David Evans at the Time Of The Writer festival in Durban (Photo: Jeeva Rajgopaul/Time Of The Writer)

Return of a native

David Evans reports from the Time Of The Writer festival in Durban

In 1963 in the city of Durban the South African government halted my career as a writer by imposing a ban which forbade me any form of publication, performance or public speaking. A year later I was imprisoned for opposing apartheid, and five years after that house arrested on my release. Living in the UK since 1970, first as an exile then as a citizen, I’ve seen my poetry, short stories and a novel published and work for stage and television performed, but have remained unpublished in South Africa.

So it was an emotional and somewhat triumphal moment on an evening this March to be on a public platform in the city where I was banned – and to be reading a poem as part of a week-long writers’ festival.

And what a week! A festival which began on the deck of a launch with drinks and a buffet supper for writers, festival organisers and civic dignitaries, as the craft circled the bay at dusk with the harbour and city lights coming up.

A week which included two civic lunches, one a sit-down affair in a restaurant looking out over the Indian Ocean (to which we were welcomed by the Asian deputy-mayor, informal in jeans and T-shirt), the other a buffet in the city hall.

A week in which, on the final day, we were taken to a wildlife reserve to see hippos, rhinos, wildebeest, giraffes, birds and buck, ostriches, zebras, warthogs and even a lizard the size of a crocodile, then on to a delicious al fresco lunch before being driven back to the city to hear the end-of-festival speaker, John Pilger. On top of which we were paid for our participation and put up in a five-star hotel in central Durban.

Durban, aka eThekwini to the indigenous AmaZulu, is itself a fascinating place, reputedly the fastest-growing port in the southern hemisphere. Occupied briefly by the Voortrekkers in the mid-19th century, then colonised by the British, it is today a sprawling sub-tropical, sometimes risky post-colonial city, with Mosques and Hindu temples among the modern buildings, a vivid, teeming mixture of Black, White and Asian people and impressive sandy beaches drummed by serious breakers.

This was the eleventh Time Of The Writer festival, an annual international event organised by the Centre for Creative Arts, based in the University of KwaZulu/Natal and efficiently run with great consideration for the invited writers.

Most but not all writers attending through the years have come from Africa. They have included two Nobel winners, Nadine Gordimer and Wole Soyinka, as well as well-known continental names such as Andre Brink, Ngugi wa Thiong’o, Es’kia Mphahlele, Lewis Nkosi, AntjeKrog, Marlene van Niekerk, and non-Africans such as England’s Margaret Drabble, Bernadine Evaristo, Hari Kunzru, Barbara Trapido, Joanna Trollope and India’s Arundhati Roy.

This year, too, most of the 16 writers (and two publishers) were drawn from Africa – South Africa, Zimbabwe, Kenya, Angola, The Congo, Congo Brazzaville, the Gambia, Mauritius, Senegal. I was the only UK-based writer, listed as coming from both England and South Africa. The youngest writer, first time novelist Kopano Matlwa, a fifth year medical student, was 22. The oldest? I had better pass on that one.

There were eight men and eight women. The former included  dynamic Kenyan Henry Chakava, initially a highly successful editor for Heinemann, now, inter alia, head of one of the continent’s leading indigenous publishers, the East African Educational Publisher (EA) Ltd.

The writers included Afrikaner Breyten Breytenbach, polylingual poet, painter and political visionary, imprisoned for eight years by the apartheid regime and now director of the Gorée Institute off the coast of Senegal, and his fellow Afrikaner and formidably brave print and television journalist Max du Preez, who founded and edited the anti-apartheid Afrikaans-language newspaper Vrye Weekblad in spite of death threats.

Both men spoke out about problems in our troubled continent.

Breyten, in a keynote speech, delivered an attack on “barbaric criminality, the plague of raping, theft and fraud, the indecent enrichment of the few…public office as an exercise in scavenging, the breakdown of essential services, entrenched racism, the lack of public morals or even common sense” – and at the same time urged us as writers to cling to a notion of utopia, to “keep on movng and making a noise.”

Mbulelo Mzamane, former political activist, distinguished academic and fiction writer and director of the University of KwaZulu-Natal’s Centre of African Literary Studies, took a less gloomy, though not uncritical, view, arguing that after 350 years of brutal exploitation and only 15 years of democratic government South Africa is in a transitional phase in which faults and failures can be expected. The women writers were equally fearless in taking on political and gender issues.

These serious themes recurred throughout the festival, sharpened by the tense elections and horrifying post-electoral events in neighbouring Zimbabwe, and the presence among us of a courageous Zimbabwean book publisher, Irene Staunton, and Charles Mungoshi, one of Zimbabwe’s (and the continent’s ) finest writers, both understandably anguished by the continuing brutality at home.

 Our books were on sale and we had two opportunities to present our work to the public in the course of the evening programmes. On the first night each writer had 4 minutes to introduce himself or herself – I read a prison poem.

Then later in the week we divided into pairs to share a slot of 40 minutes in which we read a longer piece and answered questions on literature, life and politics. Audiences were good and appreciative, there was plenty of food and drink and, on most evenings, a book launch. The evenings were also enlivened by outstanding musical events, including the wonderful Ladysmith Black Mambazo.

We were kept busy. Not only were we expected to support the other writers’ events throughout the week, but we were also involved in a variety of panels, workshops and ‘outreach’ visits.

I was one of six writers driven to a teachers’ centre in Kwa Mashu, a breezeblock type township outside Durban, where I did some agitating in the early sixties. This time we read to and talked about writing with a sizeable audience of school-children. It was profoundly moving. Although the event was staged during school holidays, the students turned up in impeccably laundered uniforms and were eager and enthusiastic. Later in the week several of us went into a prison to talk to aspirant writers – about 15 of them, encouraged to write by local authors. Some of us also featured in a well attended Community Writing Forum in Durban itself. Other writers were equally busily involved in town and townships in a variety of ways, including discussions of ethics, media and publishing.

Durban City Council seems wholeheartedly and constructively supportive of the arts. On the Friday it opened up the council chambers for a writers’ parliament where festival and city writers attempted to formulate proposals for the promotion of literature in the city.

Included among the proposals about literacy, residencies, workshops, sponsorships, writers’ rights and publishing – the usual preoccupations – were two which seemed slightly crazy and at the same time highly imaginative.

The city, we urged, should sponsor a ship to take writers  up the east coast to Maputo, Madagascar, Dar Es Saalaam, Zanzibar, Reunion, etc. – “a mobile workshop for disseminating skills, encouraging synergy and building networks between writers from Durban and elsewhere on the continent.”

Secondly, it was suggested that the city should distribute a short story every month with the authority’s bills.

I understand that this latter idea has already been agreed to.

Because we were all together in one hotel, there were great opportunities for the writers to get to know each other: to eat, drink and chat together over common concerns throughout the week. I valued that most of all.

The week also attracted a lot of media publicity. Each of us was interviewed, photographed and recorded. We were all given a T-shirt with the festival logo on the front and our names on the back – tactfully printed in alphabetical order. It led to an interesting conversation while I was queuing in a local bank.

Much that is written here about South Africa is critical and indeed there is much to criticise. But there is far more to celebrate in what is after all a vital if fledgling post-apartheid democracy.

Continuous cultural activities, like those organised by the magnificent – and multi-ethnic – Centre for Creative Arts team, are very much part of that. Certainly there is blood on the rainbow, but this shouldn’t blind us to the plentiful goodwill and increasing integration - and millions of unpublicised people getting on with trying to make the multilingual, multi-ethnic and multicultural society work.

In rich and often complacent Britain, we could learn from them.

David Evans was born in Queenstown, South Africa, and now lives on Merseyside. His citizenship, taken away when he came to Britain, has been restored and he regularly revisits his other homeland.

For information about CCA events contact the Centre for Creative Arts, University of KwaZulu Natal, Durban, 4041, South Africa. Telephone +27 (0)31 260 2506/260 3118.
Email cca@ukzn.ac.za
www.cca.ukzn.ac.za

This article first appeared in the Guild's magazine for members, UK Writer (Autumn 2008).