Freedom of the word will rule at the Mail & Guardian Literary Festival that begins at 7 pm on September 3. It’s then that M&G editor-in-chief Nic Dawes delivers the event’s keynote address, which is expected to speak about the threats to freedom of expression and opinion posed by the ANC’s proposed Protection of Information Bill and Media Tribunal.
The Bill and tribunal menace writers of all stripes, not only journalists. South Africa’s first Nobel laureate for literature, Nadine Gordimer, incisively summed up the situation in an interview with the Guardian published on August 31.
“All writers are threatened by censorship, and censorship is the reality lurking behind the words ‘media tribunal’,” she told Stephen Moss. “Writing presupposes an interaction with readers. If the work and the freedom of the writer are in jeopardy, the freedom of every reader in South Africa is too.”
Readers and writers will mix and match words at the M&G Literary Festival, encouraged by the intimate and relaxed ambience of the venue, 44 Stanley Avenue in Milpark, Johannesburg. Sessions, some in parallel, take place at The Room and Gallery Art On Paper, and there is a launch of the collected letters of Es’kia Mphaphlele, Bury Me at the Marketplace, at Bean There coffee shop.
At the sessions — eight in all — robust discussion is planned about South Africa, and its fiction and non-fiction. Each 90-minute session will include contributions from and debate between panellists, followed by vigorous discussion between the panel and the audience.
Constructive dissent is the rule, in the words of David Macfarlane, M&G education editor and chair of Session Four: The ABCs of RSA: So where to, education? Macfarlane says of this approach: “I will try to keep the peace, but I won’t try too hard.”
That spirit of controlled rebellion looks to thinkers and word activists such as Mphaphlele, Sol Plaatje, Bessie Head and Albert Camus, among others. It was Camus who wrote, in his treatise The Rebel: “The novel is born simultaneously with the spirit of rebellion and expresses, on the aesthetic plane, the same ambition.”
In that spirit, the festival hopes to foster raucous examination and reflection from its first session, on the state of fiction in South Africa, to its bookend, writing crime in South African fiction and non-fiction.