13.01.2016
19 Uhr
Salon des ehem. Palais Dürckheim, Cranachstraße 47, Weimar

Chimurenga: What Innovation Appears Like from an African Guerrilla War Theater Vortrag von Clapperton Chakanetsa Mavhunga

The project, entitled "Chimurenga as Laboratory: The Science, Technology, and Innovation of Self-Liberation", focuses squarely on the Zimbabwean war of independence (1960s-80). It shows how those that colonialism traumatized galvanized their trauma towards escaping their captive position and reclaiming charge of their own destiny. The oppressed did so by identifying as targets of attack the instruments the oppressor marshaled to traumatize them. Having do so, the traumatized then incrementally assembled a vast architecture for self-liberation by drawing in many localities across the world and turning them into resources to attack the identified targets. From training bases in the USSR, Romania, Yugoslavia, North Korea, China, Cuba, Ghana, Algeria, Egypt, Tunisia, Tanzania, Angola, and Mozambique, to universities, student activism, and fundraising in the cities of America, Canada, Britain, the Nordic countries, this worldwide web of self-liberation is an amazing piece of African innovation. Yet as impressive as these trans-continental and pan-continental architectures were, the project emphasizes that at core chimurenga was a communal, spiritual, and rural anchored struggle of the people by the people for self-liberation. To that extent, the mountains, valleys, forests, and homesteads in the countryside constitute a vast laboratory of self-liberation hosting unbelievable innovations between guerrillas and the people, against the colonial state.