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.
Khongolose Khommanding Khommis by Jefferson Bobs Tshabalala (Diartskonageng, 2018)
A unique collaboration between two black-owned, independent creative arts companies, diartskonageng and Kiri Pink Nob. Having worked together as co-producers of the stage production in 2017, Monageng Motshabi of diartskonageng and Jefferson Tshabalala of Kiri Pink Nob decided to publish the script in book form.
This play delves into the very complex world of the lines which blur for persons who have professional interests both in the spheres of Business and Politics. What does it mean to be a Black Business Man, and what does it mean to be a Black Politician, in the contemporary South African climate? Furthermore, which is a question more suited for this play, what does it mean to be both, simultaneously? Khongolose Khommanding Khommissars examines closely this tumultuous duplicity with an incisive flare for the poetics of doggerel and the trappings of revolutionary rhetoric.
The publication also features the "Daddies of Sugar" monologues from Tshabalala's earlier work.