The Financial Times has a write-up of Chimurenga Chronicle, the South African-based journal founded by a Cameroonian named Ntone Edjabe. Writer Simon Kupar betrays head-slapping condescension in his review, but his enthusiasm is significant all the same:
I read it and was staggered. I’d always thought the zenith of journalism was The New Yorker, but in parts, Chimurenga is better.
It’s also more surprising: I love well-off media types from New York or London, but by now we do tend to know how they think. By contrast, reading Chimurenga you keep thinking, “Who knew?” Who knew that (as one article recounts) Bloemfontein has a literary scene of authors and critics writing for no money, guided by a Nigerian immigrant, and headquartered in an Afrikaans literature museum? Chimurenga changes your view of Africa, and of journalism.
What is particularly interesting is Kupar's conversation with Edjabe about the unexpected challenge in curating a journal of Africans writing about Africa:
Often, African writers and journalists take their lead from depictions of Africa by white foreigners. Edjabe says, “Whatever was considered an important book had to be validated first by the Guardian.”
Yet Chimurenga isn’t particularly anti-colonial. That time has passed. Edjabe says, “You are not writing about the white man. That’s not the person you grew up with. This is not the person I have a beef with. The guy I have a beef with is the shebeen owner.”
Alas, there is no mention of Kwani?, the journal out of Kenya that casts its net equally wide, risking not only literature, but tough narrative and visual journalism: see, for example, 24Nairobi, or Kenya Burning, the book on the post-election violence. Or the twin journals delving into the "epochal first 200 days of 2008" and exploring ethnicity in a travel piece set in Uganda. This is especially weird because Billy Kahora, the editorial director of Kwani, gets a shout-out in the Financial Times article for writing in Chimurenga about "the decaying Nairobi neighbourhood that ... turns into a metaphor for modern Kenya." And Kwani collaborates in the physicial publishing of Chimurenga, along with Nigeria's Cassava Republic Press. But there does happen to be a nice overlap: Kwani is launching Chimurenga in Nairobi this April, with an accompanying exhibition. Allies on the new frontier. Enough stories for all of us to tell.
Perhaps Chimurenga is art, or else it’s just as good. Like the new French magazine XXI, Edjabe has found something that print does better than the internet: long-form journalism. It makes you almost proud to be a journalist.
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