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 When the Fires Go Down, Lesego Rampolokeng writes in the tense after the blaze: the hour of smoke, residue, reckoning, and the dangerous darkness that follows. The title itself carries both foreboding and aftermath—what happens when the flames drop, and what still burns underneath. Across these acute, fiery, unflinching litanies, Rampolokeng brings a relentless gaze to body, history, language, and nation, moving with precision, urgency, and a ferocious musical intelligence. The poems surge from dense, jazz-charged freedom sonics and black radical invocation into historical re-enactment, social-media derangement and repurposing, and hard street-level tribute—to Orlando West, its wounds, its styles, its unfinished struggles, a microcosm of what’s been, what is and what’s to come.
Part prayer, part performance, part poetic treatise, this is a book of conjuring and confrontation: incantatory, improvisatory, and alive with ecstatic wordplay, where high theory and low vernacular collide, where freedom is sung and interrogated, where memory returns as rhythm, scar, and prophecy. Here, Rampolokeng writes from both sides of the tracks at once—A-side and B-side, inside and outside—holding us in that crux until the mirror cracks and history speaks back.
"If there was any doubt about Lesego Rampolokeng’s important place in the literary history and trajectory of this country, the prophetic power and poetic pyrotechnics of his latest offering should be enough to suffocate such spirit of uncertainty for good." Unathi Slasha, author of the novels, Jah Hills and The Hollow Sound of Lightweight Bodies.