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.
Jah Hills is alone in the Kwafindoda bush, waiting for the elders to come, burn ibhuma and deliver him home when he is tricked, captured and turned into isithunzela. A creature trapped in a wardrobe by day and only freed at night, to move between the realm of the living and the dead. One night, he narrowly escapes and finds his way back. But home is no longer home.
Set between Kwafindoda, where the nature is alive and ghosts exist even before someone is dead, and South Africa's gritty urban townships, Jah Hills explores the conflict between life and death, folklore and philosophy, the extraordinary and everyday so as to write the Unlanguaged World of today.
A breathless journey, at once fevered, visionary and breathtakingly alive, it invites the reader to find wilderness and brutality in the banal, the beautiful in the bizarre and to seek answers, not in the sum, but in the derangement of its many seething parts.