Still much to write about, say SA writers in London

Jean Meiring

"Now that apartheid has ended, it's sad to see some of my old friends in the ANC slipping into the roles of the previous establishment," novelist André Brink said at a colloquium on South African writing held at the British Library in London last Saturday.

In a conversation with the eminent British newscaster Jon Snow he noted that apartheid's demise didn't spell the end of material for South African writers. "There's an enormous amount one can write about: abuse of power is present in all societies."

Yet the spirit pervading the high point of the African Visions programme, which saw Brink, Zakes Mda and the 2004 Booker finalist Achmat Dangor and others celebrating ten years of South African democracy by speaking at venues across Britain, was overwhelmingly upbeat. The focus was firmly on writing in the post-apartheid era.

The two issues that cropped up most persistently were multilingualism and literacy.

Brink started writing his novels in English as well as Afrikaans after 1973, when censorship threatened to end his career. By writing in English he could evade the apartheid censors by publishing abroad. "Writing in two languages is a very difficult enterprise. Language as a material thing influences the story. The genius, rhythm and cadences of a language push the story in a certain direction."

Mda, whose first published short story as a teenager was in Xhosa and whose home language today is Sesotho, noted that he draws extensively "on the very rich body of literature and oral traditions" of a variety of South African languages.

Dangor, who spoke his mother tongue, Afrikaans, and Sesotho before attending an English-language school, decided to stop writing in Afrikaans at an early age because he felt he didn't have an audience in Afrikaans. Yet his Booker-nominated novel Bitter Fruit, which gives a voice to the so-called coloured community, is a rich intermingling of English and Afrikaans idiom and rhythms.

When pressed to explain why the publishing industry in the indigenous languages isn't stronger, Dangor noted that the problem in South Africa "is reading and not writing". There can't be a thriving publishing scene if there aren't any readers.

Mda, Dangor and first-time novelist Susan Mann were grilled by Giles Foden, assistant literary editor of The Guardian, in what became a master class on the mechanics of the writing process.

In an earlier conversation, Dangor spoke with diffidence of his Booker nomination. "The nomination won't change my life. They say if you win it, though, it can change your life."

In a panel discussion with poet and senior ANC parliamentarian Mongane Wally Serote, actress Gcina Mhlope, and children's writer and biographer Elinor Sisulu, literacy and the importance of instilling a love for books in childhood were central.

Serote warned that South Africa faced a huge problem: according to buying figures, only five percent of people actually engage in reading as a pastime. About half of these people read only magazines and newspapers.

There were many reasons for this, said Serote. "Everything possible was done to try and destroy our indigenous languages. Also, they have mainly an oral tradition, which has to be transformed into a written form. But it's not a lost cause. The challenge is to use the basic reading skills people have in the oral tradition and transfer them to a written context."

Sisulu pointed out that promoting a culture of reading was a worldwide problem. TV and computer games dominate children's stock of entertainment. "People think that we can leapfrog the acquisition of language to the world of IT. But this leaves the imagination and creativity out of the equation. Children sometimes have too much choice. There are certain books they must read. Only long after I'd had to read Shakespeare did I realise the value of it."

Sisulu, chairperson of the board of the Centre of the Book in Cape Town, agreed that publishing in the indigenous languages was very important. "We live in a multicultural, multilingual world. But people don't have the money to buy books. We need a strong library system."

African Visions, a project of the Africa Centre in central London, showed the South African literary scene to be diverse, bustling, and bristling with undeveloped talent.

Zakes Mda very neatly captured the surprising spirit of getting on with the job which marked the discussions. When asked what the task of the writer in South Africa was, he answered briskly: "To write."

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