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

Not exactly at arm’s length

Despite South Africa’s ban on arms exports to Israel and its condemnation of Israel’s actions in Palestine, local arms companies continue to send weapons to Israel’s allies and its major arms suppliers.

Ruto’s Kenya

Since June’s anti-finance bill protests, dozens of people remain unaccounted for—a stark reminder of the Kenyan state’s long history of abductions and assassinations.

Between Harlem and home

African postcolonial cinema serves as a mirror, revealing the limits of escape—whether through migration or personal defiance—and exposing the tensions between dreams and reality.

The real Rwanda

The world is slowly opening its eyes to how Paul Kagame’s regime abuses human rights, suppresses dissent, and exploits neighboring countries.

In the shadow of Mondlane

After a historic election and on the eve of celebrating fifty years of independence, Mozambicans need to ask whether the values, symbols, and institutions created to give shape to “national unity” are still legitimate today.

À sombra de Mondlane

Depois de uma eleição histórica e em vésperas de celebrar os 50 anos de independência, os moçambicanos precisam de perguntar se os valores, símbolos e instituições criados para dar forma à “unidade nacional” ainda são legítimos hoje.