask what could have been done – but also to provide a space from which to re-engage the present and re-dream the future.
The print edition includes a 128-page multi-section broadsheet, packaged with 40 page Chronic Life Magazine and the 96 page Chronic Book Review Magazine.
An intervention into the newspaper as a vehicle of knowledge production and dissemination, it seeks to provide an alternative to mainstream representations of history, on the one hand filling the gap in the historical coverage of this event, whilst at the same time reopening it. The objective is not to revisit the past to bring about closure, but rather to provoke and challenge our perception
Featuring contributions from Mike Abrahams, Olumide Abimbola, Toyin Akinosho, Paula Akugizibwe, Sello Alcock, Max Annas, Gabriela Carrilho Aragao, Ayi Kwei Armah, Sophia Azeb, Robert Berold, Marlon Bishop, Louis Chude-Sokei, Jean Comaroff, John L. Comaroff, Imraan Coovadia, Goran Dahlberg, Kwame Dawes, Jacob Dlamini, Manu Herbstein, Sean Jacobs, Neelika Jayawardene, Billy Kahora, Parsalelo Kantai, Bill Kouèlany, Jackie Lebo, Miles Marshall Lewis, Percy Mabandu, Munyaradzi Makoni, Dominique Malaquais, Lionel Manga and many more
Letter from the Editor in Chief Warren Jeremy Rourke
In the scientific community, the theoretical physicist Max Planck’s dictum is now well known: consciousness is the fundamental; we cannot get behind consciousness. For us today this assertion may seem to be a self-evident truth, an a priori fact of experience, and not altogether a revolution in the structure of knowledge. But the truth is that for the longest time, matter and phenomena were considered to be merely ‘out there’ to be discovered and known – the role of consciousness, was not “fundamental” in scientific method.
For the visual and literary artist, our great project is an altogether opposite one. Our journey is not ‘out there’ in order to know and discover matter and phenomena, so much as it is, an arrival of matter and phenomena into our consciousness. And by the alchemy of representation, to turn these subjective experiences into our works of art, and once more, to deliver them into the consciousness of viewers and readers. And so, Planck’s dictum does, in part, hold true for us in the arts community as well – consciousness is the fundamental, but where we must part ways with this truism – is that the whole duty of the artist is to get behind consciousness. I believe we have an exemplary demonstration of what we are here speaking of, with Hazel Woodward’s paintings. These are no mere objective representations of an ostensible shared reality. No-no, these are something else. Something valuable to the artistic method.
The works of literary art that have gone into the making of this first digital version of the Botsotso Literary Journal – yay! – altogether, expand our horizons of understanding in a world seemingly hell bent on closing consciousness down. Here, the literary pushes the blue sky out of the way, and we magnify the phenomena of our innerverse to see just as stargazers looking at images from the Hubble and James Webb telescopes allow.
I would like – as Dr Mary West once showed me how with the journal we did together – to mention a few specific contributions, coming into their own formations here – but I’m not going to. There are constellations and nebula and the results of supernova, neutron stars and comets and all the wondrous stuff of the universe, right here in this digital creation that I would rather encourage readers, and especially the contributors, themselves to find. To have been able to see these, myself, to have journeyed behind consciousness because of the works of art herein – gosh, just what a thing!
Thank you, all.
Warren Jeremy Rourke
Former Editor-in-Chief