Title: Gathering Spirit: Arriving to Self
Date: 30 March 2013
Time: 14h30
Venue: Steve Biko Centre Auditorium
Moderator: Mandla Mbothwe

As part of the Ginsberg Easter Festival, the Steve Biko Centre is proud to host a dialogue with Bulelwa Basse. Basse is the Founder of Lyrical Base Project, an arts and culture organisation which seeks to elevate the profiles of writers from marginalised communities through community-publishing projects and performance poetry (merged with music, dance, visual arts) at cultural and corporate events.

She has collaborated nationally with various arts education institutions and literary establishments, such as Kgare Ya Africa, Centre for the Book, South African Museums’ Education Department, Cape Town Language Committee, Department of Cultural Affairs and Sport, Artscape Theatre, Badilisha Poetry and the City of Cape Town (Communications & Events Dept), in the capacity of Creative Writing Facilitator, Published/Performance Poet, Programme Director, Guest Speaker and Events Co-ordinator.

Her writing has been published by the Poetry Institute of Africa, University of KwaZulu Natal Press, Department of Arts and Culture, The British Council, Oprah Magazine and Glamour Magazine.

Basse is passionate about aligning herself with women empowerment projects such as Bona Magazine's Women Empowerment Club, True Love Magazine's Winning Style and Move Magazine's empowerment initiatives, for which she's both hosted and performed her poetry as a motivational tool.

It is this very passion which catapulted Basse’s career into Brand Ambassadorship, where both emerging and established business began to engage her ability to creatively communicate company ideals to a cross-cultured market/audience:
Your Business Association and Indigo Brands have been such independent entities with which Basse has aligned her own public disposition.

It wasn’t long before Basse’s dynamic talent resonated with the rest of the corporate industry, where she’s emceed and performed at Transnet’s 150 years of service excellence awards ceremony, which accentuated her Corporate Emcee trademark, attracting multi-media houses (Marketing/Advertising/PR). A summation of experiences which inspired Bulelwa to re-launch her own production house.

Though Basse’s work spans across multi-disciplines: Education, Arts & Culture (Literary & Performing Arts), and Corporate Industry - the common denominator is her purpose of being in-community. And Bulelwa Basse Productions precisely allows her to resourcefully encapsulate and house all her diverse, yet inter-related pursuits.

Her creative and business path has seen her represent her country as an arts and cultural-exchange ambassador in India (Coimbatore and Kerala) and tour the UK (England). But South African stages have always been her favourite arena of her work at play:

As former Editor of Muse, an online poetry publishing and profiling magazine, Basse earned herself a performance platform on, Poetry Delight, where she's affectionately known on stage as, Miss "Sassy" Basse, following her satirical poem entitled: My Lyrical Sass, which confronts the societal nature of portraying women as sex-objects.

Basse’s stance: When the Universe compels you to live up to your purpose, there is no grey area to confuse the plot!

Title: Gathering Spirit: Arriving to Self Date: 30 March 2013 Time: 14h30 Venue: Steve Biko Centre Auditorium Moderator: Mandla Mbothw...

The Steve Biko Foundation, will host the third annual Ginsberg Easter Festival, Resurrecting the Village Spirit, in the Ginsberg Township of King William’s Town from March 29-30. With events taking place at the recently opened Steve Biko Centre, and in open air venues throughout the township, there will be a wide variety of activities for Festival goers of all ages.

The Ginsberg Easter Festival is an annual program of SBF’s Performing Arts Programme. It is intended to encourage community participation in events that build unity and advance social development.

This year, the Festival will take its audience on a journey of self-realization and discovery, a process described by Steve Biko himself as the quest for a true humanity. Showcasing productions shaped by popular symbols, images and communal voices, this journey will explore the collective stories, popular memories and history of the region. These memories will be used as a platform to reflect on today’s pressing issues, resurrecting the spirit of community from its historic landscape to the contemporary urban village.

The Festival will include interdisciplinary performances by leading local artists, with more than 350 artists taking part in performances at over 40 sites. Alongside dialogue, dance, visual art and poetry, the Festival will also feature storytelling.

The Ginsberg Easter Festival is presented by the Steve Biko Foundation in partnership with the British Council of South Africa, the Eastern Cape Provincial Arts and Culture Council, Buffalo City Metropolitan Municipality (BCMM) Civil Services, Rhodes University, BCMM Department of Economic Development Tourism, the Ginsberg Taxi Association and Umnombo Omtsha Creative Arts.

For bookings and programme information, members of the public should contact Mr. Jongi Hoza, SBF Programme Officer, on 043 605 6700 or via email at jongi@sbf.org.za.


ENDS


For media inquiries please contact Ms. Dibuseng Kolisang, SBF Communications Officer, on 011 403 0310 or via email at dibuseng@sbf.org.za. Alternatively information can be found on www.sbf.org.za.

The Steve Biko Foundation, will host the third annual Ginsberg Easter Festival, Resurrecting the Village Spirit, in the Ginsberg Township o...

"How much credence can a victim of racial oppression place on the disinterestedness of any member of the oppressor group who is, or claims to be, a liberal sympathiser while enjoying the benefits conferred automatically on him by his skin colour? Is it fair that the victim should be saddled with the additional burden of sorting out this ambiguity when all his energies should be channelled into his struggle?
…I really don’t think that the awkwardness in their (the liberals) condition should be blamed on the likes of Steve Biko, but rather on those whose racial arrogance, greed and stupidity made skin colour such a red flag in the first place…In a decent , humane society, Steve Biko would have been cherished as a young man of great promise;…”


Professor Chinua Achebe at the third annual Steve Biko Memorial Lecture, 2002

"How much credence can a victim of racial oppression place on the disinterestedness of any member of the oppressor group who is, or cl...

March 22, 2013


By Philip Gourevitch


Chinua Achebe, who died in Boston today at the age of eighty-two, was a few weeks shy of thirty years old when Nigeria was granted independence from the British Empire, on October 1, 1960, and he was already acclaimed, worldwide, as the preëminent novelist of “black Africa.” The British publisher Heinemann had brought out Achebe’s first novel, “Things Fall Apart,” only two years earlier, and it had to have been the first African novel that many of his admirers—on the continent and off—had read. The sure tragedian’s authority with which Achebe tells the story of Okonkwo, an Igbo elder of immense strength and pride, a figure of heroic qualities within the traditions of his culture, who is ill-served, brought low, and undone by those same qualities in his first violent encounters with colonial power, has ensured that still today, with more than ten million copies sold, “Things Fall Apart” remains the best-known work of African literature.

The great African novel? The book could as truly be called a great novel, period. Many writers would prefer to carry that badge of universality, but Achebe—who has gone to his grave without ever receiving the Nobel Prize he deserved as much as any novelist of his era—has said that to be called simply a writer, rather than an African writer, is “a statement of defeat.” Why? Because his project has always been to resist emphatically the notion that African identity must be erased as a prerequisite to being called civilized. Growing up as what he called a “British-protected child” in the colonial order, the young writer came to see that the Empire’s claim that Africans had no history was a violent, if at times ignorant or unconscious, counter-factual effort to annihilate the history of his continent’s peoples.

Achebe made his case in many forms—essays and lectures, interviews and acts of protest, and as an ideologue and propagandist for the failed Igbo-nationalist secessionist state of Biafra—but he made it most cogently on the final page of “Things Fall Apart.” With the reader in the full emotional grip of the many dimensions of Okonkwo’s epic fate, the author boldly and deftly adds another, shifting to the perspective of a colonial governor who considers Okonkwo’s story good material—“perhaps not a whole chapter but a reasonable paragraph”—for the book he is planning to write: “The Pacification of the Primitive Tribes of the Lower Niger.”

Having, with his first effort, created a permanent place for the African novel in the world literary canon, Achebe continued to be a prolific imaginative writer, producing novels and stories that evoked, in a range of voices, the trials of Nigeria’s pre-colonial and colonial history, and the traumas of its post-independence ordeals: from “No Longer at Ease” and “A Man of the People” in the sixties to “Girls at War” and “Anthills of the Savannah” in the aftermath of the Biafran war. But the fact that he must be remembered as not only the father but the godfather of modern African literature owes at least as much to the decades he spent as the editor of Heinemann’s African Writers Series. In that capacity, Achebe served as the discoverer, mentor, patron, and presenter-to-the-world of so many of the now-classic African authors of the latter half of the twentieth century. The series’s orange-spined, generously inexpensive paperbacks carried a stamp of excellence that drew readers everywhere to essential works by writers as varied as Kenneth Kaunda, Ngugi wa Thiong’o, Dennis Brutus, Tayeb Salih, Léopold Sédar Senghor, Ousmane Sembène, Wole Soyinka, and Nadine Gordimer, to name but a few: it is an extraordinary legacy.

As a storyteller, as a voice of his nation, as a cultural impresario, an intellectual combatant and provocateur, Achebe gained with age the status in Nigeria of a bard and a sage that the modern world rarely affords to writers. After suffering terrible injuries in a car crash, he spent much of his time in the last decades of his life in America, where he settled into long-term professorships at Bard College and Brown University. But when he returned to Nigeria he was received as a national hero. Crowds of thousands—sometimes tens of thousands—gathered to pay tribute to him. The adoration hardly softened him, though. He was, in his old age, as much a scold to his compatriots as he had ever been in his youth.

I met Achebe a few times in his wheelchair-bound American years. When he gave you his hand it was at once firm and soft and notably warm. He had a gentle presence—a man fully capable of wit and mischief and open laughter, but whose default expression, at ease, was one of sympathetic melancholy. His voice was another matter: low-pitched and rich and adamant. When he spoke, it was with great command and unmistakable music. In Boston, in 1999, at a celebration of the centennial of Ernest Hemingway’s birth, I had the honor of sitting on a panel with Achebe, on the subject of writing about Africa. He was as cogently withering about Hemingway’s Africa—a place he could not recognize because there were no speaking Africans there—as he was, in one of his most famous essays, about Joseph Conrad’s. At the end of the session, the floor was opened to questions. An evidently confused woman in the audience took the opportunity to ask “In what sense are you writers about Africa?” The other panelists—Nadine Gordimer and Kwame Anthony Appiah—were too baffled to respond. Not Achebe. He leaned into his microphone, and very slowly and melodically, with rolling “R”s and drawn out “O”s, roared: “Read. Our. Books.” The woman said, “But I’m asking you.” And Achebe said, “I’m telling you: Read. Our. Books.”

What better epitaph for the man, and what better way to remember him: read his books.

For more, read Ruth Franklin’s 2008 piece on the influence of Achebe’s novels.

This article was first published in The New Yorker at http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/books/2013/03/postscript-chinua-achebe-1930-2013.html

March 22, 2013 By Philip Gourevitch Chinua Achebe, who died in Boston today at the age of eighty-two, was a few weeks shy of thirty ...

The Steve Biko Centre, an initiative of the Steve Biko Foundation, continues to facilitate legacy classes exploring the role played by Bantu Stephen Biko & Black Consciousness in the South African liberation struggle.

Below are images from previous sessions


For bookings you may contact Mr. Jongi Hoza on 043 605 6700 or jongi@sbf.org.za during office hours.

The Steve Biko Centre, an initiative of the Steve Biko Foundation, continues to facilitate legacy classes exploring the role played by Bantu...