Librarians at the Florida Regional Library in Church Street were again the happy hosts of another famous author on the morning of Thursday 6 February.
Mongane Wally Serote, who typically introduces himself as merely ‘Wally’, addressed an audience of two schools and media representatives as well as fans on Thursday morning.
Wally had published at least 10 collections of poetry and released his fourth novel, Rumours, in 2013. He had also authored some academic essays and served as the chair of the parliamentary select committee for arts and culture. He also served as the CEO of Freedom Park, the national heritage site in Pretoria, until 2012.
Wally was a political activist, is one of the founding members of the Black Consciousness movement and had been imprisoned in solitary confinement.
The talk was organised by Florida Regional Library with the cooperation of Jacana Media, Wally’s publishers.
Wally started off by introducing himself and telling his story after which he took questions from the audience in order to start a discussion.
“At primary school, I had very good teachers that had us tell stories,” Wally said about how he started writing poetry.
“However, being influenced by European literature at school, I initially wrote a poem about snow and presented it to one of the teachers — she reprimanded me for writing about things that I have never experienced and advised me to write about what I experience, what I observe.”
Wally then started writing about Alexander, where he grew up, and continued writing poetry with themes of political activism, the development of black identity and portraying images of revolt and resistance.
“In 1976 I got a fullbright to study in the United States.
“I was afraid to be too influenced by my new American surroundings and approached an African professor to mentor me in African literature, to help me maintain my South African voice.”
“After prison I decided to abandon writing poetry and wrote my first novel, To every birth its blood, partly because writing about how we arrived at the situation in 1976 was to explain what that situation was, and what is to be done about it [from my perspective] — it was too long, I explored it too vastly for it to be poetry.
“We had to face a very big problem in South Africa — that being apartheid,” Wally said, who was acquainted at the time with liberals like Braam Fischer and Ingrid Jonker.
He says that his most prized literary achievement, having been awarded many prizes, was the Ingrid Jonker Poetry Prize.
“She was my friend, we were colleagues in writing, and I knew that this country didn’t do her good.”
Wally deemed it important during his conversation with the audience that South African youth further the work of Nelson Mandela and the Truth and Reconciliation Commission.
“Let us find a way to reach ourselves and understand these things that are put before us so that this country may never repeat the mistakes of the past.”
