Fresh off its Euros prize from its €100,000 prize from the Dutch Prince Claus Fund, Chimurenga launched “The Chronic” yesterday:

Chimurenga’s new publishing project takes the form of a once-off, one-day-only edition of a fictional newspaper to be released on “Black Wednesday”, October 19th 2011 – a historic day in South Africa that marks the banning of numerous Black Consciousness organisations and independent newspapers by the apartheid regime. Please see attached for more details.

Titled the Chimurenga Chronic, the project is an intervention into the newspaper as a vehicle of knowledge production and dissemination. Editor Ntone Edjabe explains, “Knowledge produced by Africans is always curtailed towards simplicity because we are trapped in the logic of emergency. At Chimurenga we’re constantly trying to create beyond this shut hole of relevance. There is indeed famine and war but there is also life. There is also innovation, thinking, dreams – all the things that make life. Our project is to articulate this complexity.”

With over 90 contributors, The Chronic is a pan African production that locates itself directly inside the crisis of relevance by provoking and challenging mainstream perceptions, accounts, representations and narrations of history.

“The objective is not to revisit the past to bring about closure,” says Edjabe, “but rather to provoke and challenge our perception, in order to imagine a new foundation from which we can think and act within our current context.”

Here.

Further Reading

Goodbye, Piassa

The demolition of an historic district in Addis Ababa shows a central contradiction of modernization: the desire to improve the country while devaluing its people and culture.

And do not hinder them

We hardly think of children as agents of change. At the height of 1980s apartheid repression in South Africa, a group of activists did and gave them the tool of print.