Picture of Tiisetso Lekopa: provided
Short.Sharp.Stories is a platform showcasing established and emerging South African short story writers. For the 2025 anthology, POWER: Short Stories that Light the Dark, writers imagined “power” in fictional terms – how it influences and affects us; and this includes political and personal power, and ever-present issues of loadshedding.
In this Short.Sharp.Stories interview David Mann chats with Tiisetso Lekopa, author of the short story “Canvas”, which deals with the idea that in South Africa art isn’t just a mirror reflecting reality, it’s a force that provokes, challenges, and sometimes demands confrontation.
Tiisetso Lekopa is a writer, freelance proofreader and ghostwriter based in the East Rand. Her journey with words began in high school, eventually leading to the publication of her poetry collections on Amazon. She was awarded Publisher’s Choice in the Publish’d Afrika Short Story Competition. When she’s not crafting narratives or creating magic in the kitchen, you can find her at the bottom of a tea cup, savouring the quiet moments between stories.
Can we begin by getting a better sense of your history with writing? Tell us a bit about when you started writing and why.
I started writing in grade 10, when my English teacher noticed my talent and encouraged me to keep going. But, being a teenager, I didn’t think much of it; I honestly thought she was just exaggerating. Fast forward to 2016, I found myself sitting in front of my laptop, typing out everything that was running through my head, and I realised how good it felt. I haven’t stopped writing since, because it allows me to express myself in ways I sometimes can’t in “real life”.
How do you think your writing has grown since then? And do you have a love of short stories?
My writing has grown tremendously. I no longer write just for the sake of putting words on a screen. I write to evoke emotion in whoever is reading. I’ve become more intentional with my storytelling, focusing on depth and authenticity and creating meaningful connections with readers.
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I do have a love for short stories and they’ve been instrumental in my growth as a writer. Writing a short story demands precision because every word has to earn its place, which has made me much more deliberate about language and pacing.
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I do have a love for short stories and they’ve been instrumental in my growth as a writer. Writing a short story demands precision because every word has to earn its place, which has made me much more deliberate about language and pacing.
Your story, “Canvas”, looks at art as a tool for change, but also provides a critique of how art – particularly art with an overt socio-political message – is misread or perhaps even misappropriated in commercial art spaces. How do you hold both realities in this story?
In “Canvas” I show both the power and the struggle of using art to say something meaningful. The story celebrates how art can push for change, but also shows how that same art can be misunderstood or watered down once it enters commercial spaces. I wanted to be honest about that tension, about how artists want their work to matter, but also have to deal with how the world sees and uses it. More specifically, I was trying to highlight several dynamics that I've observed in how the world engages with socio-political art. There's the commodification problem with how galleries and collectors often strip away the political context of artwork to make it more palatable or marketable. A piece created to challenge power structures might be reframed as simply “bold” or “provocative” without acknowledgement of its actual message.
I also wanted to explore performative engagement, the way institutions or buyers sometimes acquire such art not because they support its message, but because owning “challenging” work signals their sophistication or progressiveness. They’re essentially using the art as cultural capital while ignoring its call to action. Then there’s the interpretation gap and how viewers bring their own biases and experiences to art, sometimes completely missing or deliberately avoiding the artist’s intended critique. What an artist sees as a condemnation of inequality might be viewed by others as merely aesthetic or even as validation of the status quo.
This story also provides a critique of contemporary South African democracy, inadequate service delivery and failing infrastructure. How can stories serve as vehicles for change?
Writing my story, I was aware of how statistics about service delivery failures or infrastructure collapse can feel abstract to readers who haven't experienced them directly, so setting it in a rural setting as well as in Jozi enabled me to show how these failures affect different communities in distinct ways. By contrasting these two environments I could illustrate that these are systemic issues that span the country’s geography.
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Stories allow us to hold up a mirror to society. They make complex issues personal and relatable by showing how real people are affected. Through fiction we can ask uncomfortable questions, challenge the status quo and start conversations that matter.
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Stories allow us to hold up a mirror to society. They make complex issues personal and relatable by showing how real people are affected. Through fiction we can ask uncomfortable questions, challenge the status quo and start conversations that matter.
Kayone is a very distinct character. As an artist, too, he has his area of interest and expertise. Where does he come from? How did you go about building up and shaping Kayone?
In 2023 I visited a rural part of the Eastern Cape that left me with a deep culture shock. While there, I met an incredibly talented man who created functional toys despite not having any formal education – he just had this raw creativity. We talked about finding ways to help him get investors, but the conversation went nowhere because he didn’t want the help. Kayone is inspired by that experience, but I didn’t want him to have the same fate. I wanted Kayone not only to have the talent but also to work actively towards making it his livelihood, to have the drive to make his gift work for him.
Some stories emerge quite quickly and relatively well-formed, while others need time and tend to develop over several revisits. What kind of story was this for you?
This was one of those stories that came to me quickly and felt well-formed from the start. Once the idea had landed, the characters, the setting and the central themes all fell into place quite naturally. It felt like I was simply uncovering a story that was already there, waiting to be written.
Who are your influences?
I don’t have a fixed list of influences. Instead, I draw inspiration from a mix of people, everyday experiences, emotions and moments that stay with me. These experiences often centre around what I call the “in-between spaces” of life, those moments where different worlds collide or where people navigate multiple identities simultaneously. I'm drawn to the conversations that happen in taxis, where you'll hear someone seamlessly move from discussing loadshedding in English to debating about something else in Zulu. There’s this raw honesty in these spaces where people aren’t performing for anyone, they’re just being themselves in all their complexity. There’s also the code-switching that occurs when someone moves between their rural home and urban workplace that fascinates me because it’s not just linguistic, it’s a complete shift in how you hold your body, what concerns you voice, even what dreams you allow yourself to have. I’ve watched people transform on the long-distance bus ride home, gradually relaxing into a different version of themselves as the city skyline disappears.
I want to represent a world that often gets flattened in mainstream narratives about South Africa. There’s this cultural experience of constant negotiation: negotiating language, class, race, tradition, modernity that I think is uniquely ours but rarely gets the nuanced exploration it deserves. We’re often presented as either completely traditional or completely westernised, when the reality is that most of us live in this complex middle ground.
What I’m trying to show is how people create meaning and maintain dignity while navigating systems that weren’t designed for them. The small acts of resistance, the quiet moments of joy, the ways communities support one another despite institutional failures – these are the experiences that stay with me and find their way into my writing.
What would you say is the general subject matter or focus of your fiction? What about these things interests you?
Most of my work is rooted in romance, but I like to layer important issues into the stories, whether it’s social dynamics, family pressures or personal growth. I’m drawn to the emotional depth of relationships, and I find that love is a powerful lens through which we can explore bigger themes. What interests me is how people navigate love while dealing with real-life challenges – it’s never just about the romance, but about what it reveals about who we are and what we carry.
Finally, why do you write? What is it about telling stories and creating characters that keeps you coming back to the craft?
I write because it’s how I make sense of the world and myself. There’s something powerful about putting emotions, thought and experiences into words especially through characters who feel real and stories that reflect both struggle and hope. Telling stories gives me the freedom to express what I sometimes can’t say out loud, and it’s also a way to connect with others. Knowing that someone, somewhere might feel seen or understood through my work is what keeps me coming back to the craft. It’s both a calling and a comfort.
David Mann is an award-winning writer, editor and art critic from Johannesburg. His short fiction, which draws from the undercurrents of the South African art world, has appeared in various local and international journals. He has also edited numerous local art publications, including Creative feel and Cue, the publication of the National Arts Festival. He works as the writer for the arts incubator The Centre for the Less Good Idea, and edits the ARAK Journal, based in Doha, Qatar. His short story collection, Once removed, was published in 2024 and was awarded the Thomas Pringle Short Story Prize.
POWER is available at good book stores, or directly from Tattoo Press: joanne.hichens@gmail.com.
Tattoo Press is an independent small publisher, specialising in contemporary South African short fiction.
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