Event information
I.O. Echeruo, Lebogang Matseke and Mphuthumi Ntabeni are interviewed by poet and healer vangile gantsho on the integration of seen and unseen worlds within African storytelling traditions.
Ntabeni is a novelist and columnist whose fiction frequently engages with Xhosa history and indigenous cosmology. Matseke is the author of Death Rattle, a novel exploring grief and inheritance. Echeruo's work threads between realist and speculative modes, drawing on cosmological frameworks that inform how communities understand the boundary between the material and spiritual.
The discussion centres on how these writers use fiction to hold multiple, sometimes contradictory, ways of understanding reality at once, and what is lost when African cosmological frameworks are flattened into simple metaphor within Western literary traditions. Expect reflection on ancestral knowledge systems, the role of dreams and ritual in narrative structure, and how blurred boundaries between the visible and invisible shape a distinctly holistic worldview in the panellists' fiction.