Algeria welcomes Pan-African festival

The second Pan-African Festival since 1969 began July 5 in Algiers, Algeria, and will run until July 20, celebrating the arts, music, literature, and culture of fifty-one diverse African nations.

The first festival forty years ago celebrated the end of colonialism, but this free, non-commercial event will focus on a rebirth of artistic pursuits, the African cultural renaissance, with 500 musical performances, 41 plays, 9 art exhibitions, and several conferences featuring thousands of intellectuals, performers, and artists. Over two hundred literary titles will be republished and made available to attendees.

All African nations except Morocco will participate in the events, with additional support from the United States and Brazil, who each have substantial African-born populations. "Lucy," one of the oldest preserved remains of human civilization, will leave her home in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, for only the second time to be exhibited, and other attractions will include an extravagant parade and a fireworks display.

Algerian Minister of Culture Khalida Toumi told Liberté that Panaf 2009 is not a commercial operation, and that it is "the festival of the Algerian people".

"Everything must be free," she said. "The poster shows Africa in fireworks. And, well, that's the programme. All areas of culture will be at their dazzling best."

The Bessie Head Literature Awards, 2009

The foremost literary award ceremony in Botswana, the Bessie Head Literature Awards, has announced its winners for 2009, with women leading the pack in all categories.

Cheryl Ntumy, a student at the University of Botswana in Gabarone, won the best novel award for her manuscript Crossing. In the short story category, Gothataone Moeng won for "Putting on Faces," and in poetry the winner was Luda Sekga for "He Was My Oppressor."

The awards, sponsored by Pentagon Publishers, honor the legacy of Bessie Amelia Head, a South African author who sought refuge in Serowe, Botswana, in 1964 and wrote many autobiographical novels set there. She is considered Botswana's most important literary figure.

The ceremony will be held in Gabarone on July 19.

Pepetela warns of Angolan class divide

Comparing social unrest and extreme poverty to a volcano about to erupt, writer and former education minister Artur Pestana, known by the pseudonym Pepetela, described the injustice of widespread poverty in one of the world's most resource-rich nations during a book presentation on June 18.

Angola, one of the foremost producers of oil in Africa, ended a long civil war in 2002 and has been working on economic improvement ever since. Though oil executives stay in luxurious hotel rooms costing four hundred dollars a night, much of the country's 16.5 million population lives without running water or electricity.

Pepetela's work, highly regarded throughout the region, has long explored this contradiction.

In one of his famous short stories, entitled "This Country is Great" Pepetela tells the story of a young boy who comes home running to tell his mother that oil was squirting out from his neighbour's back yard. The boy later discovers that the oil came from a leak in a nearby refinery and is disillusioned when he realises that many of the riches his country possess are out of reach to the majority of the population.

Pepetela's comments echo those of President Jose Eduardo dos Santos, who has ruled the southwestern African nation for 30 years and is expected to run in the country's first post-war presidential poll later in the year. Dos Santos has pledged to build one million homes for the poor in four years at a cost of $50 billion.

J.M. Coetzee discusses new memoir

Despite his notoriously reclusive and private nature, J.M. Coetzee, the South African novelist who has won two Booker Prizes and the Nobel Prize for Literature (in 2003), made a public appearance at Oxford University to promote Summertime, a work of "fictionalized autobiography" set to be published later this year.

The South African reports:

Seeing Coetzee read on Thursday night thus presented a spectacle to make any postmodern literary critic lick their chops: an almost pathologically private man reading his own “fictionalised memoir”, with Summertime achieving a further distancing effect by means of the fact that the book takes the form of a series of interviews with people from Coetzee’s life carried out after Coetzee’s death. The surprise for those in the audience was how much of a showman Coetzee emerged as, when reading his own work, inserting moments of broad comedy into his performance that had the audience rocking with laughter. It was an incongruous moment: fellow South African writer Rian Malan claimed a colleague of Coetzee’s once testified that in a decade of working together, he had seen him laugh just once.