Books capture SA’s rich seam of stories

Afriend told me this weekend that she didn’t buy Sunday papers anymore. She reads a few stories on her Twitter feed and is often left depressed, which makes her wonder if there’s any point in spending cash indulging in the self-torture that has become our national discourse.

I have also decided that my exercise in self-torture must come to an end.

This last weekend, for the first time in years, I did not buy a Sunday paper. This state of affairs will continue until after that December conference. There is more to life than forever chasing the South African story.

Stories are meant to entertain, educate, build hope and empathy, and transform and expand one’s world view. But that is not what the prevailing South African story is about. Just because the governing ANC is unable to manage its change of leadership, the rest of the country is now subjected to a daily dose of insanity.

Our political language now includes mind-numbing hashtags such as #cupcakes, #cyrilporn and #witchcraft as the pensioners competing for the ANC high office throw dirt at one another in what can best be described as a pornographication of politics.

Fortunately, there is still plenty on offer for those with curious minds.

Spring has brought us book fairs and literary festivals, from the Jozi Book Fair, National Book Week and the South African Book Fair in Johannesburg to the Open Book Festival in Cape Town.

On Sunday I ignored the newspapers to spend a bit of time at the Open Book Festival. I had conversations with three authors about the production of knowledge and how books can improve our understanding of history.

I went back in time to the Frontier Wars with Mpush Ntabeni, whose debut novel The Broken River Tent is an account of the battles against colonial land grabs during the 1800s.

Ntabeni writes about this historic injustice from the point of view of the Xhosa people. The modern-day reader is able to relate to the story as the narrator is a young Xhosa man trying to make sense of his life in postapartheid SA. The Broken River Tent is the first book of a trilogy that could be called Decolonising the Mind.

From the Frontier Wars, I journeyed forward in history to the Anglo-Boer War and First World War with renowned author Fred Khumalo. His Dancing the Death Drill tells the story of the men aboard the warship SS Mendi who, as part of the South African Native Labour Corps, provided manual labour to the allied forces during the First World War.

More than 800 men were on the SS Mendi when a Royal Mail cargo ship ploughed into it in the English Channel, sinking it and killing 640 men. By fictionalising this tragic event, Khumalo enriches the reader’s understanding of how ordinary life was affected by the Anglo-Boer War and the First World War.

Interestingly, Khumalo notes that the ANC actively encouraged people to join the Native Labour Corps, hoping the British queen would be sympathetic to their plight following the Natives Land Act of 1913, which restricted black ownership of land in SA to less than 10% of available land.

After the SS Mendi and the Frontier Wars, we heard about SA’s contemporary history with University of SA history professor Sifiso Ndlovu. His book, The Soweto Uprisings: Counter Memories of June 16, is a personal account of the events leading to that fateful day in Soweto in 1976.

At the time, Ndlovu was a 14-year-old pupil at Phefeni Junior Secondary School, and the book gives you a sense of the politics, the socioeconomic conditions and the bravery, in particular of the teenage girls who led this protest but today are forgotten in the way the event is memorialised.

At the book festival, and in the space of a few hours, I was able to cover more than 200 years of SA’s history. All of a sudden, the South African story was no longer depressing. As the festival revealed, SA is a country with rich stories and an engaged and curious people.

Frankie Murrey, Open Book Festival co-ordinator, says they sold more than 10,000 tickets in 2017 and attracted a younger and more diverse audience.

And the season of book appreciation is not over yet. At the end of September, FirstRand CEO Sizwe Nxasana is hosting the Future Nation Schools Book Fair and Literary Festival in Johannesburg.

And in December, the second anniversary of the Abantu Book Festival is due to take place in Soweto.

With book appreciation, the South African story will survive the demise of Africa’s old party of liberation.

ALL OF A SUDDEN, THE SOUTH AFRICAN STORY WAS NO LONGER DEPRESSING. THE FESTIVAL SHOWED A COUNTRY WITH AN ENGAGED, CURIOUS PEOPLE