By Benevolence Mazhinji
When asked how he felt about returning to Makhanda for Wordfest 2025, writer Etienne van Heerden said, “We were told to expect the worst, and we were really expecting a dystopic city, but it’s beautiful and it’s wonderful to be back.” The award-winning novelist, poet, and columnist was among the many writers, performers and thinkers who came together for the two-day festival to celebrate South African literature in Makhanda.
The festival welcomed over 15 speakers exploring a wide range of topics and afforded us a thought-provoking experience. Audiences were moved by deeply personal and often gut-wrenching biographical stories shared by the authors, alongside sessions that celebrated the power of language through photography and live poetry readings.
Among these voices was Popina Khumanda, whose memoir The Smallest Ones recounts her childhood survival of war in the Democratic Republic of Congo. She shared the harrowing five-month journey that eventually brought her to South Africa. “We started walking from Kinshasa to South Africa. We passed Kisangani, we walked through Zambia, and then we walked into Zimbabwe, and wanted to cross the border from Zimbabwe to South Africa, but the borderline there is very strict,” said Khumanda, “So we had to reroute and then go all the way through Mozambique and into South Africa. It took us five months to get to South Africa on foot.”
Khumanda’s book and story captured the essence of the festival itself, a space where literature becomes a vessel for memory and for reclaiming indigenous voices. That same spirit of resilience was reflected in Ronelda Kamfer, the author of the Afrikaans novel, Kompoun. She said, “I started writing the book, and then my computer crashed and I realised I didn’t save the book. It was like a year’s worth of writing that I lost. I had to rewrite it from my own memory.” The audience laughed at the misfortune and gasped at its scale, but it showed that it’s the tenacity to push through setbacks that ultimately carries a story to the page.
The festival’s intensity shifted from literary resilience to investigative grit with Jeff Wicks whose session was highly anticipated following the success of his book The Shadow State: Why Babita Deokaran had to Die. Wicks opened by reading the book’s gripping first paragraph, immediately drawing the audience into the high-stakes world of corruption, whistleblowers, and state capture. Reflecting on the investigation, he revealed the personal weight of the work and the fear of possibly inheriting the same dangers faced by Babita Deokaran. The tension and gravity he shared highlighted the courage required to confront entrenched systems of power, giving us a rare glimpse into the risks and realities of investigative journalism.
The connection between words and photography surfaced across several presentations, taken up in different ways. In her talk “Brief encounters: connections between the short story and film photography”, Robyn Perros described how both forms are “brief yet potent”, which means that they are defined as much by what is unsaid or unseen as by what is said or seen. She talked about the pursuit of beauty as the force which usually animates writers and photographers, but she said, “If I see a beautiful sunset or a beautiful bird or a beautiful piece of art or architecture, that’s not something I’m typically interested in photographing at all. If, however, I were to see a sunset painted on a caravan selling boerewors in a stinky parking lot, or a bird feeding its babies in a fence, or a piece of art printed on the cheap T-shirt of a mannequin in a China mall, these would be moments where beauty is, in some way or another, striving, these would be moments that I’d be more interested in photographing.”
This sensitivity and practice of noticing the world around us was also highlighted by Darryl Earl David in his talk about his book Karoozing: An Ode to the Open Road. He said, “I have this view in life that you don’t take photographs, but photographs are given to you, that they are a gift from God.” Both speakers, in their own ways, reminded us that whether through words or images, art begins with the discipline of paying attention.
That same attention to language and form carried into the launch of New Coin Poetry, South Africa’s longest-running poetry journal, which launched its volume 61.1 June issue at the festival. The survival of a poetry publication for more than six decades is no small feat, especially in a country where poetry is so often considered a hard sell. What made this moment feel particularly significant was the endurance of the journal itself, and the way it highlighted the place of poetry as a collective endeavour which is sustained by academics, writers, and readers working together. The poems read on the day were by turns searing, tender, and heartbreaking, reminding the audience of the unique ability of words to cut through noise and reach the rawest edges of human experience.
The festival drew to a poignant close with a piano concert by Christof van der Berg, which served as a tribute to the late Chris Mann, who ran WordFest during the national arts festival for many years. Much like a memorial lecture in music, the performance honoured Mann’s enduring legacy in South African literature and culture.
