Cameroonian composer and producer of Afrolectric sound Franck Biyong’s soundtrack Power of Brain conveys the essential role of brainpower that relies upon connectedness. Biyong encourages us listeners to shake the ground through spiritual juggling,[2] to counter the non-sense and no-sense of the present interregnum. The cultural platform Chimurenga has consistently drawn upon “connecting brainpower,” shattering hierarchies implicit in colonial historiography through literary and sonic reportage while sustaining living archives and forms of assembling as attunements that lie intimately alert within a Pan-African consciousness. Let us recall the radical insistence of mighty upsetter Lee ‘Scratch’ Perry whose dub contribution in Chimurenga magazine provokes a confrontation with “the universal panic of governments” and the need for a “dread brain’” as a means of takeover.[3]

As Wole Soyinka writes, “During the Colonial era music remained undisplaced as the regenerative source of the continent’s cultural will.”[4] With the Pan African Space Station (PASS) founded in 2008, the radio studio turns itinerant while still anchoring in place dense scenes of communing. In the last decade PASS has journeyed from Johannesburg to Cairo, New York, Amsterdam and London, and from Harare to Mexico City, featuring in its transmissions over 150 artists, musicians, writers, and activists. In so doing, it operates much like mangrove ecology with aerial roots as breathing antennae that absorb the atmosphere while hosting microstructures within. Before walking into the storefront where PASS landed in New York as part of Performa 15, one could already hear a discussion that had floated into the streets and was ON AIR. The poet and fiction writer Rashidah Ismaili was speaking of specific resonances and uses in Nigerian poetry, tracing poems that have different functions, such as those meant for hunters and others used in naming ceremonies.[5] She said, “Naming is already poetic.” Beside the pop-up radio studio, I conversed with the Francis brothers of the Brooklyn-based African Record Center and ended up with a rare record by the Calypsonian Rastafarian Black Stalin. In another corner, artist and educator Nontsikelelo Mutiti was setting up an African hair-braiding salon to gather around a space of beauty, trust, and shared learning.[6] Through such activities, PASS stages intimate realms of congregation, wherein aural histories, corporeal practice, and collective narrations of African subjectivity are foregrounded beyond Euro-American ocularcentrism—as part of planetary realignment processes that have long been underway.

As a Pan-African platform of writing, arts, and politics, Chimurenga is an ensemble that assumes as its name suggests: the spirit of struggle and “struggle music.”[7] Its portals include but are not limited to Chimurenga magazine; The Chronic—a quarterly broadsheet; the biennial publication African Cities Reader, online resources as well as the roaming Chimurenga library. Over the years, Chimurenga’s collaborative partners and participatory constituencies have grown cumulatively in an archipelagic mode. A restless civic engagement at the level of body, mind, and soul ensues, wherein sonic grammarians time and again splice through. Enfleshed common experiences of anti-colonial resistance, social justice movements, and geopolitical historiography unravel as a multitude of possible worlds set in resonance. Chimurenga members choose to evoke cosmic composer–philosopher Sun Ra thus: “There are other worlds out there they never told you about.” A multitude of worlds and the shout out to a shadow subject (YOU!) become entangled not as dystopian rant but instead as a contact zone that is also the escape route—a stubborn spiritual awakening to survive otherwise, in spite of hegemonic white power.

Chimurenga’s dialogic frameworks and archival resources around key meeting points such as PANAF in Algiers, the Sixth Pan-African Congress in Dar es Saalam, 1974, and FESTAC ’77 in Lagos expose the potency of third world internationalism and alliance building as an “unfinished conversation.” FESTAC ’77, the Second World Black and African Festival of Arts and Culture, has been the subject of investigation through episodic series that probe the official agenda which brought several thousand artists, writers, musicians, dancers, and scholar–activists to Lagos. Delegations included black communities from Western Europe, Australia, New Zealand, and Papua New Guinea as well as the non-independent Caribbean territories.[8] The festival’s stated aims of galvanizing “a return to origin” to celebrate black and African culture are examined by Chimurenga through the lens of sonic production,[9] starting with King Sunny Ade’s anthem to the aesthetics of diplomacy and the prolonged trauma of the Biafran War. Fela Kuti’s dissenting counter-response to the festival’s “statist” agenda, and the long-term impact of this festival for the black world, drawing from the resilient mechanisms of liberation, intellectual movements of anti-colonial leadership and resistance tactics of the African diaspora, are also assessed by Chimurenga. Prioritizing critical readings rather than triumphant chronicles of these festival platforms that proclaim black unity as mandate, in their research outline Chimurenga inquires: “How can we draw on FESTAC ’77’s history to better understand the relation between oil and spectacle in a world where Gulf States, from Dubai to Abu Dhabi, are positioning themselves as cultural hubs via biennales, festivals, art fairs and new international galleries?”[10]

During a PASS radio session, when the epic South African drummer Louis Moholo-Moholo is asked what it means to be in exile, he talks about the trials of separation from comrades and being lonesome. Further on, he relates how avant-garde black experimental music helped bring down the Berlin Wall and end apartheid.[11] Eventually he asserts the need for musical freedom under a white regime as a fundamental tool of resistance, saying: “exile is a fucker.” In his poem A Song from Exile artist Olu Oguibe says: “The tongue is blunt. The songster has journeyed without his voice. … Exile persists, and its persistence speaks to the resilience and relevance of geography.”[12] As the founding editor of Chimurenga, writer Ntone Edjabe and his collaborators have long tracked the work and struggles of their elders in worlds of music, literature, cultural history, and activism. The notion of ancestry and acoustic inheritances is perhaps best comprehended in reckoning with the poetics of the black radical tradition routed through ongoing conditions of exile and the geographic imperative of capital. The historic regime of exit permits and the horrors of the Middle Passage, this networked violence, operates in a recurring cycle upon the racialized body and blocks interlaced cosmopolitan existence even today.

In 2017 at La Colonie, Paris, Chimurenga Chronic launched Who Killed Kabila, a research inquiry that congregated as an orchestra—with readings, performances, lectures, and film screenings. The magazine issue that emerged out of the live program opened with pages on the presidential palace in Kinshasa and the circuits of rumor that swarmed around the wounded body of President Laurent-Désiré Kabila and the military tribunal that followed. Working from Fred Moten’s approach, the “radicalization of singularity,” the artists, thinkers, and writers from DR Congo, Rwanda, Uganda, Zimbabwe, Angola, and a de-territorialized entity called AFDL,[13] strove to capture the totality of this event, unpacking codes of hero worship and the absent hero, evolving a dramaturgy of many-sided informants and storytellers, local and foreign, on the ground and in the air to output a Kongo Kosmology. In a post-truth media economy, such narrative methodologies and sonic mappings become ever more vital since there is a new level of vertical pressure upon oppressed and disenfranchised bodies. As Audre Lorde would remind us now: “Black and Third World people have always been expected to educate white people as to our humanity.” This drain of energy is a strategy to deaden the power of self-protection and collective survival. We are therefore better off when “redefining ourselves and devising realistic scenarios for altering the present and constructing the future.”[14]

The ongoing series Stories about Music in Africa assembles audio-visual narratives and concert–lectures amplifying the acoustic textures and music production by the likes of Herbie Tsoaeli, and Shabaka Hutchings and The Brother Moves On, who commence with an astral fantasy: “I have left Earth, a comet is coming and I am travelling through the asteroid belt. Over, Over, Over, Over and … Out.” In another programming installment, musician and co-founder of PASS Neo Muyanga presents Revolting Songs, exploring a long arc in protest music—opening with the ANC’s choir in exile and leading into revolutionaries from Ghana, Egypt, Brazil, and Uruguay who deployed liberation music—triangulating feelings of war, piety, and lament. Muyanga reflects, “This is ugly beautiful. One of the roles of music is to do that. Its position is between things … Nothing is fixed. We can always invent, change.”[15] Stories about Music in Africa sessions are recorded live at the Chimurenga headquarters in Cape Town and at times broadcast from locations beyond, in the African context.[16]

There are some places that one wishes would return from the vast storage of time capsules, the now-closed bar and club TAGORE’s in Cape Town is one such portal I wish I had frequented. As rumor has it, this was a place where jazz maestros, artists, and maverick poets could assemble and broker a feeling of togetherness amidst daily transience.[17] The visceral records of communal musicality leave imprints that are a remainder. Achille Mbembe notes:

Music “breaks bones” (buka mikuwa) and “hurls bodies” (bwakanka nzoto), causing women and men to “behave like snakes” (na zali ko bina lokolo nioka). The body is not so much “harmed” as it becomes a site of transgression, the locus of a blurring—between the transcendental and the empirical, the material and the psychic.[18]

It is from these blurring lines and joyous ground that Chimurenga’s urgent contributions emitted through Pan African Space Station and other channels recode relations between self and world while unfastening the rebellious potential of our collective nervous system. By way of conclusion, let me cite Fela Anikulapo Kuti from his phenomenal interview with Keziah Jones in “When You Kill Us, We Rule!,” featured in Chimurenga in 2009, incidentally his last interview:

“If one believes that politics is still the best way to enhance a human life … then music is a good medium for spreading the message … that is only if one believes politics is the best medium to develop a human life … I think it’s only one of the ways.”[19]