Chimurenga 15 – The Curriculum Is Everything (June 2010)

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.

Surplus Values by Ari Sitas (October 2025)

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The 10th poetry book by Ari Sitas digs deeper into the atrocity we have become. Are there ways so that words can express the wanton violence and killing, even the current genocide, without losing hope? How do we create values and solidarity when our navigating systems are being trashed and rendered surplus? Is there a breathing space left on this continent and especially on this southern-most tip? Is our poetry and music part of a regrettable failure? In his last work, Mapping Gondwana (2022) we were left knee-deep in water in deep tunnels hoping that our verse was seeding. We could still hear the screaming outside their walls. In this collection he dares to take us to the sources of such sounds. Poetry was and is, hard work.

Size: 138mm x 197mm

Pages: 108pp (plus cover)

Printing: black and red, with illustrations, Munken Pure 90gsm with Risograph

Language: English

ISBN: 978-1-0492-0427-7