Chimurenga 15 – The Curriculum Is Everything (June 2010)

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.

Chimurenganyana: The Fear and Loathing Out of Harare by Dambudzo Marechera (2021)

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During April 1985 Dambudzo Marechera began work on a book on Harare, inspired in part by the HS Thompson’s gonzo opus on Las Vegas. Writing that shows how the city held him in precarious balance, homeless at home, a black insider on the outside of the outside. At some point he abandoned the project and the pieces lived in the archives, unloved.

The Fear and Loathing Out of Harare is a selection of these never-published essays, in collaboration with the Dambudzo Marechera Trust, with an afterword by writer Tinashe Mushakavanhu and a map-poster of Marechera’s Harare conceived by the Black Chalk & Co collective.