African Small Magazines of the Long Twentieth Century: Archives and Assemblages of Solidarity

In a blurb published on its website, the Cape Town-based literary activist collective Chimurenga describes the motivation behind issue fifteen of its eponymous journal, titled “The Curriculum is Everything”:

Presented in the form of a textbook, Chimurenga 15 simultaneously mimics the structure while gutting it. All entries are regrouped under subjects such as body parts, language, grace, worship and news (from the other side), numbers, parents, police and many more. Through a classification system that is both linear and thematic, the textbook offers multiple entry points into a curriculum that focuses on the un-teachable and values un-learning as much as its opposite.[1]

Asking the reader to consider what a curriculum based not on received notions of knowledge production but rather on its deliberate (in)coherence as lived and emerging, “The Curriculum is Everything” offers an alternative way to register the messy pluriverse of modern experience seen from an African vantage point. By so doing, it unsettles what it terms the “linear and thematic,” even as it inhabits them, prizing open the classificatory systems of colonialist taxonomies. I begin with this brief look at Chimurenga 15 because the issue—like Chimurenga’s work more broadly—demands a reconceptualization of many of the received notions around knowledge production and the worlding of the cartographies of modernity which undergird literary study. Constituted from a textual assemblage which forges a deliberately African mode of transnational radical thought through praxis, Chimurenga’s work is emblematic of the ways in which periodical culture centred on the African continent demands a revitalized approach to literary categories such as “modern” and “transnational” to understand its labor. With its emphasis on a multiplicity of knowledges as the basis through which to understand, articulate, and register the anxieties of a specifically African experience of modernity, Chimurenga and the publications with which it forms a network (publications which include Kwani? [2003–present], Farafina [2004–2009] and which span the African continent, moving across linguistic boundaries), must be seen as resolutely modernist in their experimentalist formations. I view modernism here less as containing within it a set of identifiable formal features aligned to a static geographical mapping or specific historical moment, and more as the aesthetic and literary registration of a specific instantiation of the twinned conceptions modernity and modernization, which continues into the present day and is subtended by what Quijano, Mignolo, and others have termed the colonial matrix of power, or coloniality.[2]

Modernism and modernity have always vexed the African continent’s position.[3] As Will Rea notes:

While African art was allowed aesthetic sensibility (in European markets) largely due to (European) modernism’s appropriation of African art, modernity and the various forms of African modernism were regarded as disruptive categories that reordered long established notions of authenticity. . . . Dependent on a genre and movement that had at its base the pejorative framing of an appropriated African subjectivity, the modern African artist was seemingly stuck in a bind of European opprobrium—neither allowed authenticity or the ability to properly generate the artistic form of the modern nation-state.[4]

It is this insistence on a binary between “traditional” forms of “authentic” art and a notion of the “modern” as derivative of Western (European) forms which defined the relationship with modernism and modernity. Indeed, the coupling of modernist aesthetics with the formation of the nation-state itself points to a significant tension underlying African expressions of modernism, coming from a context in which the nation-state itself functioned as a proxy for the imperial state, its borders driven by the impulse to maximize the extraction of capital. As numerous scholars have noted, despite efforts to forge an “imagined community” as the basis of the nation across the African continent, these themselves remained subject to a kind of agonistics.[5] With the vagaries of arrested decolonization, the persistence of “patrimonial” models of social production, and what Ekeh has referred to as the “two publics” of the African continent, the differential functioning of the social and political across African contexts was nonetheless assimilated into a teleological narrative of modernism/modernity rooted in the developmentalist narratives which underpinned the violence of coloniality.[6] As Gikandi notes, “African discourses in the nationalist period were compelled to draw a fine line between imperialism and modernity. Pan-Africanist manifestos in the early twentieth century were as unanimous in their critique of imperialism as they were enthusiastic in their endorsement of modernization.”[7] The result, then, was a mode of aesthetic expression whose own autonomy was continually denied, a characteristic which continues to mark extant discussions of African literary and cultural production.

Much has been written about the ways in which the major periodicals of the early twentieth century in both the Anglophone and Francophone spheres (Présence Africaine [1947–2018], Black Orpheus [1957], Transition [1961]), traversing literary public networks alongside glossies such as Bingo (1953) and Drum (1951), contributed to the constitution of a transnational Black modernism whose reach spanned across the African continent and its diasporas. As has been noted, this is a form of modernism which brings together the aesthetics of Léopold Senghor, Léon Gontran Damas, and Aimé Césaire’s burgeoning Négritude movement with the aesthetics of the Harlem Renaissance with the new formalisms that arose in West Africa through the assimilation of the novel form with indigenous aesthetic and storytelling traditions, and more. Bulson, for instance, describes the small (or little) magazine in Africa as “a strange amalgam of print media (newspapers, pamphlets, academic periodicals), something that could only emerge in the post-war conditions when independent nations were being born out of the wreckage of collapsed empires and a modernist magazine culture that was already a thing of the past.”[8] For Bulson, the small magazine on the African continent holds the peculiar distinction of functioning as an emerging instantiation of an essentially residual form. Yet, there is another way to approach these textual forms which foregrounds the multiple genealogies which gave rise to the small magazine in the African context, involving multiple strands of print culture including pamphlets, market literature and the press, but also calling upon a range of intellectual and aesthetic traditions as part of its negotiation of modernity at large. Characterized by various modes of elasticity and a refusal to easily conform to the tradition-modernity binary so often ascribed to African cultural production, this view enables a perspective in which small magazines function as a site of negotiation firmly rooted in a transnational trafficking of ideas, images, genres and forms but centred resolutely on the African continent.

The university-based small magazine of the 1960s and 1970s, especially in Eastern Africa, served as one significant platform through which these processes can be ascertained. Chief amongst these publications were Busara (1967, originally titled Nexus and based at University College Nairobi), Umma (1967, originally titled Darlite and based in the Department of Literature at University College Dar es Salaam) and Dhana (1958, originally titled Penpoint and published out of Makerere University in Kampala, Uganda). These periodicals, published under the auspices of the East African Publishing House and, later, East African Literature Bureau, formed important nodes in the larger literary landscape which traversed the African continent at the time. With contributors drawn from across the African continent (though concentrated in Eastern Africa) and, to a lesser extent, its diasporas, featuring material in English and Kiswahili, university-based small magazines drew together a range of writing including poetry, fiction, and essays which attempted to navigate the position of the educated young class of Africans coming of age after independence. These texts display a range of idioms drawn variously from realist, figurative, and oral aesthetic traditions, melding genres and forms to produce textual archives which speak to the lived experiences of new and developing urban classes.

One example of the aesthetic modes which constituted this archive can be seen in the editorial to volume three, issue one of Busara, which takes the form of an extended lyric poem.[9] With allusions to the “the foetus from Kampala” of national-cultural development and a range of reference which encompasses both the so-called “great tradition” of Anglophone letters favoured by the university curriculum throughout the 1960s, another logic is nonetheless evident within “Editorial.” This logic turns away from the colonial paradigm and its attendant geographies to seek a form of self-fashioning—or “self-actualisation,” as its stanzas state—which moves beyond the boundaries of a normative Enlightenment-derived conceptual apparatus in order to remap the topographies of literary commitment. Citing figures including Robert Serumaga, founder of the National Theatre and known for his play with narrative absurdism, Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, Grace Ogot, and Okot p’Bitek and his fictional figures Ocol and Lawino, the range of reference in “Editorial” indicates an allegiance to a different kind of idiom or discursive tradition than that supposed by readings of African modernisms as derivative of European forms, evidenced in its final stanza:

As we return to the shadows, singing songs of dead lambs,

examining the Experience(s) we have brought forth and taking

the Last Word(s) about them, we may

falter, but I suppose it is O.K. for even when

there is no bride price we still go, for even the

old generator will start. Of course it will electrocute a

few but that is fine. But since Africa is kind,

let us allow Lawino to remain with her sages in

the limbo, at least if she would not stand the city.

After all, certain violinists still meditate down

there (although these days I hear we can have

limbos without graves!).

Operating within multiple frames of knowledge production, the editorial may thus be read as invoking specifically localized images, figures and idioms inflected by the aesthetic forms of modernism under the purview of a specifically Eastern African mode of transnationalism whose topographies gesture towards a longer history of interconnectivity and solidarity which colonialist paradigms of knowledge production cannot fully admit.

While sometimes showing a more heavy-handed mode of moralism in their orientation, the writings published in university-based periodicals also demonstrated different forms of experimentation in expression, drawing on symbolism, images and voice to construct competing—sometimes complementary, sometimes contradictory—visions of modern African life. As Helgesson notes, literary magazines materialize “forms of uneven exchange between literatures that are always ongoing but seldom made as graphically visible.”[10] Taken in this light, small magazines operate as particularly important sites for the registration of a modernity arising from the specific conditions of (post- or de-)coloniality as lived and felt from an Africa-centred point of origin. Yet, this process is anything but straightforward, troubling the allegedly neat binaries of core and periphery, metropole and colony implied in analyses of the small magazine as a global form. As Gikandi notes, “the colonial process presented an interpretative enigma” because, while it “[o]stensibly . . . touched on every aspect of social political life on the continent . . . its impact also seemed to be superficial because, in spite of the predominance and preponderance of colonial modernity, so-called traditional society seemed to function as if the colonial event was a mere interruption in the longue durée of African history” (Gikandi, “African Literature,” 382).  For Gikandi, this epistemological multiplicity resulted in a situation in which “the simultaneous existence of a modern and traditional world could only be negotiated through works of the imagination” (382). What emerges in the university small magazine, then, is a sense of participation in what James Ogude characterizes as the larger “critique of a European idea of difference and by extension universalism which had been at the centre of modern philosophy in Europe for decades and found its way into Africa through colonialism.”[11] Operating at their peak during the same period as Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, Taban Lo Liyong, and Henry Owuor-Anyumba’s position paper, “On the Abolition of the English Department” (1972), these small magazines were part of a larger project which attempted to navigate the terms and boundaries of the modern experience as felt from and centred on the African continent, a project which, as Ato Quayson reminds us, is fundamentally a question of epistemological negotiation. As Quayson notes, if writers both established and emerging in this period “made gestures towards Modernism, it was not in the form of a mimicry of western forms, but because those forms revealed a sense of things that the African writer felt could be appropriated and cross-mapped onto the African structures of feeling undergoing transformation via the inescapable cultural exchanges with the west.”[12] These periodicals, rather than simply operating as “a backwards glance at Anglo-European modernism in the postwar years,” as Bulson characterizes African small magazines, were part of “a project of restoration, the struggle to wrest the space upon which black aesthetics could be celebrated, unfettered,” gesturing towards a fundamental “aesthetic pluralism” which is not incompatible with the modernist forms of the university journal or literary periodical where to urge to “think otherwise” remains an open, if vexed, horizon (Bulson, Little Magazine, 26; Ogude, “Emergence of Local Patronages,” 17).

University-based small magazines of the 1960s and 1970s registered a felt tension in the struggle to “think otherwise” towards a mode of Africa-centred modernist self-fashioning rooted in the immediate experience of political decolonization. Inevitably, this was a context tied to the binaries of imperial cartographies even as it struggled to decenter them. By contrast, the twenty-first century has seen the emergence of a range of small magazines whose aesthetic and epistemological position is far more overtly radical in their reordering of the topographies of space and time. Here, I return to the penultimate issue of the Chimurenga journal, number fifteen, with which I began. As alluded to in its official description, “The Curriculum is Everything” opens with two radically dissimilar modes of ordering, each of which both inhabits and prizes open the categorical logic of coloniality. The first of these, a thematic contents section, is followed by “Contents II,” a play on the indexical logic of taxonomies which fall apart under the weight of their sheer internal multiplicity. Across hundreds of classifications which include entries such as “BODY PARTS: Touch @ own risk: HANDS, wringing of,” “WEAPONS: Not for the risk-averse: ELUCRUBRATION” and “NEWS FROM THE OTHER SIDE: Risky business: PROPHECIES,” each classificatory headword lists one or more text from within the issue under its scope. The result, taken together, is a visualization of the impossibility of singular models of classification and the sprawling spatiotemporal networks which define the issue’s attempts to think otherwise. This is re-emphasized in a text printed under an asterisk following this second contents table’s own title:

The moral of this story is at the beginning. It goes something like this:

the needle is the spear of our nation, you know as well as i this is true; in the midst of their election, you see them holding up an elephant with only their little pinkie; with only their little pinkie, they can invent lies; they know very well that you and i never learned to truly listen.

our schools are haunted by ghosts; classrooms are packed full of the skeletons of education; cocks no longer deign to croak in the morning, scared to make a noise; so now in the morning we are woken up by the heavy weight of our pockets; with the heavy weight in our pockets, we like to buy ourselves lies; we like very much how this nice time of ours is having its way with us.

why don’t i learn myself, turn myself into a knife, learn to flash my sharp edge; the darkness is here and it is so loud.[13]

In addition to new and previously-published pieces, material includes audio and visual elements drawing on Grace Jones lyrics, cartoon versions of stories by Dambudzo Marechera and schematic drawings. Textual pieces include a dazzling array of genres incorporating things published long before, spanning a range of reference that includes the constitution of Haiti, Ayi Kwei Armah, Amiri Bakara, Okot p’Bitek, Fela Kuti; life writing, fiction, poetry, creative non-fiction, works which defy genre and span several, visual narratives, texts which inhabit the so-called reason and logic of coloniality. Across the many texts contained in the volume, “The Curriculum is Everything” foregrounds what Glissant once called the trace, that which “as opposed to systematic thought, acts as a wandering that guides us,” a kind of worldedness in which difference, rather than the universal, is allowed to maintain its irreducible form.[14] This is a pluriverse of knowledges, some made more or less visible by the colonial matrix of power, but which continue to reverberate as part of a tout monde whose wholeness does not imply the domination of an undifferentiated totality. This is a wholeness, moreover, constituted from a (re)mapping of the world, centred on Africa and oriented towards the forging of heterogeneous solidarities whose multiple centres span the continent and its diasporas without necessitating a routing through the Euro-American core of the colonial matrix of power. As an “archive of the present,” or “a site for the validation and recording of fragments of social histories, experiences, and spaces that often remain off the pages of ‘official’ archives,” “The Curriculum is Everything” encapsulates a mode of claims-making that operates through the transnational deployment of a circuit of modernist aesthetic imagination.[15] It is further of no little consequence that “The Curriculum is Everything,” like many of Chimurenga’s recent projects, appears in the form of print. While the twenty-first century has seen a proliferation of what has been termed the “digital litmag,” Chimurenga, like many other African small magazines, has maintained an allegiance to print as a critical mode of circulation and documentation.[16] Through its own circuits of production and transmission, in turn, this produces an otherwise-thought worlding of the world. The small magazine, then, becomes less important for its ability to transport an a priori form of modernist expression to the peripheries of the world-system and more vital for its ability to shift, mutate and produce transnational networks and platforms which think space-time differently. A mode of thought which is not inevitably centred on the colonial question, but rather on a plurality of topographical orderings of which it is simply one and which, ultimately, return the African continent—and the very specific regionalisms and transnationalisms therein—to the center, the small magazine remains a critical site for solidarity-formation and the projection of other conceptions of the world.