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.
Invisible Inventories – the Zine! (Iwalewa Books, 2021)
Published by iwalewabooks (Bayreuth/Johannesburg) and Kwani (Nairobi), the contributions from IIP members and Kenyan museum professionals and practitioners critically reflect museum and restitution politics but also the limits of the cooperation between African and Europeans museums. Besides conversations, essays and texts that accompany the artworks in the exhibition with the same title, the publication also contains a number of object biographies written by different authors that provide different perspectives on the very same objects.
The zine supports the decolonising approach of the project by providing perspectives yet underrepresented in international discussions and aims to contribute to the debate on colonial histories that are inscribed in collections and museum.
With contributions by The Nest Collective, Jacky Kwonyike, Leonie Chima Emeka and Niklas Obermann, Chao Tayiana Maina, Sam Hopkins and Simon Rittmeier, George Abungu, Marian Nur Goni, Juma Ondeng', SHIFT Collective, Leonie Neumann and Frauke Gathof, Clara Himmelheber, Philemon Nyamanga and Lydia Nafula, Philip Jimbi Katana, Wandile Kasibe.