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.
Chronicles of the Road: Five Nations Five Artists by Barnabas Ticha Muvhuti (Arak Collection, 2024)
Barnabas Ticha Muvuthi was the first recipient of the ARAK Collection Art Writing Residency Fellowship, May-November 2023. He researched five artists from five different SADC countries: Rudolf Seibeb (Namibia), Nelly Guambe (Mozambique), Thebe Phetogo (Botswana), Victor Mutale Kalinosi Chishimba (Zambia) and Lutanda Zemba Luzamba (Democratic Republic of Congo).
Barnabas Ticha Muvuthi is Deputy Vice Chancellor of Open Window University for the Creative Arts in Lusaka, Zambia, and is the resident art critic at The Post Newspapers. He was awarded the 2012 CNN African Journalist of the Year for Art and Culture and a Media Institute of Southern Africa award in 2015 for his work in arts journalism