Stephen Gray spoke to three of the authors who attended the Time of the Writer festival
LIEWE JORIS
How do you define travel-writing?
Some like to go into the desert riding a camel … but that is not at all my type of travel. I’m not doing romantic things, having adventures. When I asked Ryszard Kapuscinski what he felt about that label, he said he writes what he calls “non- fiction literature”. Me too, I don’t really define myself just as a travel-writer.
What is your purpose then?
I travel for people, and for being behind the scenes. What I try to find out, especially in the second Congo book I am working on, is who these people are whom we used to look at, when we were exploring their countries, when we were baptising them and always talking about them from such a distance.
But you belong to the colonisers, not the colonised.
Yes, but in a way what I am doing is standing in between. Because very often in my books I play a role as the one who is on the receiving end of many cursing sessions that people are having against us. But also I have to bridge a gap for the people who read me and don’t necessarily know the African world.
Your family has links with the old Congo?
Yes, and the first time I started out wanting to write something about my family, which is from Limburg in Belgium; my passport is Belgian and I am Flemish and will always be. It took me three years of preparation, too, before I could go. Reading, going to archives, you have to prepare for such a trip, you have to have your luggage.
Which of your books is getting the best response here?
Well, each book has its own rhythm. Mali Blues is the one people like in South Africa, because it is about Senegal, Mauritania, then Mali itself. The new Congo one will take a long time still, you know, so we’ll have to see who takes to it then.
AHMADOU KOUROUMA
As a citizen of Cte d’Ivoire, how do you feel about visiting South Africa?
Well, during the apartheid years I would never have come, even though between Cte d’Ivoire and the South African regime there were certain agreements and accommodations. At home I was always one of the opposition to all that.
But your first novel of 1968, translated as The Suns of Independence, was severely critical of Francophone Africa.
Yes, once colonisation was over, that was the first book to give a critique of black government. Everything was ripped apart by independence, and everything had to be rearranged – then the dictatorships followed, the Cold War and so on. So the critique was that, having fought so hard for independence, when it came it brought us nothing – rather a severe view. But as a matter of principle I felt I had to write something, as I was the only intellectual left in my country not in prison.
The title of your new novel of 1998 translates as Waiting for the Vote of the Savage Beasts.
Well, it’s really a satire on dictatorships, and my particular dictator is, let’s say, a bit like President Eyedma of Togo. When he’s asked if he would lose a certain election, he replies there is no possibility whatsoever as, even if he did lose, by magic he’d call in all the wild animals out of the bush too, and all of them would vote for him unanimously. So, no problem, even if the human beings dared to let him down! And then it turns out of course he gets a 120% vote …. all his countrymen, plus others who couldn’t resist coming in from outside!
Isn’t criticising tyrants like that dangerous?
Before it was, very seriously, but more recently, not at all. Within Cte d’Ivoire, with our coup d’tat a few weeks ago, now we writers are the ones who do the speaking. We’re completely free to criticise, and to entertain.
At your age (73) you intend to continue writing?
Ah yes, especially since I’m now retired from my law practice. And you’ve seen me doing my jogging along the Durban beach!
GORETTI KYOMUHENDO
You presented yourself the other night on stage as a representative of the Uganda Women Writers’ Association.
Yes, Femrite. We started in 1996 with the overall aim of assisting Ugandan women to have their books published. Because we realised that previously there was only one woman among all the big male figures like Okot p’Bitek, John Ruganda, Taban lo Liyong, Robert Serumaga …
Has your first novel, The First Daughter, published in Kampala in 1996, done well?
Yes, very well, I think because of the issues it dealt with: teenage pregnancy, polygamy and more. These were the challenges to a young girl growing up in Africa. I went to school in a rural area myself, and can compare that experience with that of my city-bred sons. To give an example, they’re amazed I never used to put on shoes … but I didn’t have any, you know.
And the recent novel?
Of last year, and it is called Secrets No More. That is the one about the Rwandan genocide of the mid-1990s. I chose this because, as you know, we share a border with Rwanda, and I knew people who died during that period, or who were suffering, so I had to write it out of my system. But there, although writing about a terrible war situation, still my special interest is in that neglected half – the experience of such a person as the girl who is my main character.
Some of your scenes are extremely graphic and violent.
There are rape scenes, described very harshly, and also sex scenes, which are intentionally described very accurately, because I kept saying: African women are not meant to enjoy sex, on the one hand, or be wounded by it on the other. Any pleasure, or any pain, is to be kept quiet. So I write about those things very openly. Unfortunately some people take those scenes out of context, and the work gets read for the wrong reasons. But you get sex scenes in the male writers too, and nobody ever considers them obscene. That is just another challenge for me and Femrite to come to terms with.