Wole Soyinka, in an interview in The (London) Times” on the “theatricality of politics”:

Some leaders “exceed what the playwright can invent”. He gives the example of the Sudanese leader, Omar Bashir, who “guilty of sending his soldiers out raping, massacring, poisoning wells in Darfur, then goes on television with a spear and a robe that probably doesn’t even belong to his tribal culture, and prances around saying, ‘They’re trying to recolonise us’. After that, what do you want to put on stage? It cripples you. How can you match that level of theatricality? How can you match Mugabe’s moustache?

Soyinka also has something to say about Barack Obama (“I know you think he’s Kenyan, but I know he’s half Yoruba, like me. I’m waiting for the DNA tests.”) and his friend, Derek Walcott, who recently was the subject of a smear campaign at Oxford University (“There but for the grace of God go I. It can happen to any of us, especially in countries like Amercia, where you can be sued for admiring a student’s skirt.”)

Via Naijablog.

Poet and novelist James Matthews turned 80 today. Here‘s a link to a short note I wrote on the occasion of his 79th birthday.

If you can read Afrikaans, here‘s a link to piece in Cape Town’s “Die Burger” by reporter Heindrich Wyngaardt. [The picture, above, by photographer Michael Hammond accompanied the Wyngaardt story.]

Johnson writes libelous things about the dead because they can’t sue, according to Beresford. And then there’s this method of research:

… [Johnson] writes: “not only was (Robert) Mugabe one of the few people given a fore-warning of the events of 9/11, but he had actually allowed al-Qaeda militants to fly into Zimbabwe in the week following 9/11 to get fitted out with false Zimbabwean passports”, thus suggesting that Mugabe was an accomplice before and after the fact in the destruction of the twin towers. Turning to the relevant footnote for the source of this mind-boggling claim, I read: “See RW Johnson.”

The Guardian

‘… “There are a lot of novels out there that make you think America is England, you know? …”That book is sort of—it’s dark green, and there’s a very sort of sensuous but depressing-looking cover: a photograph, there’s like a blurry thing in the distance. It’s a beach maybe, and the title describes a relationship between a mother and a daughter, or a mother and a father, or a father and a daughter. And the typography is all done in the same typeface as money, and the interior is all about small lives lived in a small way. I’ve often felt like those books don’t have much to do with the way life is actually lived in America.” …’

novelist James Hannaham

From the archives.

A clip from a longer interview with writer Nadine Gordimer in 2005.

And in October 1982 in a talk entitled “Living in the Interregnum,” (one of my favorite pieces of writing on the conundrum of South Africa, that despite the context changing, still remains relevant)  she told an audience at the New York Institute for the Humanities, among other things, that:

“… In the official South African consciousness, the ego is white: it has always seen all South Africa as ordered around it. Even the ego that seeks to abdicate this alienation does so in an assumption of its own salvation that in itself expresses ego and alienation. And the Western world press, itself over-whelmingly white, constantly feeds this ego from its own. Visiting journalists, parliamentarians, congressmen and congresswomen come to South Africa to ask whites what is going to happen there. They meet blacks through whites; they rarely take the time and trouble, on their own initiative, to encounter more than the man who comes into the hotel bedroom to take away the empty beer bottles. With the exception of films made clandestinely by South African political activists, black and white, about resistance events, most foreign television documentaries, while condemning the whites out of their own mouths, are nevertheless preoccupied with what will happen to whites when the apartheid regime goes.”

With his son, Ken Wiwa, on Saturday at the annual Pen World Voices Festival of International Literature.

Also, on the program, Egyptian novelist, psychiatrist, and activist Nawal El Saadawi, giving a lecture on Sunday.

[Here is] the description of the funeral of Mbeki’s father in 2001. Govan Mbeki, who had been more activist than parent, insisted that he be buried in a dilapidated, litter-strewn local cemetery near Port Elizabeth. This produced, as Govan must clearly have understood it would, a painful tableau for his son, the president who had not succeeded in lifting most of his countrymen out of poverty. “There was something festive and celebratory in the air — not just that Govan Mbeki truly was a local hero in these neglected quarters, but that the carnival of power had come to town — and most onlookers cheered for the dignitaries they recognized,” Gevisser writes. “Some, however, made no bones about their feelings. ‘Look at your fancy cars!’ one woman yelled to a prominent black businessman as he alighted from his BMW.”

The Winter 2009 issue of The Literature Review is themed “Africa Calling” and is guest edited by Jeffery Renard Allen, features work by African writers writing in English. Contributions by Siphiwo Mahala, Parul Sehgal, Victor Ehikhamenor, Jackee Batanda, Chika Unigwe, Yvonne Adhiambo Owuor, Esi Edugyan, Stanley Gazemba, Zed Houndete, Oghenerukevwe Jennifer Agbatutu, Brian Chikwava, Mildred Kiconco Barya, Andiah Kisia, Christopher Mlalazi, David Mills, Caitlin Meissner, Neema Ngwatilo Mawiyoo, Patricia Jabbeh Wesley, Shailja Patel, Kitso-yame Kgaboesele, Kim Coleman Foote, Tracy Nneka Nnanwubar and Paula Delgado-Kling

Download selected content here.

Novelist Damon Galgut interviewed in The Boston Globe:

Q. You grew up in apartheid South Africa and live in post-apartheid South Africa. How does that influence your writing?

A. It’s hard to say. Any radical change or trauma always makes for interesting subject matter, but then all stories deal, to some extent, with the disjuncture between past and present. I feel much more at home, in a creative sense, in the new South Africa. Things have become far more ambiguous, far more morally nuanced. I like the irony and contradiction I see around me. It’s a bit of a mess, historically speaking, but viewed through a writer’s amoral lens, it’s certainly not dull.

New book edited by a friend of mine.