What could the curriculum be – if it was designed by the people who dropped out of school so that they could breathe? The latest issue of Chimurenga provides alternatives to prevailing educational pedagogy. Through fiction, essays, interviews, poetry, photography and art, contributors examine and redefine rigid notions of essential knowledge.
Presented in the form of a textbook, Chimurenga 15 simultaneously mimics the structure while gutting it. All entries are regrouped under subjects such as body parts, language, grace, worship and news (from the other side), numbers, parents, police and many more. Through a classification system that is both linear and thematic, the textbook offers multiple entry points into a curriculum that focuses on the un-teachable and values un-learning as much as it’s opposite.
Inside: Amiri Baraka waxes poetic on the theoretics of Be-Bop; Coco Fusco flips the CIA’s teaching manual for female torturers; Karen Press and Steve Coleman instruct in folk-dancing; Dambudzo Marechera proposes a “guide to the earth”; Dominique Malaquais designs the museum we won’t build; through self-portraits Phillip Tabane and Johnny Dyani offer method to the Skanga (black music family); and Winston Mankunku refuses to teach.
Other contributors include Binyavanga Wainaina, Akin Adesokan, Isoje Chou, Sean O’Toole, Pradid Krishen, E.C. Osundu, Salim Washington, Sefi Atta, Ed Pavlic, Neo Muyanga, Henri-Michel Yere, Medu Arts Ensemble, Aryan Kaganof, Khulile Nxumalo and Walter Mosley amongst others. Cover by Johnny “Mbizo” Dyani.
Botsotso Publishing
Botsotso was launched in October 1994 by the Botsotso Jesters, a poetry performance group, as an insert in New Nation (one of several weekly newspapers established in the 1980’s to reflect debate and report on the struggles for a free South Africa).
Artists were invited to contribute work that challenged accepted and perceived wisdoms – in all areas, of all classes and cultures; Art that would explore our identities and traditions and do so without inhibition – except with regard to crassness or the giving of gratuitous offence! It was also Art that was encouraged to experiment and perfect itself technically.
Botsotso is a coming together of poets, writers and artists who wish to both create Art as well as generate the means for its public communication and appreciation. The publishing house works with inter-action: the different elements of the South African and broader African mosaic colliding and synthesizing – affected both by social forces and each individual’s uniqueness.
