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.
Chimurenga Chronic: We Make Our Own Food! (April 2017)
Food is largely presented as scarcity, lack, loss – Africa’s always desperate exceptionalism or exceptional desperation or whatever. In this issue, we put food back on the table: to restore the interdependence between the mouth that eats and the mouth that speaks, and to delve deeper into the subtle tactics of resistance and private practices that make food both a subversive art and a site of pleasure.
The aim, of course, is not to dismiss the questions raised by food insecurity, but rather to complicate them, to cook and serve them differently. Necessarily, it must be done with close attention to the mouth – to the feelings of words and sounds on the tongue, and to the fingers, too. Taste, not hunger for the word alone, compels the eating.
With contributions from Yemisi Aribisala, Moses März, Rustum Kozain, Desiree Lewis, Harmony Holiday, Stacy Hardy, Zayaan Khan, Adji Dieye, Bwesigye Bwa Mwesigire, Fungai Machirori, Shoks Mzolo, Isaac Otidi Amuke, Bongani Kona, Kwanele Sosibo, Thabo Jijana, Paula Akugizibwe, Akin Adesokan, Harry Garuba, Billy Kahora, Barbara Wanjala, Kodwo Eshun, Saki Mafundikwa, Oris Aigbokhaevbolo, and many more.