• Wed 07 06 2017 / 7 pm •
Way Back Home Niq Mhlongo

with NIQ MHLONGO in conversation with GUNTHER GELTINGER and GUY HELMINGER

Author Niq Mhlongo has been called “one of the most high-spirited and irreverent new voices of South Africa’s post-apartheid literary scene.” He is strongly influenced by his hometown of Soweto as he pens his fiction in Soweto, about Soweto and in Soweto dialect. His third novel, Way Back Home (2013), recently translated into German, tells the story of a female freedom fighter named Senami, who is killed by her own comrades in her Angolan exile during the apartheid era. She was not buried properly, so her angry spirit comes back in the form of a ghost to haunt her killers in the present-day post-apartheid South Africa. In order to appease these spirits, her killers and relatives have to go back to Angola where she was killed to do the rituals of taking her body and spirit back home to South Africa where she is reunited with her ancestors. Only by doing this will Senami’s spirit rest in peace and her death will be complete. Niq Mhlongo reads from his novel and joins translator and writer Gunther Geltinger and writer Swantje Lichtenstein in a discussion moderated by Guy Helminger.

Venue: ACADEMYSPACE, Herwarthstraße 3, 50672 Cologne
Free admission
In English with German translation

In cooperation with African Voices / Allerweltshaus Köln and Sylt Foundation