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.
I Lost a Poem by Mzwandile Matiwana (Deep South, 2005)
The poems in Mzwandile Matiwana's first book cover a range of subjects, including love, prison, poverty, and religion. Mzwandile Matiwana's poems are deeply felt lyrics, displaying surprising shifts of tone. Many of them were written from prison. They cover a range of experience - love, prison life, poverty, religious feeling - with rawness and delicacy.
Mzwandile Matiwana was born in 1967 in Port Elizabeth, and writes in both English and Xhosa. His poems have been published in Kotaz, New Coin, Timbila, Botsotso, Fidelities, donga, southernrain, Carapace and Sweet. He is a member of the UWA Writers Group in New Brighton and has run creative workshops with children at the St. Christophers Street Children Shelter and Ethembeni Enrichment Center.