Chimurenga Chimurenga
Chimurenga is a pan-African platform of writing, art and politics founded by Ntone Edjabe in 2002. Drawing together myriad voices from across Africa and the diaspora, Chimurenga takes many forms operating as an innovative platform for free ideas and political reflection about Africa by Africans.
Chimurenga’s outputs include a broadsheet titled The Chronic; The Chimurenga Library; African Cities Reader; and the Pan African Space Station (PASS). The Chronic is a gazette born of an urgent need to write our world differently, to begin asking new questions, and old ones anew. The Chimurenga Library is an ongoing intervention into knowledge production and an archive that seeks to re-imagine the library as a laboratory for curiosity, new adventures, critical thinking, daydreaming, socio-political involvement, partying, or just random perusal. The library and archive can be investigated as both conceptual and physical spaces in which memories are preserved, history is written, and both are reactivated. 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 and the African Centre for Cities at the University of Cape Town. Founded in 2008 by Chimurenga in collaboration with musician and composer Neo Muyanga, the Pan African Space Station (PASS) is a periodic, pop-up live radio studio, a performance and exhibition space, a research platform and living archive, as well as an ongoing, internet-based radio station.
The aim of these activities is not just to produce new knowledge, but rather to express the intensities of our world, to capture those forces and take action. Chimurenga aims not only for a new set of questions but its own set of tools; new practices and methodologies that allow us to engage the lines of flight, fragility, precariousness, as well as joy, creativity and beauty that defines contemporary African life.