Litnet

"Advocate Tembeka Ngcukaitobi and I, as writers who hail from the Eastern Cape, have had the dream of reckoning with the literary history of the Eastern Cape for as long as we have known each other. When, last year, there were celebrations of 200 years of Xhosa in the written word, we thought it an opportune moment to put the idea into action. The Gompo Book and Cultural Festival to be held in East London on 21 to 23 March 2025 is the tentative first step towards accomplishing this goal."

"Sitting at the fireplace of Victorian Manor Hotel on one of those rather bitterly cold Karoo nights, I flattered my imagination with the idea that Schreiner once sat before the same fire or on the stoep of the hotel, where, according to Fox, the farmers used to come for gossip and a sip of brandy; this made things come alive in a special way for me."

"Mythscape – the desire for interpreting reality through native mythology – as a narrative form is becoming common in books of our era. This is understandable in the case of African literature, since our continent’s sense of self and development of organic narrative structure was interrupted – almost truncated – by the occidental colonial project."

Mphuthumi Ntabeni read Vagabonds! by Eloghosa Osunde and interviewed them about the novel while attending the Open Book Festival in Cape Town. The two authors discuss the spirit of Lagos and other cities like Johannesburg and Cape Town, the invisibility of working classes, the tension between African and Western belief systems, and the lives of fictional characters.

"Percival is the kind of writer that first disarms the reader with humour before painting the horrors of American life, on which modern Western culture is premised. Humour is the modus operandi of his narrative style. His books are tragicomedies with depth."

"Most of these stories are set in Botswana, which in itself is refreshing since there has been a scarcity of stories in that setting since the death of Bessie Head."

"Christianity might not own the Last Supper symbolism, but would the symbol have been able to gain so much power and presence without Christianity? Who today knows or remembers the Dionysian feast of the gods, except perhaps some lonely professor of ancient Greek mythology?"

"I find this fast-becoming-popular genre of interrogating history through filtered personal and family experience to be a very pleasing literary direction in our country. You’ll not see me complain if we eventually replace the political novel with it, because not only does it gently provide us with a platform to reckon with our (national) past, but it gives us tools for higher consciousness to map up our personal lives also, which is what literature is supposed to do."

"My guess is that the growing radicalism from the left will gain momentum, especially if things don’t get better. As it is now, they too are at sixes and sevens and have no workable solutions. Anger at the failures of the ANC and the betrayal of the revolutionary mandate is their only political fund. They will probably take the coming few years to unite, organise and consolidate before coming to take yet another bite out of the sinking leviathan."

"Mhlongo, through the character of Mangi, loves Johannesburg with the insane and obsessive love of a jilted lover."

"It is easy in South African politics to blame Zuma, the preterit king of the superfluous, while failing to understand that the fundamental root of our current problems is extreme inequality."

"The near north is a book of memory, about life and death, joy and sadness, spatial geography and the thinking and not thinking behind human settlements."

"The future of our political direction depends on those with enough courage to venture out into something new and convince the majority of eligible voters, who are in a stupor due to political choice despair. My friend counts himself among these, whom he amusingly terms the 'electile dysfunctions'."

"If you’ve loved the sparse ironic tone of Amor Towles’s A gentleman in Moscow, you’ll love Beyond the door of no return."

"It is not easy, waiting for fair sailing weather, permanently watching for the winds to turn."