Infantilizing writing in African languages?

I was at a reading of Phaswane Mpe’s Welcome To Our Hillbrow and K. Sello Duikers’ Thirteen Cents and The Quiet Violence of Dreams yesterday, as part of the Keleketla Library’s contribution to WALE, the Wits Arts and Literature Experience festival. The Keleketla investigation of the legacy of Mpe, Duiker and Moses Molekwa is part of ‘Dislocating the Studio’, a residency programme in the Wits School of the Arts. Siphiwo Mahala and I were re-reading these books of our friends and I think we all found that they still speak to obstacles to freedom, to limitations on our literary imagination.

For example did you know, as Welcome To Our Hillbrow tells us, that if you write a book in an African language, you are likely to be asked to tone it down for a young audience? That’s because supposedly, the only economically viable readership for a novel in an African language is schools; and therefore the book must be edited according to what educational publishers deem appropriate for children to read. Phaswane’s narrator comments that our whole system of reviewing and publishing confuses writers by making them believe that “euphemism equals good morals” and that “Calling shit and genitalia by their correct names in Sepedi was apparently regarded as vulgar by these reviewers, who had for a long time been reviewing works for educational publishers and who were determined to ensure that such works did not offend the systems that they served.”

We are still in the process of replacing those systems, and it seems as if we haven’t completely shifted this outrageous assumption that novels written in African languages have to be infantilized before they can be published. Siphiwo Mahala is one of the very few writers who ahs published his novel, When a Man Cries in English and in isiXhosa and had the latter reviewed in the English mainstream press. Yet, he said that he had to tone down the sexually explicit parts of the isiXhosa novel, as if “euphemism equal good morals.” How do we persuade the public and the publishers and the reviewers that there are readers for good, innovative new writing in African languages? How do we continue the libratory work of Phaswane Mpe and K Sello Duiker?

The Keleketla performance for WALE is called Nonwane and will be held in Hillbrow May 11 at the Summit Hotel For more details contact Ra at rangoato@keleketla.org. WWC events for WALE include the launch of the play The Pump Room by Allan Kolski Horwitz on Wednesday May 11 at 18h30- 19h30, Graduate Seminar Room, South West Engineering building; People Power, readings of new writing from the mentor protégé group sparked by recent events and an invitation to write, on Thursday May 12, 16h30 -18h30, at the Wits Writing Centre; launch of the novel Ngiyolibala Ngifile (I will forget when I am dead) by Dumisani Sibiya on Friday May 14 at 17h30 -18h30 at the Graduate Seminar Room, South West Engineering building; and lastly launch of the poetry cd Roots and Branches, featuring performances from a treasury of Johannesburg poets, including Lionel Murcott, Ike Muila, Siphiwe Ka Ngwenya; Myesha Jenkins, Khanya Magubane, Yoliswa Mogale, Phillippa de Villiers, Lesley Perkes, Allan Kolski Horwitz, Mark Espin, James de Villiers, Chantal-Fleur Sandjon, and Mphutlane wa Bofelo.

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