March 16, 2007: Kaapstad!

Chimurenga: Shona for “Struggle”

When I set out for South Africa, I made myself one promise-- to take advantage of all the opportunities available to me. And why not make a few opportunities available to me if they didn’t exactly present themselves?

A seed was planted when a fellow student introduced me to a magazine that focused on certain areas that I was interested in academically. Chimurenga (www.chimurenga.co.za) is a publication of art, culture and politics from and about Africa and its Diasporas. Consciously Pan-African, the range of material is expansive, the voice is definitively radical and each issue captures a critical and controversial theme.

I emailed them my resume and a cover letter explaining my interest. Soon after I received an email back from the editor, Ntone, and we set up a time to meet the next week.

I put on my most respectable outfit (conservative black skirt, button down shirt and heels—tres Banana Republic) and hopped a minibus (nearly broken-down vans crammed with passengers and pumping house music that serve as unofficial public transportation for the whole metropolitan area) into the center of “Kaapstad!” (Afrikaans for Cape Town and what the locals yell out the minibuses to lure passengers aboard)

Finding my way to Long Street—a wide, one-way street lined with cafes, bookstores and bohemian hang-outs—I wandered to the Pan-African Market, which is a three floor building filled with traders selling various arts and artifacts. Chimurenga shares the top floor with a few of these traders and an art gallery. The whole building is overripe with color and by the time I’ve reached the office, my face is also red from the afternoon heat.

I knock on one door, hear,“come in” and am greeted by five painters at their canvases in a cramped studio. Visibly surprised, I apologize and ask for Chimurenga. They all laugh and tell me to go next door but to come back afterwards. I laugh and say maybe I will.

So one door down, I’m greeted by Ntone, the editor, and Rucera, the administrator. Ntone and I hit it off immediately— our conversation spans from publishing to Foucault to New York to feminist theory to French. I’m in absolute awe of this man-- a political activist from Cameroon who began this magazine two years ago completely on his own.

Now each Thursday I travel to the office (where the traders are beginning to recognize me bit by bit and I no longer wear respectable skirts but instead throw on a t-shirt and jeans), and get lost in words. The day stretches out and I enter the myriad that is becoming the upcoming issue, tentatively titled “Conversations With Poets Who Refuse to Speak”:

“An issue on silence and its uses - so much has been said about speech: speaking up, speaking for oneself, not being allowed to speak, speaking for the other who'd rather speak for self, but very little is said about the virtue of silence. So much said about making oneself visible, but little said about mining the rich depths of absence. This issue is about silence, disappearing oneself as act. Though it's often one of abdication, could it be defiance, resistance even? - a challenging idea, in a culture where struggle about seeking exposure, giving voice, making visible and all that stuff...”

Here now, in the office, I type away to the foreign sounds of the city street below me-- completely unlike that of Manhattan where there is order to the noise in some way or at least NYC is a chaos I'm acquainted with. Ntone usually tumbles in around 3 pm, at times I sit here alone, which I relish. To have a private space where I can get inside the work or my own thoughts is a blessing.

But I don’t feel disconnected-- there is always some percussion rising from the street below, a bell or horn or the clicking of tongues. The afternoon sun bounces off the windows of the building across the street from us and lands on the left side of my face, splitting my reflection in two on my computer screen. The walls burst from the heat and the shade of orange they are painted—unhesitatingly gesturing its contents. To paint every one of your walls a bright, robust orange is to say , to shout, "This place is no accident, this place is on purpose, this place has a distinct voice and character and does not ask for approval".

But there is room here, it is not overcrowded with righteousness or ideology or intellectualism-- the high ceilings and the sparse furniture give that feeling. And the windows are always wide open, the small fan always blowing the soft hot air across me. There are no bars on the windows here—another blessing of sorts. Of course, we are three stories up.

The walls are punctuated by newspaper articles, next to blown-up pictures from the magazine, next to political rally posters, next to promotional posters for Reggae shows. Some in English, some in French, I try to decipher their messages, which in either language can be equally opaque: "Quelques questions sure la representation du corps 'africain' sure les scenes occidentales". My French starts and stops..."Some questions on the representation of the "African" body in Western scenes"?
And I'm exhausted by the translation-- of it all. To translate this world into a world I understand. To translate the street into a street I can navigate. To translate the expressions of each person into a smile or a sneer. These are the things that I am undone by.

This place—no, it is in particular my path to Chimu: the heat off the skin of the passengers from the cramped minibus, the tangled maze of the bus station, the earthy smells from the street markets, the bustle of city sidewalks, the lazy business of the traders in our building waiting for customers, the heartbreaking paintings at the top of the stairs—it is beautiful/ugly in the way that I know NYC can be as well. That element comforts me in its familiarity.