Edinburgh International Book Festival: Achmat Dangor

Edinburgh International Book Festival has a distinctly South African flavour this year. As well as this appearance from Achmat Dangor, there's a reading from speculative fiction author Lauren Beukes, and Sifiso Mzobe and Henrietta Rose-Innes in conversation with the festival’s director Nick Barley.

In a last minute alteration to the programme, fellow South African author Sindiwe Magona drops out, leaving Dangor to discuss his country's issues of the day. Chaired by Professor Willy Maley of the University of Glasgow, Dangor reads an excerpt from his Booker 2004 Shortlisted novel Bitter Fruit (2001) as well as a passage from his latest collection of short stories, Strange Pilgrimages (2013).

Maley leads Dangor in a conversation that has a heavy political rather than a literary emphasis. During the early 1970s, Dangor was an important part of artistic resistance against the apartheid regime in South Africa. At a time when black culture was portrayed by the ruling Afrikaners as 'crude and backwards', Dangor, along with some friends, founded Black Thoughts, a revolutionary writing group that aimed to counter the cultural distortions set forth by the authorities. Dangor comments that during the breakdown of the apartheid, writers were known as "cultural workers", and their words as "cultural weapons". As a result, there was enormous pressure on his contemporaries to make their writing count.

Maley is interested in new writing coming out of the country, particularly in the disaffected, dispirited tone that the post-independence literature often takes. Dangor responds that such writing needn’t always be bleak, but has a duty to tell the unsanitised truth without becoming overly pedantic or essayistic in tone. He speaks of a need to remember the atrocities that occurred, but also to embrace the future. If, as Georges Braque suggests, "art is a wound turned to light", then the current blossoming of South African literature may be seen as result of a country unburdening itself of a bloody history.

Yet Dangor is keen to point out that the apartheid must not be oversimplified: "it is not a mere case of black and white, truth and evil, victim and victimised." For Dangor, South Africa is a country in which both victim and perpetrator are grappling to come to terms with what happened on either side of the divide. He makes the astute point that one of the problems in the country is the tendency to view problems as entirely unique. It would be prudent, he notes, to look outwardly as well as inwardly at the ways in which countries such as Ireland have overcome their own political problems.

The audience, many of whom seemed to have strong South African connections, ask pertinent questions, and Dangor answers eloquently. It is somewhat of a pity, however, for there to be so little discussion of Dangor’s own writing, particularly after he opened the event with such provocative excerpts. Nevertheless, it is an intelligent and thought-provoking hour which addresses topical issues about the future of the Rainbow Nation.