Chimurenga! The Shona cry of defiance, freedom and celebration. Chimurenga! A musical sub-genre melding African and western (read American, and/or European) styles. Chimurenga! The name of a long-standing, independent, Cape Town-based print and pixel publication of quality literature.
The publication’s next project is a doughy mix of metaphors that climbs right out of the cookie cutter, merges modes and muddles timelines. It wants your words as one of its ingredients. Scribes, soothsayers and naysayers, you are invited to de-scribe the world as you (would have) imagined it in the form of past-tense, future-sensitive classified ads.
Ever wanted to write an obituary for someone that wasn’t born? Ever wished you’d sold that old bicycle instead of letting it rust along with your memories? Ever pondered who you’d be (with) today if you had taken a personal ad out instead of mentioning it as a passing joke? Ever wondered how the job market would look if telemarketers told you how they were feeling today? That’s the spirit.
Chimurenga Newsroom explains “The current tools we have at our disposal, particularly in the area of knowledge production and dissemination, don’t help much to grasp contemporary reality. What we need is a Time Machine! A device that will allow us to understand the numerous different temporalities, dispersed entanglements and overlapping time-spaces that define today. The Chimurenga Chronicle - a once-off, one-day-only edition of a speculative, future-forward newspaper that travels back in time to re-imagine the present.”
Say what? While everyone is trying to be the first to get newly published or released material, Chimurenga Chronicle is back-dated for retrospective and future impact. Set in the first week of the “so-called xenophobic violence in South Africa” a couple of years ago, it “focuses outward, covering the events, scenes and situations around the world during this period.”
The publication is asking for “nano-novels, micro-art works, flash poetry, philosophical aphorism, minima moralia, haikus of the heart, found objects and more, for sections including sales, wanted, services, jobs, personals and obituaries.”
Word count : 50, written for the dates May 18-24 2008.
Closing date for submissions : 31 April 2011
Email chimurenga@panafrican.co.za for queries and deadlines.
www.chimurenga.co.za
www.chimurengalibrary.co.za
www.panafricanspacestation.org.za
www.africancitiesreader.org.za
www.pilgrimages.org.za
www.chimurenganewsroom.org.za
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About : Produced in collaboration with Nigeria’s Cassava Republic Press and Kenya’s Kwani?, the multi-section broadsheet will be released in September 2011 across Africa.
