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.
Set in 2019, Volume 1 opens with the discovery of the mutilated body of a middle-aged white woman in the basement of Shalom Court, an abandoned block of flats in Yeoville, Johannesburg. What follows is both the struggle to identify the victim and the hunt for the killer. En route, various characters – neighbours, cops, property owners, municipal officials, as well as past and present residents of the building – co-operate or clash in terms of their own agendas and concerns.
“Utilizing brutal realism and satire, with touches of the fantastical, The Chronicles of Shalom Court delves into contemporary South Africa by cutting across cultures and classes. Its fictional universe is populated by every stratum of society fleshed out in a blend of social encodings, tonal registers and individual eccentricities. Examining competing notions of sanity, the extremes of violence and gender relations, political and bureaucratic corruption, racist phobias and everyday struggles for survival, this is truly a work of the neo-colony.” – Andries Walter Oliphant
_________________