An alternative

Alternative culture

Alternative culture is a type of culture that exists outside or on the fringes of mainstream or popular culture, usually under the domain of one or more subcultures...

 magazine from South Africa

South Africa

The Republic of South Africa is a country in southern Africa. Located at the southern tip of Africa, it is divided into nine provinces, with of coastline on the Atlantic and Indian oceans...

. Started life as an underground

Counterculture

Counterculture is a sociological term used to describe the values and norms of behavior of a cultural group, or subculture, that run counter to those of the social mainstream of the day, the cultural equivalent of political opposition. Counterculture can also be described as a group whose behavior...

 zine published shortly after the fall of the Berlin Wall

Berlin Wall

The Berlin Wall was a barrier constructed by the German Democratic Republic starting on 13 August 1961, that completely cut off West Berlin from surrounding East Germany and from East Berlin...

, and grew into an irregular, irreverent and entertaining read at the newsstand. Published in Cape Town

Cape Town

Cape Town is the second-most populous city in South Africa, and the provincial capital and primate city of the Western Cape. As the seat of the National Parliament, it is also the legislative capital of the country. It forms part of the City of Cape Town metropolitan municipality...

, the magazine carried articles by activists, anarchists, ecologists and hackers

Hacker (computer security)

In computer security and everyday language, a hacker is someone who breaks into computers and computer networks. Hackers may be motivated by a multitude of reasons, including profit, protest, or because of the challenge...

 and was considered subversive and revolutionary for its time. The last issue was published electronically in 1993.

Origin

Kagenna - from Gehenna, the Jewish Hell, and !Cagn, the mantis god of the !kung San People

The project started out as a collective experiment in Cape Town

Cape Town

Cape Town is the second-most populous city in South Africa, and the provincial capital and primate city of the Western Cape. As the seat of the National Parliament, it is also the legislative capital of the country. It forms part of the City of Cape Town metropolitan municipality...

 after the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989. The first issue had a silk-screened cover and was photocopied. Subsequent issues became more sophisticated and the magazine developed a life of its own, spawning other experiments and in particular a thriving small press.

Contents

Kagenna #1 (silk-screened cover) 101 Green things to do; Beyond Environmental Conflict; Women as practical Utopists; Hyperdelic Exploration; Artvark Interview; Garbage Ecology; Ten Key Values of the Green Movement; Jim Jute and the Night People; Tristam and Them comic.(24pp) out of print

Kagenna #2 (silk-screened cover) Reclaiming Celebration; Busking;Towards a Green South Africa by Jacklyn Cock; Dioxin Factsheet; Siyabona Theatre; The Word Becomes Cassette by William Levy; Tristam and Them comic.(28pp) out of print

Kagenna #3 Plastic Propaganda; Art and Change; Ozone- Friendly Might Just KillYou; Global Warming Factsheet; Camphill Bus; African Hip Hop interview; Fax for Freedom; Recycling and Toxics guide; The Kitchen Revolution; Beezy Bailey poster. (28pp + poster) R12.50

Kagenna #4 Do You Have to be White to be Green by Albie Sachs; Steve Newman's alternative reality; German Green party interview; Radical Radio; Disrupting Trivia and Tapping the Information Highway; The Reality of Meat; Hobos Recycle; CO-OP cutup; Kwangoma; P. Clark-Brown poster. (36pp) R13.50 Kagenna #5

Kagenna #5 Planetary Dance; Do Trees Have Rights? Albie Sachs; San Survival; Eco-Architecture; Power Crisis on the Cape Flats; Kicking the Automobile Habit; 25 Difficult things you can do to save the Earth; Mike van Graan interview;Indigenous Plant users outlawed; The Mad-Dogs of the Media, Justin Wells poster. (40pp)

Kagenna #6 Cyberpunk by Timothy Leary; Subversive Television; Bleeding by the Moon; Interconnectedness by Mike Cope; The History of Hemp; Permaculture; Benjamin Zephaniah interview; Street-kid Theatre; Tristam and Them comic; Jane Thompson poster. (40pp)

Links

An archive of images exists at http://www.kagenna.blogspot.com

Index of contents at http://deity.digitalzones.com/kagenna/kagenna.html

View copies of the actual magazine, at the South African National Library in Cape Town, Mayibuye Centre at UWC, and African Studies Library at UCT.

Issue 7 available from scribd http://www.scribd.com/doc/2388332/Kagenna-007

Issue 6 available from scribd http://www.scribd.com/doc/14332116/Kagenna-Issue-Six

Issue 5 available from scribd http://www.scribd.com/doc/14453568/Kagenna-Magazine-Issue-Five

Issue 4 available from scribd http://www.scribd.com/doc/14489198/Kagenna-Magazine-Issue-Four

Issue 3 available from scribd http://www.scribd.com/doc/14567740/Kagenna-Magazine-Issue-Three

David Robert Lewis - Kagenna, insert for 1992 Green Trust Awards http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tfrEaetmEAQ

See also

• Alternative media in South Africa
  Alternative media in South Africa
  South Africa has a long history of alternative media. During the eighties there was a host of community and grassroots newspapers that supplied content that ran counter to the prevailing attitudes of the times. In addition, a thriving small press and underground press carried voices that would not...
  
  
• Alternative Press
• Alternative Media
  Alternative media
  Alternative media are media which provide alternative information to the mainstream media in a given context, whether the mainstream media are commercial, publicly supported, or government-owned...
  
  
• Underground Press
  Underground press
  The underground press were the independently published and distributed underground papers associated with the counterculture of the late 1960s and early 1970s in the United States, Canada, United Kingdom, and other western nations....
  
  
• Samizdat
  Samizdat
  Samizdat was a key form of dissident activity across the Soviet bloc in which individuals reproduced censored publications by hand and passed the documents from reader to reader...
  
  
• Self publishing
• Counterculture
  Counterculture
  Counterculture is a sociological term used to describe the values and norms of behavior of a cultural group, or subculture, that run counter to those of the social mainstream of the day, the cultural equivalent of political opposition. Counterculture can also be described as a group whose behavior...