Bookshop for South African and World Literature

Do you know the isiZulu word for the elbow? If you didn't know that it is indololwane, you could be accused of being a foreigner. And you and your family could be in mortal danger. According to the Mail & Guardian this is the new pencil test.

Scenes of brutal and violent attacks have shocked and saddened all South Africans and the world in the last two weeks.

* Are the attacks all about xenophobia? * Chances are you know the word Kwere-kwere. * "No one hates foreigners like we do". * Is stopping migration the solution? * How much has poverty and frustration about broken promises got to do with it? ("We vote for the ANC, but get nothing"). * Is ethnic bloodshed next? * What are the issues raised by these attacks?

BOEKEHUIS

invites you to join us to a discussion about immigrants, refugees, being foreign, home and literature.

Veronique Tadjo and Simao Kikamba,

both authors of books on ethnic and foreigner hatred will discuss

Where: BOEKEHUIS,Cnr. Lothbury and Fawley streets, Auckland Park

When: Saturday 31 May 2008, at 12:30

RSVP: by Friday 30/05 on

011 482 3609 or boekehuis@boekehuis.co.za

About the books:

Going home by Simao Kikamba is a story told by a political refugee living in South Africa. It investigates the life of one particular immigrant, Mpanda from Angola, and his experiences of trying to make the best of being an unemployed foreign national in South Africa.

Going home is a moving debut novel, revealing the anguish of a man trying to survive in a country where nobody allows him to belong. A constant search for a home.

The Shadow of Imana by Veronique Tadjo is a reflection on the Rwandan Genocide.

Along with nine other African Writers, Veronique Tadjo was invited to visit Rwanda to bear witness to the genocide that took place in 1994 - wiping out one million Tutsis and moderate Hutus during a hundred days of barbaric violence. A poet and a storyteller, Tadjo achieves the right tone that challenges our preconceptions. From the unexpurgated story of a young woman reliving the horrors of the massacre to dialogues between strangers meeting across the past, and finally to her own reflections.


About the authors:

Simao Kikamba was born in northern Angola in 1966 in the middle of liberation war against the Portuguese colonialists. At the age of two he emigrated to the neighbouring Zaire on the back of his mother. In 1992 he returned to Angola encouraged by the Bicese peace Accord between UNITA and MPLA.

In 1994 he was abducted in front of his pregnant wife. After his release he emigrated to Johannesburg in South Africa where he still lives and works. Going Home, which touches on the topics of xenophobia and displacement, is his debut novel. This novel won the Herman Charles Bosman Award in 2006.

Véronique Tadjo is a writer, poet, novelist, and artist from Côte d'Ivoire. She completed her BA degree at the University of Abidjan and her doctorate at the Sorbonne and she received the Literary Prize of L'Agence de Cooperation Culturelle et Technique in 1983 and the UNICEF Prize in 1993. Tadjo now lives with her husband and children in Johannesburg where she is the head of French Studies at Wits.

Saturday Voices is a series of readings and discussions by authors at Boekehuis

It normally lasts 45-60 minutes.