More insights from Africa’s most perceptive authors

Visit timesselect.co.za every day this week for free-to-read reflections by leading writers on the crisis that connects us all, written exclusively for the Sunday Times

MONDAY Ayobámi Adébáyo

Lagos-based writer Adébáyo studied with Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie and Margaret Atwood. Her debut novel, Stay With Me, won the 2019 9mobile prize for literature and was long-listed for the International Dylan Thomas Prize. She diarises the changing face of travel and our shifting perceptions of far and near. “Still the illusion of distance persists — uneroded by technology that has enabled us to shrink thousands of miles to a negligible point and in defiance of experience — until what was over there arrives here.”

TUESDAY Shubnum Khan

Khan is a Durban-based artist and author whose debut novel, Onion Tears — about the lives of three generations of Indian Muslim women in SA — was shortlisted for the Penguin Prize for African Writing and the University of Johannesburg Debut Fiction Prize. She writes of how lockdown has warped our sense of space, time and reality. “Sometimes I still imagine I can hear it. An echo of the old world reaching out like a phantom limb.”

WEDNESDAY Siphiwe Gloria Ndlovu

Ndlovu, born in Zimbabwe and based in Johannesburg, has master’s degrees in African studies and film and a PhD from Stanford University. Her debut novel, The Theory of Flight, won the 2019 Sunday Times Barry Ronge Fiction Prize. She writes of the unknowability of the time we are in and its ability to expand our knowledge. “The virus is in the process of teaching us a very different way of seeing and experiencing our place in the world. We are being humbled.”

THURSDAY Mandla Langa

Langa is one of SA’s most respected authors. In 2007 he was awarded the National Order of Ikhamanga for literary, journalistic and cultural achievements. Among his many works is Dare Not Linger: The

Presidential Years, the second volume of Nelson Mandela’s autobiography. He writes movingly of what the coronavirus pandemic has revealed about society, evoking hope as well as heartache. “There’s an isiZulu proverb, okungapheli kuyahlola, which, slightly paraphrased, means that this, too, will come to an end.”

FRIDAY Novuyo Rosa Tshuma

Tshuma is a Bulawayo-born writer whose 2019 novel,

House of Stone, won global acclaim. The New York Times said: “Tshuma’s brilliant layering of competing images and metaphors is one of the many marvels of this wise and demanding novel … a remarkable feat … ambitious and ingenious.” She writes about being far from home in the US, where she was a visiting assistant professor at the Iowa writers’ workshop when the world was locked down.