News & Events, July '07

Chimurenga 11 - Conversations With Poets Who Refuse To Speak. Out now!

The new Chimurenga sounds out on silence: So much has been said about speech: speaking up, speaking for oneself, not being allowed to speak, speaking for the other who'd rather speak for self, but very little is said about the virtue of silence. So much said about making oneself visible, but little said about mining the rich depths of absence. This issue is about silence, disappearing oneself as act. Though it's often one of abdication, could it be defiance, resistance even? - a challenging idea, in a culture where struggle about seeking exposure, giving voice, making visible and all that stuff... Inside: Asef Bayat on the quiet encroachment of the ordinary, Gael Reagon's unsolicited rant to Mr. Prez; serious Melodifius thunkish funk from Geoff Dyer; queries on Queenstown from Sandile Dikeni and Jack Henri Abbott on life in the hole.

Also: Christopher Wise's search for Yambo Ouloguem; Liesl Jobson on bad breasts; Anthony Joseph on the African origins of UFO; Che via Jay Cantor on el comandante’s punitive silence; Achille Mbembe on the death of Um Nyobe; Suren Pillay on making pictures; Nwando Mbanugo on the little red hat of power; Eric Darton on what to say when it’s time to speak; Stacy Hardy on Julius Eastman's caged negratas; Conceição Evaristo on strange fruits; Neelika Jayawardane on Gitmo and Ed Pavlic on unannounced winners.

Images include Ralph Lemon's spaceship drawings, Mario Benjamin's unnamed ghosts, drawings from the Ramallah Underground, and "Declensions in Blue," an essay on what silence looks like featuring images by David Hammons, Gordon Parks, Herve Youmbi and Moustapha Dime. The cover is "Sarkozy, Fanon and the jazz baroness", a remix of the cover art of Monk's Underground.

Get yours from a Chimurenga dealer or subscribe online.

Felasophy & House of Truth - Chimurenga @ Africa Remix & documenta 12

The magazine was launched on Sunday 24 June at the Africa Remix opening with a renegade audio "Felasophy" session featuring Abrahamse's Jafrobeat Ensemble, ranthologist Lesego Rampolokeng; powerhouse polyrhythmic drummer Kesivan Naidoo, Nigerian Afro-soul fusion trumpeter Olufemi Ogunkoya and urban conscious treknology, tricknology and tracknology courtesy of DJ Khenzeroa.

Next up: Chimurenga at documenta 12 in Kassel, Germany. Chimurenga is one of 90 international magazines selected to contribute to this year's "documenta 12 magazines" Catch Chimurenga in-house in Kassel from 2 until 8 July with "House of Truth", an open-house that takes its name from the drinking pit where the makers of the infamous Drum magazine gathered nightly for informal seminars with Can Themba as resident deconstructor. At "House of Truth" fluids, bodies and burning minds coalesce to burning grooves courtesy of DJ Ntone.

More Africa Remixology

Africa Remix continues at the Jozi Art Gallery from June 24 to September 30. Included in the 85-artists-85 countries mix are plenty Chimurenga people: Abu Bakarr Mansaray; Santu Mofokeng; Zwelethu Mthethwa; Goddy Leye and Tracey Rose. Revisit Ashraf Jamal on the bearable lightness of her kiss in Chimurenga Online). And order back issues of Chimurenga here.

Venetian Spats & Igbo-gods

Meanwhile the 52nd Venice Biennale continues in Europe until 21November. Grumblings about Fernando Alvin and Africa Remix man Simon Njami's African pavilion Check List Luanda go on. Ben Davis unpacks the issues and Sindika Dokolo himself hits back - both in Artnet.

Chimurenga regular artist/writer Olu Oguibe is also in on the fray. Striking regal Igbo-god pose on the June cover of Modern Painter, he says: "every investment in ... keeping those works in Africa where people have a chance to experience them without having to first travel to the West is a good investment."

Still more Check List Luanda in Art South Africa v5.4, where "a stink overwhelms Venice."

Alien Nation, Deep Jazz & Black Betty

Art SA also make a play at Afrofuturism with a 1-0-1 and words on Credo Mutwa. For Chimurenga’s take: Credo in Chimurenga February 2007 Online Exclusives with Khulile Nxumalo in the House: "The story of The House of Credo Mutwa is one of the more famous events that happened in Diepkloof. I grew up there and I remember it well, seeing the house razed to rubble". And Julian Jonker’s "Black Street Technology (The Whitey on the Moon Dub)" Chimurenga Vol. 2: Dis-Covering Home.

Alternatively tune into Afrofuturism's root 'n'routes via Pathways to Unknown Worlds (University of Chicago Press ISBN-10: 0-945323-10-7, Spring 2007) a new book that charts philosopher and jazz luna-tic Sun Ra's Afro-astral journey through previously unseen original artwork, unsound ephemera and photographs.

For a truly surreal intergalactic encounter download: John Cage meets Sun Ra, Side B from UbuWeb.

Another speculative sonic fictioneer with a new book out is Kodwo Eshun. In The Ghosts of Songs: The Art of the Black Audio Film Collective (Liverpool University Press ISBN-10: 1-84631-014-8, Spring 2007) he joins Otolith Group co-conspirator Anjalika Sagar to excavate the cine-cultural memory space of 80s black British filmmakers, Black Audio Film Collective and ask: can a past that the present has not yet caught up with be summoned to haunt the present as an alternative?

Download: Handsworth Songs, the Black Audio Film Collective's film essay on race and disorder in 80s Britain.

Closer to home, Jazz drummer and Brotherhood of Breath founder Louis Moholo-Moholo poses a similar question to Eshun's with Hear our Heart's Vibrations, a new jazz big band aimed at deep-breathing "new life into South African jazz."

More Moholo in Chimurenga Vol. 2: Dis-Covering Home : "I always find it so difficult that [view that] King Chris McGregor came along and rescued us like Captain Marvel." And in London at the Vortex Jazz Club, July 4 alongside Orphy Robinson, John Edwards, Jason Yarde and South African sax up-starter Ntshuks Bonga.

Still on South African jazz, Jazz Epistles drummer Makaya Ntshoko, who left the country in 1962 is back with a crew of Swiss cats. Catch him in Grahamstown on 3 July, Johannesburg, Bassline (4 – 6 July) 2007, Nassau Theatre Kaapstad 6 – 8 July and in residence at the District Six Museum 8 – 14 July.

And North Sea Jazz Festival 2007 @ Ahoy, Rotterdam, The Netherlands, Friday 13, Saturday 14 and Sunday 15 July 2007. Skip through the main programme and go straight to Rockin Gospel Blues (with Keb Mo), Kindred Spirits (including Anthony Joseph - featured in Chimurenga 11), Sound Lab with Jamie Lidell and Amon Tobin and The Movie Music Of Spike Lee and Terence Blanchard. Download: Anthony Joseph’s She Swam In Heaven Movie.

Then Betty is back! Betty? "She introduced Miles to Hendrix's music and got him interested in the hardcore rock stuff." - Herbie Hancock. "Betty was a G for real" - Ice Cube. That Betty. Get the first available reissues of her early works or download: "He Was A Big Freak."

More sonic astral travels at the 22nd edition of the MIMI Workshop and Festival in the South of France, from 19-22 July, featuring Pan-Atlantic free jazz explorations from Pathfinder, ethio-jazz-experiments with singer Eténèsh Wassié and Le Tigre Des Platanes, soul from vocal veteran Ethiopian Mahmoud Ahmed, as well as multiple hip-hop slam servers, funk explosions and more.

Still in France French-Malinese rapper Mokobé's just dropped Mon Afrique featuring Salif Keita, 113, Babani Kone, Amadou & Mariam, Seun Kuti, Viviane Ndour, Gohou (Les Guignols D'abidjan), Manu Chao and more.

More collabs: Ishmael, once of POC fame cuts tracks with Swami on their just-dropped Equalize. Also Equaliz-ing are French rap crew A Suivre, Sonia Panesar, Lady Ru, Romesh Chohan, Bobby Panesar, El Feco, Pras, MC Spee of Dreadzone, Yam Boy and Boostylz.

Also maverick Afro-Beat direct from NYC: Antibalas out with Security. Think Tortoise meets Mingus, Can meets Coltrane, James Brown meets Fela. Listen in online.

Goonj, Shout-outs, Calls & Respect

Back in the Postcolony: the CFP: Law and lit conference theorises postcolonial 'Law and Literature' in Durban, South Africa July 8-11, 2007. Speakers: Sarah Nuttall, Mark Sanders, Ashraf Jamal, Monika Reif-Huelser, Patrick Lenta and Faisal Marrouki.

Stay on in KZN for a One-Day Colloquium on Bessie Head @ Centre for African Literary Studies, University of KwaZulu-Natal, Pietermaritzburg on Thursday 12th July, 2007. More Bessie 70th birthday tributes : Gaborone, Botswana: July 5 and 6; Seminar at CALS, Serowe, Botswana: July 15, 16, and 17 and Cape Town, South Africa at the District Six Museum, dates TBA.

Elsewhere: the Sable Litfest runs at Cape Point in The Gambia, West Africa from Friday 13 July to Sunday 15 July 2007. Participating writers include Buchi Emecheta and Chimurenga regular Binyavanga Wainana.

Having already founded literary mag Kwani, Binyavanga Wainana is currently working on Goonj, a "massive internet portal that will archive all the combined past issues of several leading literary magazines". More in his Mail & Guardian column.

As Wainana points out, June was a big month for Nigerian literature. Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie scored the Orange Broadband Prize for Fiction and Chinua Achebe won the 2007 Man Booker International Prize for fiction. Read Adichie's short "Lagos, Lagos" in Chimurenga Vol.8 : We're all Nigerian! , "Half A Yellow Sun/Bloody Nukes" (Chimamanda Adichie Ngozi/Olu Oguibe) in Chimurenga Vol.5 : Head/Body(&Tools)/Corpses and "Groundnuts and Bananas: A Conversation with Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie", Interview with A. Naomi Jackson in Chimurenga Online, December 2005. In Chocolate City? Adichie reads at the TransAfrica Forum, July 1, 2007, 3:30 -5:30 pm, 1629 K Street, NW, Suite 1100, Washington.

Then respect to Ousmane Sembene. The seminal Senegalese filmmaker and writer died on 9 June, 2007, in Dakar, Senegal, after a long illness. He was 84. Peace.

And a filmmakers note: A call out from Centre de Cultura Contemporània de Barcelona. They're selecting independent documentary films and other video works for the 2008 edition of the project OVNI - The Observatory Archives. Themes include: identity and mass media, globalization and resistance heterodoxies and autonomous zones, migration, nomadism and globalization, Foucault, Debord, Said, Burroughs and Deleuze. Works must be submitted in July.