“Goddy Leye has left us.

It was February 19, 2011, shortly after midnight. In Karachi, at the edge of the desert where it never rains in this season, the heavens opened. Rain….”

Dominique Malaquais pays tribute to artist, friend, mentor, comrade Goddy Leye who recently passed away.

Through the annual Prince Claus Award, the Fund honours eleven cultural pioneers, for their outstanding achievements in the field of culture and development.

Chimurenga is honoured to receive the Prince Claus Fund’s 2011 Principal Award, and congratulates the 2011 laureates.  We thank the Prince Clause Fund for their recognition of our work over the past nine years, and are proud to join the list of previous winners.

Most of all, this award honours Chimurenga’s contributors and readers.

Congratulations Chimurenga People.

The next issue of Chimurenga Magazine takes the form of The Chronic, a once-off, one-day-only edition of a speculative, future-forward newspaper that travels back in time to re-imagine the present. Produced in collaboration with Nigeria’s Cassava Republic Press and Kenya’s Kwani?, it is a multi-section broadsheet with news, long-form journalism, comics, sport, art etc. and 100-page books magazine to be released in October 2011, in numerous African cities.

Cassava Republic are now the West Africa distributors of Chimurenga. For orders and info, contact chimurenga@cassavarepublic.biz or visit www.cassavarepublic.biz.

You can also get your Cassava Republic books from Chimurenga now.

“The 2012 presidential election campaign is well under way when Barack Obama succumbs to a sudden heart attack. Vice-President Biden is sworn in as President and the Democratic Party recalls its convention. Jesse Jackson makes a powerful speech proposing that the party adopt Michelle Obama as their candidate. What happens next?”

Get Chimurenga person, Manu Herbstein‘s President Michelle or Ten Days that Shook the World - A subversive political fantasy on Kindle at Amazon (download Kindle for PC free at Amazon’s Kindle web page).

The African Cities Reader is a biennial publication that brings together contributors from across Africa and the world to challenge the prevailing depiction of urban life on the continent and redefine cityness, Africa-style. It is a joint creation of Chimurenga Magazine and the African Centre for Cities at the University of Cape Town.

The second installment of the Reader is centered on the theme ‘Mobilities and Fixtures‘.

“I guess I realised, even then, that I was being asked to be the Sole Brown Representative in a book of essays about JM Coetzee. I couldn’t do it. Instead, I wrote about how that experience taught me a thing or two about the reification of ‘white’ culture by scholars of Southern African literature, via the objectification of JM Coetzee – using his person, as well as his writing.”

Neelika Jayawardane reflects on White Writing, JM Coetzee’s new selection of “winning stories”, African Pens 2011: New Writing from Southern Africa, and her experience at the 2009 Chimurenga Library Sessions over at Africa is a Country. Read it here.