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Black writers matter

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Niq Mhlongo at the launch of his book Affluenza at Sakhumzi Restaurant in Soweto this week. Picture: Lucky Nxumalo
Niq Mhlongo at the launch of his book Affluenza at Sakhumzi Restaurant in Soweto this week. Picture: Lucky Nxumalo

“I write for myself, no one else,” roared acclaimed novelist Niq Mhlongo on Wednesday night at the launch party of his new book, Affluenza. Refusing to hold the event at one of the usual venues in the paler suburbs, he booked the popular Sakhumzi Restaurant in Vilakazi Street, Soweto – just as he did for the 2013 launch of his novel Way Back Home.

Two years later, it’s an increasingly common trend as the black South African literary scene is finally looking set to boom.

More and more fairs, festivals and launches are “decolonising” and moving into townships and black suburbs to speak to black readers.

Mhlongo and fellow novelist Thando Mgqolozana have been at the forefront of the fight to decolonise books, especially after Mgqolozana publicly quit white book fairs at the Franschhoek Literary Festival in May last year.

Since then, several publishers and fair organisers have responded to the call for change.

Mgqolozana was involved in the first Khayelitsha Book Fair, also known as the Kulture Book Fair.

Then Durban’s long-running Time of the Writer festival announced that this year’s theme would be Decolonising the Book. It was held last month in township venues, looking at how local literature and libraries could be transformed to tell our own home-grown stories.

There are several new black book fairs being planned or announced.

At the end of the month, North West gets its first literary festival and it, too, is a black affair. The Rutanang Book Fair in Tlokwe will be held from April 25 to 27 with the theme Decolonising Literature, continuing the transformation debate.

And in December, Soweto will be hosting a major black literary festival of its own, which is due to be announced in the next few weeks.

According to Tseko Nkhane, project manager of the inaugural Rutanang fair, the general consensus is that “it is not that black South Africans don’t read – it is that the publishing value chain has not invested in understanding the reading behaviours of South Africa’s majority”.

Nkhane, who grew up in Potchefstroom, says: “Instead of us always travelling to other cities for book fairs, why not have our own one? I think the biggest impact of the fair will be social change. As a community, we are hoping to grow the culture of reading.”

Rutanang will feature writers such as Andile Mngxitama and Pinky Khoabane, and will celebrate the 100-year anniversary of Sol Plaatje’s revolutionary work, Native Life in South Africa.

A who’s who of the literary scene attended Mhlongo’s Soweto launch this week, among them Eusebius McKaiser (Run Racist Run), Nozizwe Cynthia Jele (Happiness Is a Four-letter Word) and Ndumiso Ngcobo (Some of My Best Friends Are White) – giving the strong impression that our writers are becoming celebrities in their own right.

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