Top women writers gather in Joburg’s ideas festival
13 September 2016
The moving words of Nobel literary laureate Toni Morrison – who once said “My world did not shrink because I was a black female writer. It only got bigger” – will resonate at the Joburg Theatre in Braamfontein this week when top women writers from all over Africa and the diaspora gather for the fourth annual International African Women Writers’ Symposium.
The symposium, to be held from Thursday September 15 to Saturday September 17, is part of the City of Johannesburg’s 2016 International Arts Alive Festival.
The gathering, which is both a festival of ideas and a celebration of African writing, hopes to empower and excite women with a new consciousness. Staged in partnership with the Department of Arts and Culture, the symposium, under the theme: “Bearing Witness, Giving Testimony and Telling Untold Stories”, will look into the challenges faced by African women on the continent and globally through “master classes”, workshops, panel discussions, poetry and music.
This year’s theme was chosen to mark the 60th anniversary of the historic August 9 1956 women’s march to the Union Buildings in Pretoria to demand equality and justice. The symposium will also recognise women’s endurance and resilience as they continue to assert themselves and carve their own identity in the face of adversity. One of the highlights of the symposium will be a presentation by renowned novelist Gillian Slovo of the second Nadime Gordimer Memorial Lecture at the Fringe on Friday night.
Slovo – the daughter of South African Communist Party leader Joe Slovo and his anti-apartheid activist wife Ruth First, who was killed by a parcel bomb in Mozambique in 1982 – is well known for her family memoir, “Every Secret Thing”, a worldwide best-seller. Gordimer, South Africa’s only woman Nobel literary laureate, died in 2014.
The evening will also celebrate poets and writers from all over world, including Mak Manaka, Slam Poetry champion Aja Monet (United States), Cristina Farrah (Italy-Somalia), Diana Ferrus (South Africa), Mamle Kabu (Ghana) and Vangi Gantsho (South Africa. The music will be led by Steve Dyer and feature guest singers such as Nothende, Msaki and Masike.
Saturday will see several panel discussions, talks and poetry performances featuring literary women heavyweights such as Syreeta McFadden, a US writer, photographer and academic who writes extensively on #BlackLivesMatter; Ubah Cristina Ali Farrah, a Somali-Italian poet, novelist, playwright and oral performer; Mamle Kabu, a Ghanaian a prose writer; US’s Aja Monet, who became the youngest person to win the sought-after Nuyorican Poet’s Café Grand Slam; Gantsho, an acclaimed poet and graduate of the Thabo Mbeki African Leadership Institute; and Nomboniso Gasa, a South African intellectual and activist.
Gasa will pay tribute to Phyllis Ntantala-Jordan, a distinguished South African writer who died earlier this year. Ntantala-Jordan was known as a free-thinking and unflinching woman of intellect and a feminist.