Chimurenga Chronicle - call for classified

Chimurenga Magazine’s next publishing project is 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.

Produced in collaboration with Nigeria’s Cassava Republic Press and Kenya’s Kwani?, it is a multi-section broadsheet with news, long-form journalism, comics, sport, art etc. and 100-page books magazine to be released in September 2011, in numerous African cities.

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 is one such machine. Back-dated to the week May 18-24 2008, it’s situated during the first week of the so-called xenophobic violence in South Africa, two years ago – but it focuses outward, covering the events, scenes and situations around the world during this period.

As part of the project we view the newspaper classifieds section as a literary and art platform; a public space that delights in prescience, precision, and provocation and uses wit as a formidable weapon against the tyranny of everyday banality. Yes, it sells out – it sells out big. It sells everything from undying love to first editions of Fanon, from rhetorical job offers to shards of hope.

We therefore invite submission of 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.

All classifieds submitted should be no longer than 50 words and should relate to the week May 18-24 2008.

Email chimurenga@panafrican.co.za for queries.

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Battlefield Of Life

BY SECHABA ‘LYRICAL BACTERIA’ KEKETSI

I send you out to battlefield of life
To kiss the lips of victory not defeat
First dine with me
Let your concentration
Be your fork and knife
Lessons from grandmother’s whipping
Be your table manners
As I serve you this meal of life
“Man’s greatest weapon remains his mind
But if polished with misconceptions, keeps him blind
Seek no path in dark forests of stereotypes
Feed your compass from the well of wisdom
Do not follow majority, even with their funky hairstyles
As they seek to brainwash you, “that majority rules”
Beware of the sharks of betrayal
Mount your surveillance cameras as your judgment
Set it to right levels sensitivity
Treat everyman’s existence with respect
But refrain from dancing to rhythm of fear
Fear no man but respect all
Survival is of those who dance tango with their minds
At the right pace
Let minds intertwine, combine forces
For no man is a repository of wisdom
Share with your brethren, when necessity rises
No man is an Ireland
Pay no attention as temptation
Sways her voluptuous hips
To the rhythm of your enemies’ footsteps
As they run to feed
On your soul and sanity
Now and then pay ciphers a visit
Drop a verse or two
Only when the beat boxer
Understands your goal and pace of life.
©Sechaba Keketsi