Mongane Wally Serote’s new novel, Revelations, is a narrative journey undertaken by artists and modern-day warriors, who, after the liberation of South Africa, try to understand what was fought for, and why.
A South African dance troupe in Chile brings back stories of that country’s trials and tribulations and a paralell is drawn with our own struggle to reconcile and to make peace when the time for war is over.
The underground of a Movement is a network of spirits. You are not visible when you are in the underground, yet you must be very visible. You must hide all the intentions from treachery, from evil, but ensure that those good intentions do transform and become a reality, which speaks loud, which walks, which visibly penetrates every and anything to become a spirit of the masses, and intertwines with their hopes, wishes, needs and hearts and understands their interests.
Ngaka’s major concern in those days, which held onto with my life was that one day we will achieve peace, and that that peace will emerge from the freedom we were fighting for and that freedom is what we want it to be. We must talk so and it will be so. He used a lot of words, about how to make peace out of war, he would say it in English, Sesotho, isizulu and at times in Afrikaans to describe this talk between the two. His favorite phrase in isiZulu was u kugeza’ imikhonto. I had never imagined that people could actually go to a river; wash their spears together, after they had been at war with each other. They would exchange spears, which they used against each other, and now wash them, wash the blood, the deaths of the other side, to flow away, to be taken away by the flow of the river. It is this which helped for adversaries to negotiate, then, in those days of blood they would enter into negotiations.
About the author
Born in Sophia Town, Johannesburg in 1944, Mongane Wally Serote was drawn to poetry and writing towards the end of his high-school career following his connection to the “Township” or “Soweto Poets”, a literary group involved in the development of Black Consciousness and who produced creative works which centered around themes of political activism, and featured images or revolt and resistance.
He was arrested by the Apartheid government in 1969 under the Terrorism act, following which he spent 9 months within solitary confinement. He was later released without charge, and went on to obtain a fine arts degree in New York at the Columbia University in 1979. For a time he was unable to return to South Africa due to exile, and so he began living in Botswana and London, where he became involved with the Medu Arts Ensemble.He is the recipient of the 1993 Norma Award for Publishing in Africa, and has also been given the Pablo Neruda Award from the Chilean government in 2004. He is currently CEO of Freedom Park, the national heritage site in Pretoria.
Book details
- Revelations by Wally Serote
EAN: 9781770098084
