Chimurenga & Ntone Edjabe

Chimurenga & Ntone Edjabe South Africa/Cameroon Chimurenga (‘struggle for liberation’ in Zimbabwe’s Shona language) is an innovative, Pan African, cultural platform based in South Africa. It was founded by Ntone Edjabe (1970, Douala, Cameroon), a writer and DJ, who attended the University of Lagos but was ‘educated’ by Nigerian musician and radical thinker Fela Kuti. Edjabe relocated to Cape Town in 1993 and set up the Pan African Market as a space for a free flow of ideas and projects in a context marred by xenophobia. In 2002 he launched the Chimurenga magazine to stimulate original perspectives on the contemporary African experience. It offers fresh interpretations, analyses, poetry, experimental texts and visual materials by leading creative thinkers and radical practitioners in a multiplicity of disciplines from Africa and elsewhere. Its titles include ‘Music is The Weapon’, ‘Futbol, Politricks and Ostentatious Cripples’, ‘Black Gays and Mugabes’ and ‘The Curriculum is Everything’. Chimurenga magazine’s 2,500 print-run is distributed to enthusiastic followers in African countries and internationally. Selected articles are posted on Chimurenga’s website and available as ‘pocket literature’. Making strategic use of media and collaborations, Chimurenga’s activities include two editions of the Pan African Space Station, a 30-day series of performances and radio broadcasts expanding notions of African music. The Chimurenga Library, a unique collection of independent African cultural periodicals, is accessible online and tours as an exhibition. Chimurenga Sessions are interventions in public spaces, one notable example being a demonstration of the politics of archiving in Cape Town’s Public Library indicating connections between conventionally quarantined classes of knowledge. Chimurenga co-produces: the biennial African Cities Reader, re-interpreting urban forms, with the University of Cape Town’s African Centre for Cities; the Chimurenga Chronicle, re-examining the xenophobic violence of 2008 in a global context, with Kenya’s Kwani Trust and Nigeria’s Cassava Republic Press; and Pilgrimages, an attempt to counter media distortions through literary authors, with the Chinua Achebe Centre for African Writers and Artists. Chimurenga’s network of cutting-edge contributors has gained an audience that includes public intellectuals, social leaders and activists who are instrumental in shaping Africa’s trajectory. Ntone Edjabe and Chimurenga are honoured for the outstanding quality, originality and impact of their productions, for challenging established definitions and segregations of knowledge and expression, for stimulating Pan African culture and development in a global context of rising xenophobia, and for their unwavering commitment to intellectual autonomy, diversity and freedom.