Storytelling in award-winning author Nthikeng Mohlele’s DNA

When facts, fiction and favoured literary expression come together in the mind of Limpopo-born novelist Nthikeng Mohlele, effortlessly penned-down manuscripts translate into award-winning novels. Five before his 40th birthday, to be exact.
Mohlele, who had his last book published in April this year, concedes that life is a movie that plays out in his mind as he pictures frames and reels along with much editing that keeps occurring. Quick-moving colours, sounds, images, senses, moods, light and shadows. Four years after a projected decision to resign formal employment, he is now actualising dedicated time ownership, to be combined with reading and writing while alternatively spending time with his family. Having his roots in Ga-Molepo and growing up in Tembisa, he is exchanging his province of birth for Gauteng at the end of September.
An interview with him forces the outsider to backtrack in time, to when a young Mohlele nurtured a major interest in motion pictures. He remembers titles like Terminator 2, Shaka Zulu 1, 2 and 3 (entailing nine hours of movie-watching) and Cry Freedom as his favourites. His penchant for booke saw him reading encyclopaedias in the library of the Catholic school he attended, before moving on to fiction at the age of 12. The books were introduced by American teachers, with some of the reads having been banned in South Africa then. Most of the stuff he read he didn’t understand like one would appreciate literature, but his real coming to full form was when he enrolled for dramatic arts and African literature studies at Wits.
From his recollections it is evident that storytelling is in his DNA. Throughout his life he has written hundreds of poems as a way of interacting with the world. He smilingly remembers receiving “a nasty and cheeky rejection letter from a very crude manuscript reviewer” in his second year at varsity when he submitted a love story set in the 1800s that never saw the light. Looking back it was a necessary learning curve that changed his consciousness with regards to the seriousness of literature as a craft and separating the idea of writing with the practicalities and demands of writing, he explains. He never went for creative writing training but continued reading and writing until he got it right, realising that he had ever since found his voice.
Life, innocence, nature, human beings’ complexities and the species, history and sensuality serve as inspiration for his writing. Mohlele remarks that he writes stories in the same way as one would construct a puzzle, in whichever way the story comes to him and without pattern. In a world that often expresses itself in black and white, he learnt to switch off the movie camera that is his mind, he explains. “The world is what it is.”
He thinks of writing in musical terms, so equates the words he uses to the orchestration of sounds and silences and in that way is able to be very particular about what he writes or omits. “Its like conducting an orchestra, really.”
He lives the stories he produces and for that reason can re-create whatever he writes 94% of the time. He is not afraid of losing a piece of writing, because he can recall it and pen it down again on his phone – his device of preference – in the manner he initially wrote it down, he points out.
He spends his time reading, writing and cooking meat casseroles. His ardent interest in books is wide and he enjoys music biographies, history, historical speeches, medical journals, philosophy, plays, essays, legislation, historic letters, Shakespeare and poetry, but no encyclopaedias anymore “because there is google”.
His favourite books of all time are JM Coetzee’s The Life and Times of Michael K, Bessie Head’s A Question of Power and Alma Katsu’s The Hunger. If he had to recommend a book it would be Disgrace, also by JM Coetzee, and if there is a book he wished he had written it is Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita, which he describes as “a scary masterpiece, but a masterpiece nevertheless”.
Judging a book by its cover assumes new meaning when talking to Mohlele, for he believes there are many good reads with terrible covers.
He never becomes the protagonists who are given human form between the pages of his books, but without a doubt the story of Nthikeng Mohlele might very well make for a compelling read of its own.

Story: YOLANDE NEL
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