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.
In this memoir of the 1970s in New Brighton – the largest black township built by the apartheid system outside Gqeberha (Port Elizabeth) – family relations and the development of the writer’s political consciousness and organizing abilities at the American-owned Ford Motor Company factory take centre stage. Lyrical and often colloquial, sprinkling his English narrative with isiXhosa, Mpumelelo Cilibe gives us a vivid and very honest picture, both of his personal life and his role as a leading regional activist. Irrespective of where he found himself, he always maintained his independence of thought and action, and by the late 1980s, noting the problematic behaviour of many activists who were ensnared by the apartheid authorities, elected to largely withdraw from political life. The social and literary power of this work thus lies in its description of the challenges of growing up in a period of growing resistance to white rule and shows how a resolute individual navigated extreme currents in order to make a contribution to the general struggle and yet keep his personal integrity.