kagablog

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Liberated Zones(1): re:visionary inter-textuality in South Africa

The mail arrives in my inbox at 9:35. My mouse reflexes towards the delete button. I pause. The words catch my eyes - “Chimurenga: Cape Town Now! Politics, Music, Culture: An interview with Ntone Edjabe”(2) Cape Town, now? I’m compelled to click, like the millions of computer users who fell into the Lovebug virus’ infamous romantic trap; the personal reference has seduced me.

Yes, I am in Cape Town now. And I am surprised to find my home city mentioned in an email update from Canadian journal Ctheory.net. Not that I should be surprised. Ctheory, “an international journal of theory, technology, and culture” regularly engages with the digital divide between the technologically enabled “virtual class” and it’s “unpluggged” counterparts. It’s just that, all too often, comments and analysis from African writers are mentioned as footnotes, as quotes, as references - rarely as headlines.

This is a headline. Headlining a full interview with Ntone Edjabe, editor-in-chief of Chimurenga. The book-sized arts.culture.politics magazine, that “provides takes on various eish-ues from ‘black secret technology’ to Bantu education and Fela Kuti’s reading habits, plus poetry, interviews, reviews and visuals by writers and artists at the frontlines”, needs very little introduction in Cape Town, South Africa. But to Ctheory’s international readership Edjabe describes it like this: “Chimurenga was created as a platform to end the ‘noise control’ by media monopolies in South Africa.”(3)

It isn’t long before the interview turns away from print. “I am quite interested in the possibilities of new media tools, the ways in which digital resistance such as the blocking of commercial or government websites can begin to factor in bringing about concrete change,” says Ctheory. Before the inevitable: “But, are there such initiatives in South Africa at all?”(4)

Edjabe’s response? “Exchanging revolutionary thought in a tiny circle of net junkies is not my idea of communication,” says Edjabe. “We still use the spoken word, not writing, to articulate our struggles,” says Edjabe. “Many have suggested ‘bringing’ the new tech communication -Web and all - to the people like they ‘brought civilization’ to some of us a few centuries ago,” says Edjabe. “In South Africa, the internet is still mostly used to communicate with the ‘Other,’” says Edjabe.(5)

The words bounce up against the utopian perception of the internet as a “liberated zone” of customised knowledge and demassified engagement and resonate with a low, repetitive clang in an age when the “digital divide” is the topic de rigeur amongst the virtual class.

Don’t we already have far more accessible mediums for tackling hegemonic power in South Africa? Hasn’t South African art and literature historically taken the lead in promoting cultural change? Isn’t there something uncomfortably colonial in the desire to “push”(6) the digital resistance into the African cultural landscape?

A few months later, the questions are still taunting me. Niggling guiltily at my cyber-self as I log online (to talk to the “other”?). A few random clicks lead me www.chimurenga.co.za. Chimurenga’s “free online sibling”, “featuring more takes & talks not published in the print issue. mo’ fiya: water no get enemy.” I stare at my screen. Hit the refresh button, a reflexive digital blink, wondering: have I misunderstood Edjabe’s outspoken stance on digital media?

“Yes, I’ve heard quiet a bit about that Ctheory interview, especially my comments around the development of the internet. Here. Now.” Edjabe smiles. His lips shooting me an ironic twist, “but let’s be realistic. We use computers to publish Chimurenga. We’ll use whatever mediums we can get our hands on. We’ll use whatever tools are available to us. Because we can. And in many ways, many more people have heard about Chimurenga through the internet.”

Mo’ fiya! More fire. And in the ongoing struggle against the hegemony of narrative the frontline has crept stealthily online. Creating blazing pockets of parallel, counter-narratives that rebel against both the flat-line of print and the hype of hypertextuality; licking away at the shock of the “virtual-visceral banal”(7) and burning holes in the utopia of code-language that dominates literary online production amongst the “virtual class.”(8)

Surely it’s no coincidence that Chimurenga - the name is derived from the spoken word traditions of the music that fuelled the struggle against the white supremacist regime in Zimbabwe(9) - has an online sibling that manifests itself as an interactive space for discussion and comment? A space for diverse voices - speaking on topics that span everything from Indian racism and branding, to African filmmakers’ strategies - and bouncing against each other with the unpredictability of street-side interactions.

It’s also no coincidence that the print version of Chimurenga is built on strategies of direct interaction and reader participation normally reserved for online communities. “The idea is for people to actually go out of their way to find this thing, this Chimurenga,” explains Edjabe. “We’re so used to things just landing in our laps here. Some NGO buying all the copies, then dropping them on our doorsteps and force feeding us knowledge. The idea here is that we print 1000 copies, and if you’re late, you have to go out of your way to find it. There is a contribution, an act of participation involved in obtaining a Chimurenga. Going to get it requires a conscious mental effort.”

Finding donga.co.za is easier. A click on Chimurenga’s links page leads me directly there. But defining exactly what donga is, and why it has become so important in the South African literary and critical landscape is not so easy. A quick glance presents a sparse online journal that relies on stark html to display an array of local voices: poets, critics, prose writers and the in-between and undercover.

“I wanted to create an open, white space for the poems, where the poem could look comfortable. I wasn’t happy with a lot of the representations of poems I had seen online,”(10) explains Allan Finlay, who - together with Paul Wessels - edits donga. But then:

“Donga itself has got something to say, over and above all the submissions, all the parts put together that make up the ‘hole’. The submissions we get change and refine that space we call ‘donga’. And you can’t predict it. But there is some overall tangible feeling, something you can almost hold in your hands. Maybe a donga’s a place that collects things. Things we chuck away. Or others chuck away, the other publications.”(11)

The metaphor is apt. As a child growing up in the rural far-North, dongas (”deep-ridged gulley commons in open veld or near new industrial and residential developments”(12)) were an everyday part of the landscape. They broke the flat, even bushveld and provided hidey-holes, “a good place to go shoot tin cans” and no-go areas where unwanted rubbish collected. And as donga.co.za suggests, and our mothers warned: “dongas are dangerous to people and animals. They undermine houses.”

And yes, donga.co.za does undermine the fixed walls and halls of the current literary structures and conventions in South Africa. But how? The presentation is simple - no flashy code-work or code-drive flash-work here. No playing link-ity-link or leading the reader on elaborate hypertextual wild-meaning chases. Alan’s answer?

“I’ve been thinking about John Cage’s 4′33″, a nice thought. - it’s partly a composition using space only, filled by presumptions and expectations (of the audience), which are entirely subverted. Suddenly the listener stands inside the piece, and finds he/she is part of ‘the music’; is in fact, the content. Or their muffled coughs and expectations become the content, and so on. For me the underlying publishing space created by donga is similar. And of course, it’s also just about publishing writing. But the internet can be an interesting medium.”(13)

And the internet in South Africa is fast becoming a interesting medium for new writing. Unlike much international online writing, which remains tangled in a web of hypertext fiction, flash poetry and code-work - which all too often fails to subvert anything but our material habits of literary consumption - the South African writerly web has succeeded in using the technology available without been seduced by it. “The internet has allowed us to reach into a lot more spaces. And for that we give blessings to Bill Gates!” Laughs Edjabe. Adding, “we’ll curse him in the print issue and bless him in the internet issue.”

Rather than obsess over how the medium can challenge the content, South Africa’s online journals have focussed on how content can use a medium to create new pockets of resistance, flow, rupture, all seamlessly bound together, all utterly malleable. Paul Wessels, explains it like this:

“The trick will be to keep cool calm and collected. Like men in white coats driving an unmarked van, slipping into apartments and with deft precision removing vital organs from unsuspecting television viewers, and before anyone has time to say, ‘hey! that’s my liver!’ we’re out the door, organ on ice, engine purring to the next stop.”(14)

Notes:

1 In Cape Town, the term “liberated zone” has been cut loose from its direct
political and revolutionary referents; it’s any space that opens the
possibilities of engaging in fiery discourse, cultural exchange and more often
than not good music.
2 Trebor Scholz, “Chimurenga: Cape Town Now! Politics, Music, Culture,” CTHEORY
(June, 19, 2002), online: http://www.ctheory.net/text_file.asp?pick=341.
3 Ibid.
4 Ibid.
5 Ibid.
6 See Songok Han Thornton, “Let Them Eat IT: The Myth of the Global Village as
an Interactive Utopia,” CTHEORY (January, 1, 2002), online:
http://www.ctheory.net/text_file.asp?pick=327
7 See John Cayley, “The Code is not the Text,” Electronic Book Review (August,
9, 2002) online:
http://www.electronicbookreview.com/v3/servlet/ebr?essay_id=cayleyele&command=vi
ew_essay
8 See Arthur Kroker and Michael A. Weinstein, Data Trash: The Theory of the
Virtual Class: New World Perspectives, CultureTexts Series, 1994.
9 See http://www.chimurenga.co.za
10 Joan Metelerkamp, via email for New Coin, December 2002 issue.
11 Ibid.
12 See http://www.donga.co.za
13 Joan Metelerkamp, via email for New Coin, December 2002 issue.
14 Ibid.

this article first published here