Dislocations

Our research project STANDING IN THE CRACKS OF MULTIPLE HISTORIES also visits the SAVVYZΛΛR airwaves with a growing constellation of stories and struggles pushing against the ongoing legacy of extractivism and colonialism by the United States. We are honored to welcome Chimurenga with their radio sound piece DISLOCATIONS. It explores two concepts borrowed from the Congolese world of sounds: "sebene" and "dislocation". The first is a musical mode popularised by Luambo Franco, where the lead guitar plays rhythmic phrases that continually return with variations. Variations so slight that they are perceptible only by dancing bodies. We use it as a narrative device to articulate the radical singularity of Africa's great war of the first decade of 21st century, a story bigger than storytelling, a story that cannot be told by one person or from one place. The second is theorised in the streets of Kinshasa, and in the stories of Amos Tutuola, as "dislocation" (splintering), where the body exists, or is recognised, only through its dispersed parts. Dislocation allows us to track the fragmentation or multiplication or mutation of great rumba bands across time/space, every iteration floating far and away from the mothership but never fully breaking up, carrying their surname into generations like a badge of dishonour. This modality is reproduced by the many, many rebel groups fighting in the war.

Chimurenga is a pan African platform of writing, art and politics founded by Ntone Edjabe in 2002. Drawing together a myriad of voices from across Africa and the diaspora, Chimurenga takes many forms operating as an innovative platform for free ideas and political reflection about Africa by Africans. Outputs include a periodic broadsheet called The Chronic, Chimurenganyana – a literature project consisting of serialized monographs expanding on themes developed in Chimurenga Magazine, the Chimurenga Library – an ongoing invention into knowledge production and the archive that seeks to re-imagine the library, and the Pan African Space Station (PASS) – an online radio station and pop-up studio.

The aim of these activities is not just to produce new knowledge, but rather to express the intensities of our world, to capture those forces and to take action. This has required a stretching of the boundaries, for unless we push form and content beyond what exists, then we merely reproduce the original form – the colonized form, if you will. It requires not only a new set of questions, but its own set of tools; new practices and methodologies that allow us to engage the lines of flight, of fragility, the precariousness, as well as joy, creativity and beauty that defines contemporary African life.

As Fela puts it, simply: who no know go know.