Christopher Ouma and Madhu Krishnan

The small magazine has held a significant but understudied effect on not only the project of imagining Africa in the long twentieth century, but also of articulating projects of solidarity, intimacy and political action. As a key node within larger ecologies of print culture, the small magazine is notable for the ways in which its flexible form and sometimes eccentric modes of circulation trouble what have come to be seen as ‘orthodox’ or received wisdom as to the nature of self-fashioning and modernity on the African continent. While the ‘smallness’ of its form underlines its context as a site-specific platform of cultural production, it’s networks of circulation and the audiences and publics it convenes point to a wider and much more ambitious intention which cannot be reduced to simplistic or one-dimensional systemic models of understanding. As ‘form’ and therefore a ‘genre’ in the long twentieth century of African cultural production, the small magazine has convened various platforms for the articulation and intersection of various projects, often in intersectional logic; anti-colonialism, pan-Africanism, Anti-apartheid imagination and broader project(s) of decolonization during the second half of the twentieth century. This project seeks to examine how small magazines are able, through the networks they create scale up and scale down their visibility through various strategies of curation and self-fashioning which evolve and transform over time and space. It is the specific nexus of scalability, in tandem with the curatorial potentiality of the small magazine through various models of formal juxtaposition and intellectual patterning, we argue, which has lent it its importance as an archive of the present with respect to African models of intellectual production. Such strategies account for the longevity, political and cultural potency of the form which has had a significant footprint in the long twentieth century of political and cultural organization and the imagination of identity in the continent. The project draws from example in magazines such Transition, Black Orpheus, Nexus/Busara, Chimurenga Chronic, Kwani? amongst many others, exploring how media, platform, visibility, publicness, form and genre come together in the small magazine to produce new understandings of African models of modernity, coalition and solidarity.

Izwi Labantwana, Die Kinderstem, Voice of the Children is the official newsletter of the national organisation the Children’s Movement, which had been produced between 1986 and 2017. The newsletter released issues annually in the early 90s, increasing up to five issues per annum in the later years. The production team largely consisted of child and youth members, who curated and wrote most of the pieces, which are conveyed in three languages interchangeably, i.e., Xhosa, Afrikaans, and largely English.

The newsletter offers an insightful contribution towards a better understanding of what the perspective of young South Africans might look like within the social activist arena. The Children’s Movement is unique in its approach in addressing the challenges faced in the home and community life of the children through focusing on self-organisation. The members formulate their own group structure and itinerary with materials, trainings, programmes, and advice provided by the movement. The groups engage in fun, educational activities and discuss the socio-economic issues, at times conducting surveys to pinpoint what is happening around them. A strong emphasis is placed on acknowledging and implementing possible interventions for change.

The newsletter reflects an array of these events and gatherings, with personal narratives of the children’s experiences in virtually every issue. The movement’s emphasis on realizing the agency of children, driven by the core belief that children have the potential to create change, contradicts traditional notions of children’s passive role within social spheres. Through Izwi Labantwana we see children taking responsibility for their own needs and that of other children. In the images of children cutting the nails of their peers and attending to vegetable gardens at the health centres, set up mostly in empty classrooms at local schools. To capturing their voices on podiums at the movement’s national conferences, where representatives share the challenges and inspirations they perceive in life.

The literary production is largely curated and edited by child members of the movement. It draws special attention to the inclusion of artistic creativity, many editions are filled with poetry sent in from children’s groups all around South Africa, mostly in the Western Cape. In addition to many instances of song, dance and celebration in the newsletter, there are many how-to moments. Articles with easy instructions, on how to make boardgames, ty-dyes, but more importantly how to substitute things like toothpaste with everyday items.

The newsletter was initially produced for print, with an archive available in large colour format. The letters were distributed among the groups where resources were readily available, and upon request where it had to be sourced. Some time around 2009 the editions were released online on the movement’s official website, where the full collection of the newsletter is available and freely downloadable. In the change, an extension was made where the editions became richer with text and content of the editorial teams. What is not left behind is the opinion of the children, with flowing inserts of their experiences being part of Children’s Movement of South Africa.

The movement began in the 1980s formed from children’s groups on the Cape Flats led by anti-apartheid organisers. The organisation chooses to focus its work within impoverished or isolated areas, those most affected by the economic inequalities of apartheid. A few years later, in 1985 the movement created the Children’s Resource Centre to assist in providing trainings and distributing materials to those in need. Since then, over 100 children’s groups, with over 5000 members have been involved in the organisation’s health, environment, culture, media, youth, and values programmes. In between there has been feeding schemes, skills training, cv workshops, and the like. The movement has received various levels of funding over the decades with capital fluctuations changing dynamics, decentralizing, but never extinguishing the spirit of those on the ground.

The shutting down of autonomous Black educational spaces that were started by students at universities, and the mass-popular nature of the uprisings had led to a situation where the movement wasn’t engaged in the type of critical education work that had initially been its basis. Furthermore, despite some isolated attempts by Black students to build relationships with progressive organisations beyond the academy, #feesmustfall and #outsourcingmustfall remained primarily centred on universities.

As a response to this combination of circumstances, Pathways converged as a group of people who wanted to continue the work to which we had been participating on campus; collectively discussing and planning the non-partisan movement and struggles for free education. We wanted to create a space to learn about, participate in, and contribute to the debates around free education, and through that, build relationships with people and collectives working in different sectors who were interested and committed to the project of free education. We had the position that education is something that implicates and affects everyone, and is connected to struggles around wages, disability, land, patriarchy, sexuality, housing, etc.

Pathways’ work has been based on a ‘community-building’ approach to publishing. By this, we mean gathering people and getting perspectives on free education – the movement ,histories, and debates – from people working and organising in different fields and different places. This includes students from different institutions and levels, workers and organisers from trade unions, progressive academics, social movement activists and others.

Publica[c]tion is a Black student-driven publication – a collective process that includes but also transcends and goes beyond the independently, self-published product. Initiated in conversations at the end of 2015 as an attempt to extend and continue the work of the student movement, the publication was printed and launched in August and September 2017. In this paper we reflect on the collaborative, experimental process of public action in order to highlight our learnings and perspectives on publication and relations of knowledge production more broadly. We consider the generative dialectic of critique and creation and how our creative process emerged partly from critiques of academic production and publication. Academic production we understand as largely subordinated to the neoliberal university’s individualism and its undervaluing and undermining of practices of collective knowledge production. From our critique of capitalist publication’s fixation on the product, we fixated on process – wanting to do something collectively and collaboratively. Publica[c]tion’s process emerged as an attempt to archive the particular mo(ve)ments of intense campus struggle, to connect and think and write together as Black student activists across different campuses, and as a critical response to the mainstream media where student struggles were represented in problematic and limited ways. The paper closes by looking at some of the possibilities that the process opened up – how collective reading constitutes a generative alternative to ‘peer review’, how a refusal of the authoritative power of the editor can liberate the creativity of contributors, and how publication can be used as a process of building community.

The digital version of Publica[c]tion can be downloaded as a PDF here [file size: 11MB].