Category: News

On 15^th May, multi-award award winning South African author, Damon Galgut visited the English Department to speak to undergraduate students, enrolled for a course on Galgut’s works, about his writing career. He was invited by course convenor, Ass. Prof Tilla Slabbert. The lively, though-provoking conversation was spearheaded by director, dramatist, and designer Marthinus Basson, a friend of Galgut for more than 40 years. For a generous two hours, Galgut talked and responded to questions about  the genesis, inspiration, conceptualization, processes and challenges of his writing journey; a career which resulted in several nominations and awards, e.g.: The Good Doctor (2003), shortlisted for the 2003 Booker Prize for Fiction and winner of the 2003 Commonwealth Writers Prize (Africa Region, Best Book); In A Strange Room, shortlisted (2010), and Arctic Summer longlisted (2014) for the Booker Prize; and The Promise, winner of the Booker Prize for 2021. Postgraduate students and staff also attended, and the audience conceded, it was a truly inspiring, provocative literary event.

Jauquelyne Kosgei is a PhD candidate in the English Department at Stellenbosch University. Her research, located in Indian Ocean Studies, focuses on reviving indigenous knowledges and argues for the inclusion of oral sources in mainstream discourse.

She has been invited to give a seminar at WiSER, Wits, as part of the Oceanic Humanities project. On Wednesday 19^th February, she will speak on: “Embodied and Experiential Cartographies of the Indian Ocean: Digo Oral Testimonies and Oral Poetry”. In the presentation, she explores embodied and experiential knowledges of the sea in an attempt to map how local people at the Kenyan coast conceptualise the Indian Ocean, exploring multiple dimensions of the sea – the economic, the spiritual, and the ecological. Her discussion uses accounts that she recorded among the Digo (one of the nine Mijikenda tribes), these narratives being oral testimonies by a sailor and a fisherman, and oral poems by Bahati Ngazi, a young poet. The testimony given by the sailor maps the Kenyan coast, particularly Mombasa, as a critical node of the global economic network in the Indian Ocean world. His recounted itineraries construct the sea as an open, navigable space, that belongs to no one in particular. In addition, the ease with which sea spirits found in the fisherman’s testimony move, and the fluidity of the space they move in and occupy, challenges the rationale behind the erection of boundaries in the seas. From the oral poems, Kosgei reflects on how communities at the Kenyan coast use sung poetry as a tool for the preservation of the sea. The poems offer a prompt for understanding ecological threats facing the ocean, and for appreciating and utilising local beliefs and customs in favour of its protection

Read Dr. Serah Kasembeli’s article,  The Ghosts of Slavery Still Haunt Us, which is based on her doctoral research, written for the Cape Times (12 June 2018). She graduated in  March 2018, and her thesis is titled The Ghost Of Memory : Literary Representations  Of Slavery In Post-Apartheid South Africa.