Chimurenga (SA) launches THE CHRONIC at Book Cafe
What: Chimurenga (SA) launches THE CHRONIC at Book Cafe
When: Thursday 3 October, 5.30pm
Where: Book Café, 139 S.Machel Ave/6th Street, Harare
On Thursday 3 October, the Book Café Bookshop invites Zimbabweans to the Harare launch of South African magazine “The Chronic” by Chimurenga, an innovative Pan African cultural platform based in Cape Town, whose 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. The launch will be presented by Teresa Ayugi, with a documentary film interview and Question & Answer session.
The Chronic is a quarterly gazette published by Chimurenga. It is a publication born out of an urgent need to write our world differently, to begin asking new questions, or even the old ones anew.
When will the new emerge – and if it is already here, how do we decipher it? In which ways do people live their lives with joy and creativity and beauty, sometimes amid suffering and violence, and sometimes perpendicular to it? How do people fashion routines and make sense of the world in the face of the temporariness or volatility that defines so many of the arrangements of social existence here?
These questions loom over a contemporary Africa. Yet most knowledge produced on the continent remains heavily reliant on simplistic and rigid categories unable to capture the complexities that inflect so much of contemporary life here.
The Chronic is one small, deeply subjective attempt to do things differently. They recognised the newspaper – a popular medium that raises the perennial question of news and newness, of how we define both the now and history – as the means to best engage the present; this question of thinking and writing critically about contingency and human agency today. They selected the medium both for its disposability and its longevity, its ability to fashion routine in a way that allows us to traverse, challenge and negotiate liminality in everyday life.
They favoured writing, art and photography that is open, plural, and inflected by the workings of power, innovation, creativity and resistance, and arrived at “a gazette, a collaborative living document that seeks out our capacity to continually produce something bold, beautiful and full of humour. We titled it the Chronic, a nod to both the art of chronicling, of documenting historical events in real time (the time-zone we call ‘now-now’), and because things are, well yes, chronic.”