Bergen Literary Festival, February 2020
I joined fellow South African writers Njabulo Ndebele, Jonny Steinberg and Koleka Putuma in Bergen. In the picture above they are discussing ‘The Meaning of Mandela’ and evoking the decades in which they came of age: a beautiful session. I talked to Jonny about his recent book.
“What to do? The amnesty machine seems not to have been designed to imbibe the unexpected. It was struggling enough just to process the routine.”
‘In short, there are problems’: Literary journalism in the postcolony.
Excerpt from Experiments with Truth: Narrative Non-fiction and the Coming of Democracy in South Africa.
In an epilogue to Little Liberia, his 2011 account of an African diaspora in New York, Jonny Steinberg records a telephone conversation with a man whose life he has just spent two years researching. The author has given Jacob Massaquoi a printout of the manuscript, along with a note proposing that 50% of the royalties be channelled to community projects. Four days later he receives a call:
‘I have read everything’, he said. ‘There are very serious problems with this book: problems that will hurt family back home, problems that will have re- percussions for me in Staten Island. And then there are still more problems I cannot discuss now. In short, there are problems.’