Viral festival of words
A POETRY COMPETITION IN ALL 11 OFFICIAL LANGUAGES AVBOB’s competition for wordsmiths across the board was no dead affair – as the prizes event showed.
Poets as young as 10 years old and as old as 97 years of age submitted their poems for approval in this nationwide competition. On August 1 last year, a remarkable and unorthodox event took place in the social media space.
This was the launch of a poetry competition in all 11 official languages to serve South Africans as a source of comfort and catharsis.
Sponsored by AVBOB Mutual Assurance Society and funeral service provider, the competition of this reach was unprecedented in Mzansi, and while a modest 5 000 poems were anticipated, 20 774 were finally entered.
Of these, 3 108 were published on AVBOB poetry website. From there, three poems in each language category were selected, and at a gracious gala evening held in Pretoria on June 20 this year, the poetry prize was presented to the first-placed poets.
The event signalled a celebration of the human spirit, and of the power of poetry to heal and transform, and that power has now been captured in a print anthology, published by Naledi under the competition tagline, “I Wish I’d said…”
The winning poems in each language category will now live on alongside the work of seven accomplished South African poets, each commissioned to write a poem in each language category for the anthology.
In the spirit of inclusivity, the 100th poem in the collection is written in Khoisan.
The winning poems covered the totemic themes of love, hope, birth and death, and were drawn from that pool of poetic voices, each bravely articulating the inner life of countless amateur poets across Mzansi.
Poets as young as 10 years old and as old as 97 years of age submitted their poems for approval on the website.
While Gauteng proved to be the poetic heartland of SA, poems were submitted from Cape Town to Kuruman, from Bhisho to Bela Bela and beyond.
And while English is definitely the poetic dialect of the country, the beauty of the project lay in the convergence of all the voices of our land, forming a poetic patchwork quilt in isiXhosa, Sepedi, Tshivenda, Xitsonga, isiZulu, Setswana, isiNdebele, Afrikaans, Sesotho and Siswati.
However, finally it came down to the most powerfully crafted poems in each mother tongue.
The poets behind the poems proved the richness of South Africa with a collection of praise poems of hope and healing.
Citizen Reporter