![Sample our Area Studies journals, sign in here to start your access, latest two full volumes FREE to you for 14 days]({"type":"image" , "src" : "/sda/5922/TOC-Subject-Sample-2021-Area-Studies.jpg"})
ABSTRACT
Created in 2002 in Cape Town by Ntone Edjabe, Chimurenga is a multidimensional project that combines a print magazine, a workspace, a platform for editorial and curatorial activities, an online library, and a radio station (the Pan-African Space Station). Based on collaborative ethnographic research with the Chimurenga team, this paper discusses the collection, production and creation of an archive about Pan-African festivals that this collective has developed through their cultural activities. After a brief overview of Festival of Black Arts and Culture (FESTAC) which took place in Lagos in 1977, and the history of Pan-African festivals, I describe the materials collected by Chimurenga and the projects in which they have participated. By following the travelling routes which have led to this informal and unstable collection of materials, I highlight how Chimurenga’s work contributes to challenging the idea of the archive, transformed through their practice into a dynamic and generative medium. I consider how the archive and memory of FESTAC is spread by Chimurenga in global and local spheres, and how it is used to produce new cultural and art forms in the present day, scrambling boundaries between past, present and future to perform a Pan-African transtemporal space in South Africa.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
Notes
1 ‘Across the board: Interdisciplinary Practices’, Sponsored by Guaranty Trust Bank Plc., Organised by Tate Modern in collaboration with Chimurenga, Centre for Contemporary Art, Lagos and Terra Kulture.
2 Online: http://www.chimurenga.co.za/about-us (accessed April 2018).
5 I warmly thank the Chimurenga team and Ntone Edjabe for their generosity and their kind support of my research.
6 For other reflections about art and the archive in South Africa, see also Brenton Maart (Citation2013), which deals mainly with performance and art from colonial and archives of the apartheid, but that proposes interesting common visions on the role of archives history in the present (Maart Citation2013, 35).
7 Ebony, May 1977, ‘29 Days That Shook the Black World’, p. 48.
8 This led to tensions within the organising committee, which was planned to be co-directed with Senegal, to Senghor’s abdication of his position of co-patron, and to his refusal to attend the festival, because of the presence of North African Arab countries.
9 Connecting four main cultural events that took place on the continent after independence, they question how these platforms ‘have played a pivotal role in the development of cultural and political movements in Africa from the 1950s to the present’. See their archive online: http://www.iiac.cnrs.fr/article477.html
10 See Turok Citation2001; Lemanski Citation2004; Miraftab Citation2007. Charlotte Lemanski narrates that ‘post-apartheid Cape Town continues to exhibit ruthless spatial polarization, dominated by the juxtaposition of centrally located affluent suburbs and economic centres alongside poverty-stricken and overcrowded settlements on the city edges’ (Lemanski Citation2004, 103).
11 This brief biography of Ntone Edjabe is based on an interview that I conducted with him in August 2016.
12 For the presentation of Chimurenga by themselves, see their website: https://chimurengachronic.co.za/store/
13 Chimurenga’s description of the Chronic, http://chimurengachronic.co.za/about/
14 See online: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:WikiAfrica
16 We can quote the Congress of Black Writers and Artists that took place in Paris in 1956 and Rome in 1959, and that represents ancestors of Pan-African festivals, like the Pan-African congresses organised at the beginning of the century.
17 See Borggreen and Gade Citation2013.
18 Indeed, the Black Panther Party participated in Panaf 1969 and even if they were not in FESTAC, their routes and actions for liberation struggles are anchored in the history of liberation struggles that Chimurenga unfolds.
19 The Transcription Centre was funded by the Congress for Cultural Freedom (CCF), an organism whose funding and goals actually came from the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency (Moore Citation2002). More information is available on the website of the University of Austin in Texas, where a part of the archive is recorded. https://norman.hrc.utexas.edu/fasearch/findingAid.cfm?eadid=00447
21 See about this event: https://panafricanspacestation.org.za/category/passblog/passnews/page/6/?wpmp_switcher=mobile
22 See Prah Citation2014.
24 As called by previous scholars (Hamilton et al. Citation2002; Isaacman, Lalu, and Nygren Citation2005).
![Supercharge Your Next Research Paper: Research and write your next paper with Jenni AI.]({"type":"image" , "src" : "/sda/112447/MPU-L1HU.png"})