Hélène Michaud
14 December 2011
Chimurenga (‘struggle for liberation’) is an innovative and provocative cultural platform. It is a pan-African magazine, website, and sometimes newspaper that stimulates the free flow of ideas on the continent. Chimurenga is published by Africans, in Africa.
The founder is Ntone Edjabe, a cosmopolitan writer and DJ who grew up in Cameroon, studied in Nigeria and landed in Cape town, South Africa.
Edjabe and Chimurenga received the prestigious 2011 Prince Claus Foundation award for “challenging established ideas and stimulating pan African culture with an unwavering commitment to intellectual autonomy, diversity and freedom.”
Connecting South Africa
Unlike the Dutch cultural foundation, Edjabe does not see himself as a “cultural pioneer”, but primarily as journalist, and secondly as an editor and publisher. “What is perhaps unique is my effort to connect what’s happening culturally in South Africa with what’s happening in the rest of the continent and the world.”
Panafricanism in his view is not a philosophy but rather a practice, in a country as “self-obsessed” as South Africa. “In everything we do, we try to force elements from other parts of he continent. “
A therapeutic endeavour to include South Africa in the family of African nations? This might have been the case when he first arrived in Capetown, he admits, but soon he realized that in the process he was also trying to find himself, on a journey that brought him from francophone Cameroon , to the Lagos of Fela Kuti, and finally , to Capetown.
Professional African
“It’s so easy to come into a place and play the role of the professional African . Many of us do that in Europe. We come here and say ‘we are going to tell you about the real African’, and I think that given the ambiguous relationships that South Africa has had with the rest of the continent, it’s easy to fall in that role.”
Edjabe says he had to resist the temptation to play that role. “What we are doing in South Africa is not about South Africa, it’s about everyone else. It’s not about reconnecting it, because part of the work that needs to be done there is to show that South Africa was never as disconnected from the rest of Africa as people might think.”
New concept
Later, Edjabe started asking himself what he could learn from South Africa.
That was the idea of nation building. Egjabe was born in Douala, Cameroon in 1970, at a time “when political activism had been killed”. He says he had never before encountered the notion of something that was greater than one’s family and country.
In Nigeria and South Africa, he met people who were trying to construct a country, an utterly new concept for him. “I am now taking some of that energy back and reinjecting it in the place I came from. It’s been a reverse process. “
The Chimurenga Chronic is published by Cape Town based Chimurenga publications, in collaboration with Kenya’s literary magazine Kwani and Nigeria’s independent publisher Cassava Republic Press
AllAfrica – All the Time
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Africa: Chimurenga Wins Main Prince Claus Foundation Award