Coming home — black writers, literacy spaces and belonging

One of the things that I most appreciate about the Open Book Festival is that it ventures into difficult terrain and hosts conversations that need to be had. 

The 2025 festival featured a discussion on Literary Spaces and Belonging, an exploration of the ways in which black writers are expected to perform in literary spaces after publishing and how many of these “performances” involve negotiating white spaces. 

Curated with care by festival director Mervyn Sloman, the panel featured Lesedi Molefi, Mohale Mashigo and Mbali Sikakana.

Molefi opened by reading an email he had written earlier in the year about his experience of the Franschhoek Literary Festival (FLF). 

The room held its breath. It was that compelling: filled with raw reflection, humour and sadness, describing how it felt to walk into a world that seemed to have been built for someone else. 

He wrote of black people sitting quietly on pavements, their laughter turned inwards, the whole town “white as chalk”. He had enjoyed parts of it, but the experience left him wondering whether he truly belonged not just in that town, but in literature itself.

While the conversation started with a reflection on the Franschhoek Literary Festival, it was essentially about so much more than that. In writing this, I want to hold both the lived realities of black writers who feel othered at FLF, and acknowledge the collaborative, consultative process guiding the festival’s transformation, informed by the perspectives of a diverse team and enriched through dialogue with readers and writers from a wide range of communities. 

Both things can be true, they are not exclusionary. 

I’ve felt what Molefi felt in that space, the quiet alienation. But I’ve also felt the festival’s efforts to try to rewire itself. In fact, The FLF asked me to chair a session with the well-known Irish author John Boyne. I remember the sting of erasure when a few white members of a local book club’s WhatsApp group commented how “amazing” it would have been to have another white writer (I won’t name him because I adore him) chair the session. 

And alongside that, the gratitude that the FLF “saw” me and trusted me with it. Parts of the festival have begun to feel different, more intentional in their curation. There’s genuine progress in the way new writers are being invited in and long-standing hierarchies are being challenged. But transformation is not a single destination; it’s an ongoing practice that demands constant attention, conversation and reinvention.

Molefi’s letter set the tone for the Open Book discussion that followed, a conversation about the invisible labour that black writers perform in spaces that often expect them to represent, explain and soothe. The panel spoke to this, how literary spaces can demand performance before craft. 

White authors, they said, are usually asked about process and technique, about craft: prose, structure, form. Black authors, by contrast, are often asked about biography: their parents, their childhoods, their communities, their pain. It is as if the book alone isn’t enough. 

Mashigo described having to “guard the work” even after finishing it, not only from bad edits, but from subtle attempts to sand away its politics or turn its story into something more digestible. “You finish the book,” she said, “and then you have to edit your identity.” She talked about being asked whether her family had read her book, while her white peers fielded questions about characterisation and structure.

This is not just about race but about class, gender and social capital. The problem sits deep in South Africa’s unfinished transition.

The publishing industry, like much else, rests on a foundation where power, money and audiences remain unevenly distributed. Reading itself is a luxury in a country still fighting for basic literacy. “When you’re doing books,” Sikakana said, “you need readers and writers. And we’ve never built that foundation properly.” 

Because of that, black writers are constantly crossing class lines, writing into audiences who may not share their world, and navigating institutions that do not always know what to do with them. The conversation turned to the exhaustion of having to translate one’s self again and again, from manuscript to marketing copy, from cultural shorthand to white editorial boards, from performance to authenticity and back again.

Another thread ran through the hour: the narrowness of what counts as a “black story”. The panel spoke about the fatigue of being asked to write about pain, politics or redemption, as though blackness itself were a genre. When Mashigo chose to set her collection around vampires and fantasy, she did it deliberately, “to break the expectation of what black imagination looks like”. 

The question that hovered in the room was: “What does it mean to write freely, without being measured by the politics of legibility?”

A quieter thread emerged around mental health and visibility. Molefi, who writes about trauma and depression, noted that readers often respond as allies rather than participants. They praise the work for its courage but maintain distance from its reality. That dynamic, he said, turns writing into both therapy and burden, “promoting the book while re-humanising something that’s already human”.

What united all these threads was the persistent feeling of outsiderness. Even those who had built loyal communities, won awards or become fixtures on panels said they still felt peripheral, aware of being a guest in someone else’s house. 

But there was also defiance in that admission: “I’ve made peace with my outsiderness,” one writer said. “It keeps me honest. It reminds me to leave the door open for the next person.”

Of course, the discussion offered no grand solution, but it did map out a series of quiet, practical interventions, strategies for surviving and reshaping the literary ecosystem.

The first is control of framing. Panellists described developing short, clear descriptions of their books, a paragraph or two that they repeat in every interview. It sounds mechanical, but it works. It is a small act of narrative self-defence, a way of keeping the conversation on the work rather than the writer’s biography.

The second is guardianship in the publishing pipeline. 

This means protecting manuscripts from being culturally diluted by editors, marketers and culture workers. Some in the industry pair debut black authors with established allies to open doors and lend credibility; others intervene quietly in editorial processes to ensure voice and meaning survive. 

These are not perfect fixes, but they are forms of care, bridges built inside flawed systems.

The third is community and audience. 

The long-term project, many agreed, is not just to publish more books but to build readers. That means investing in libraries, youth reading programmes, comic books and the kind of young-adult fiction that once filled school shelves. “Volume breeds variety,” Sikakana said. “If there are more black books, there will be more kinds of black stories.”

Closely linked to this is transparency. The industry’s opacity breeds misunderstanding, even among black writers themselves. 

Sikakana described the awkward moment when a new author assumed she was backed by a powerful company desperate for black voices. “No,” she told the writer. “It’s just me. I’m the one convincing them that you matter.” Publishing will only change when more people understand how it actually works: the economics, the trade-offs, the quiet negotiations behind every book.

Festivals and media also have a role to play. Programmes can be designed to centre craft rather than identity. Panels can pair black writers across genres – crime, fantasy, memoir, essays – to show range rather than tokenism. Sessions can deliberately explore form and technique instead of biography. 

These choices send a message: black imagination is not a subcategory.

And finally, there’s money, the unglamorous part of transformation. Without investment in literacy, distribution and professional development for black editors, proofreaders and designers, progress will remain cosmetic. 

“The structure is wrong,” Sikakana said. “No company will take that loss. It needs public and philanthropic money, and a will to build something that outlives us.”

The conversation did not end in despair. It ended with a kind of sober tenderness. 

The writers on stage were not asking for special treatment. They were asking to be met on the same terms as everyone else, to have their work read, questioned and argued with as literature, not as sociology. They were naming the distance between inclusion and belonging, reminding us that the future of South African writing depends on closing it.

The task ahead is not symbolic. It is structural, cultural and deeply human. It begins with something as simple as this: asking different questions, buying the books, reading with a different lens. DM

Joy Watson is book editor-at-large at Daily Maverick.