Press Release: AfricAvenir Namibia announces partnership with Chimurenga

Windhoek, March 06, 2014- A number of selected publications from Chimurenga are now in Namibia and will be available at the different AfricAvenir film screenings and events.
Chimurenga is a project-based mutable object, a print magazine, a workspace, and platform for editorial and curatorial activities. (See: http://www.chimurenga.co.za/).

On behalf of Chimurenga, AfricAvenir will make two of these "mutations" of Chimurenga: Chronic (Cost: N$120) and Chimurenganyana (Cost: N$40) available to Namibians at every AfricAvenir events.

The Chronic, offers forays into interlaced subjects of power, resistance, protest, mobilisation, mobility and belonging. Marked by an urgency to unsettle divides between opportunism and opportunity, life and liberation, here and there, and then and now-now, the newspaper acts as a platform from which to engage the practices, dilemmas and possibilities of different world. (See: http://chimurengachronic.co.za/)

Issues available are:

April 2013 (Purple)
  
A 48-page newspaper and 40-page stand-alone books review magazine featuring writing, art and photography inflected by the workings of innovation, creativity and resistance.

Jean-Pierre Bekolo, Binyanvanga Wainaina, Dominique Malaquais, Mahmood Mamdani, Andile Mngxitama, Karen Press, Gwen Ansell, Patrice Nganang, Achal Prabhala, Rustum Kostain,  Niq Mhlongo, Paula Akugizibwe, Tolu Ogunlesi, Sean Jacobs, Harmony Holiday, Howard French, Billy Kahora are a few of its many contributors from around the world.

Stories range from investigations into the business of moving corpses to the rhetoric of land theft and loss; from latent tensions between Africa’s most powerful nations to the soft power of the biggest satellite television provider; and from the unspoken history of Rushdie’s “word crimes” to the unwritten history of PAGAD. It also investigates crime writing in Nigeria, Kenya and India, takes score of the media’s muted response to the ‘artistry’ of the World’s No1 Test batsman, rocks to the new sound of Zambia’s Copper Belt and tells the story on one man’s mission to take down colonialisms monumental history.

August 2013 (Green)

This print edition is a 48-page broadsheet, packaged together with the 72-page Chronic Books supplement.

Writers in the broadsheet include  Jon Soske, Derin Ajao, Paula Akugizibwe, Yves Mintoogue, Adewale Maja-Pearce, Deji Toye,  Parsalelo Kantai, Fred Moten & Stefano Harney, Cedric Vincent,  Tony Mochama, Nana Darkoa Sekyiamah, Agri Ismaïl, Lindokuhle Nkosi, Bongani Kona,  Stacy Hardy, Emmanuel Induma, Ugochukwu-Smooth Nzewi, Lolade Ayewudi, Simon Kuper and many others.

The  Chronic Books supplement is a self help guide on reading and writing, with contributions by Dave Mckenzie, Akin Adekosan, Fiston Nasser Mwanza, Yemisi Ogbe, Vivek Nyarangan, Peter Enahoro, Tolu Ogunlesi, Elnathan John, Rustum Kozain, Olufemi Terry, Aryan Kaganof, Rustum Kozain, Harmony Holiday, Sean O’Toole, Gwen Ansell, Binyavanga Wainaina and more.

December 2013 (Orange)

The new edition of pan African quarterly, the Chronic, offers forays into interlaced subjects of power, resistance, protest, mobilisation, mobility and belonging. Marked by an urgency to unsettle divides between opportunism and opportunity, life and liberation, here and there, and then and now-now, the newspaper acts as a platform from which to engage the practices, dilemmas and possibilities of different world.

In its pages writers, photographers and artists from across the pan African world challenge political processes, question identity and interrogate economic justice. South Africa’s EFF articulates a fierce rejection of the official left, aligning itself instead with younger, insurgent forms of resistance. But, asks Kwanele Sosibo, is the new political party fighting or fronting? Rustum Kozain excavates the deeper history underlying Cape Town’s shit protests and Boniface Mwangi pushes the limits of public art to agitate for political change in Nairobi. In addition Paula Akugizibwe exposes the aesthetics of election engineering in Kampala and Kangsen Wakai interrogates Biya’s mouthpiece in Yaoundé.

Then, in a multi-voiced requiem to revolution, Egyptian filmmaker Jihan El-Tahri delivers a paean to the lost dreams and radical ideology of the African independence movements; Mohannad Ghawanmeh mourns the passing of the anti-hero of Egyptian cinema and Youssef Rakha protests with ferocious invention the failure of revolution. Writing from the height of the uprising in Cairo, he engages it as a failure of the imagination and demands a new language by which to address it.

Elsewhere, Louis Chude-Sokei crosses the Atlantic to narrate an intimate family history of splintered identity, shattered ideology, exile and alienation expressed through and beyond the Biafran war; Yemisi Ogbe questions the Nigerian elite’s obsession with birthing Americans and Florence Madenga maps how death in the diaspora disrupts borders and bureaucracy and shows pathways beyond them.

Writing from South Africa, Ronald Suresh Roberts reveals the real failures behind the failed apartheid lawsuit; Bongani Kona investigates the country’s oppressive culture of incarceration; Dudumalingani Mqombothi jousts with stick fighting in Khayelitsha and Tseliso Monaheng crosses the border to document the frontier wars of Lesotho’s “accordions cowboys.”

Chimurenganyana, a pavement literature project consisting of low cost serialized monographs culled from the print journal. The following items are available:

The Forest and the Zoo by Aryan Kaganof
Johnny Dyani offers method to the Skanga (black music family) in this extended conversation with Aryan Kaganof. Photographs by George Hallett.

Rumblin’ by Dominique Malaquais
A text and image reflection on the “Rumble in the Jungle”, the Muhammad Ali / George Foreman boxing match held in Kinshasa in 1974. Norman Mailer started The Fight, Dominique Malaquais punched back.

52 Niggers by Stacy Hardy
A word-sound investigation of unjustly neglected African-American composer Julius Eastman‘s caged negratas. Photographs by Chris Rusiniak and Donald Burkhardt.

The Making of Mannenberg by John Edwin Mason
On a winter’s day in 1974, a group of musicians led by Abdullah Ibrahim entered a recording studio in the heart of Cape Town, and emerged, hours later, having changed South African music, forever…  John Edwin Mason pens notes on the making of the icon and the anthem.

In Search of Yambo Ouloguem by Christopher Wise
Yambo Ouologuem, the Malian author of Le devoir de violence and other literary works, has been shrouded in mystery since he disappeared from the West, effectively turning his back on literature… Christopher Wise goes in search.

Dr Satan’s Echo Chamber by Louis Chude-Sokei
Reggae, technology and the diaspora… Louis Chude-Sokei documents the (un)making of Dr. Satan’s Echo Chamber.

The Night Moses Died by Nicole Turner
“Sleeking through the night city towards Hillbrow, it was Thapelo who asked where we were going and why….” Photographs by Pete Williams, Peter McKenzie

From information taken from Chimurenga and Chimurenga Chronic websites.