South Africa drafts a new chapter

REPORT:Last weekend's Franschhoek Literary Festival used the World Cup as a useful way to look at a country still working out its past, writes CAROLINE WALSH

IT WAS INEVITABLE that the pros and cons of the World Cup, which starts in South Africa on June 11th, would be a hot topic at this year’s Franschhoek Literary Festival, outside Cape Town last weekend. Are the games the shot in the arm Desmond Tutu sees them as for a country mired in problems since the bright new dawn of the end of apartheid – or a squandering of billions of rand on stadiums, airports and hotels that could have gone into tackling township poverty? “The World Cup seems to be the Holy Grail,” said Mandla Langa at a session with fellow writers Rian Malan, Imraan Coovadia and Christi van der Westhuizen on what post-2010 South Africa will look like when the hoopla is all over.

It’s four years since the novelist Christopher Hope initiated a literary festival – think Hay-on-Wye on a smaller scale – in this town at the heart of the Franschhoek wine valley, its famous oak trees now flaming in all their autumn colours. The festival revolves around Huguenot Street, the main drag, named after the 200 Huguenots who fled here from France after the Edict of Nantes was revoked in 1685.

“Franschhoek is our way of explaining what writers are,” says Hope. “I mean, if you were a black writer in this country, where on earth would you go? There is a great deal of talent out there, but how do you get it from there to here? We are not seeing young black writers coming forward in the way you’d have hoped. That’s just a fact. It’s like when the wall came down in east Berlin. Though the wall came down in South Africa, the wall in the head is still there, and it’s going to take time – but the more holes we make in that wall the better.”

Certainly, the amount of black talent on panels at the festival was noticeable. It mightn’t be something you’d dwell on elsewhere, but in manicured downtown Franschhoek, a world away from the township that sprawls on the hill behind it, the multirace blending of participating writers seemed all the more urgent – and unusual. And necessary, too, after fate intervened last month in the shape of volcanic ash to sabotage plans for the spotlight to be on South Africa at this year’s London Book Fair. Many of the four dozen South African writers who were to attend never made it.

South Africa has an above-average share of major writers – Nadine Gordimer, JM Coetzee, Breyten Breytenbach, André Brink, Gillian Slovo, Achmat Dangor – as well as Damon Galgut and Ivan Vladislavic, both of whom were at Franschhoek. And the country is now seeing a rise in genres like black satire and chick lit.

Crime writing is also huge in South Africa. Practitioners at the festival included Deon Meyer, Wessel Ebersohn, Margie Orford, Angela Makholwa and Sue Rabie. Just as it’s Irish crime writers who are currently credited with best conjuring up the fractured, often violent place Ireland has become, so too their South African counterparts have no shortage of fodder for their imaginations. “I sometimes don’t want to look at the front pages, because it’s murder, murder, murder. The front pages of all newspapers in South Africa are scary,” says Rabie, who when she sets out to write only has to look at what’s happening around her.

Sports writing dominated some sessions, including one titled Is Sport the New Politics?, chaired by Chris Thurman of the department of English literature at Witwatersrand University, in Johannesburg, and editor of the recently published Sport Versus Art: A South African Contest. Among the contributors is Victor Dlamini, also a participant at the festival, whose essay asks why on the eve of South Africa's hosting of the World Cup so many look back to the 1970s and 1980s, when they believe the beautiful game was at its zenith. "What does it tell us about South African football that, even as large amounts from sponsorship deals flow through the football ecosystem, there's been no corresponding lifting of the playing standard?"

It's clear he believes the appeal of football two or three decades ago was heightened by a yearning for an activity that could cut across many of the borders that apartheid created. "In many ways, the cultural boycott and the dearth of facilities for black people in a segregated South Africa rendered football stadiums actual theatres of the imagination." Back then the stars were household names, magicians on the football pitch, he says, arguing that one of the lasting legacies of the country's hosting of the World Cup could be the arrival of a new golden era in the nation's football.

A certain nostalgia for the apartheid era also turned up at the festival via the author Jacob Dlamini, whose book Native Nostalgialooks back wistfully at his township childhood, from the ubiquitous rats to the magical radio that brought in the outside world.

The Franschhoek festival has a simple but powerful objective in a country where millions still live in poverty and where only 1 per cent of the population regularly buys books; they sum it up as "The people shall read." They raised 415,000 rand – more than €43,000 – for the festival's library fund from ticket sales and donations in its first three years, 165,000 (€17,000) going to buy books for local schools and creches. When the author Tom Watt went into the local township to talk about football and his book A Beautiful Game, and to give out books to the children at Dalubuhle School, the message hammered home to the swarms of welcoming, singing, enthusiastic children was simple: readers become leaders, and books can open up whole new worlds.

Non-fiction was the topic of an interview with the poet and journalist Antjie Krog, whose most recent book is the powerful piece of reportage Begging to Be Black. Krog made one of the liveliest contributions to the festival when she interjected from the floor during one session to say that sitting around ensconced in privilege, as delegates were, criticising the way things are in the country, wasn't good enough. "White people are failing the hand that was held out to us after 1994."

The small Irish contingent at the festival was delighted to meet up with one of the leading lights of Nelson Mandela's government, Kader Asmal, who lived in Ireland for 27 years, teaching law at Trinity and founding the Irish Anti-Apartheid Movement, and whose memoirs are forthcoming. Reminiscing about Ireland, he talked about how ghettoised South Africa remained. "Some people have not got over the fact that blacks are running the country and doing it very well." Responding in an upbeat way to journalists asking about the turmoil that dogs post-apartheid South Africa, he quoted from Yeats's The Second Coming, turning the poet's line on its head to proclaim: "The centre is holding here, that's the important thing. There is no political violence."