Tuesday 15 March 2016

Winner of the Etisalat Prize for Literature 2015 to be unveiled March 19

Hello Literary Lovers,

On Saturday, March 19 2016 a winner will emerge in the third edition of the Etisalat Prize for Literature. It is a three-way literary battle on who will win Africa’s most prestigious literature Prize. The shortlisted books are The Story of Anna P, as Told by Herself by South Africa’s Penny Busetto, Tram 83 by Democratic Republic of Congo’s Fiston Mwanza Mujila and What Will People Say? by another South African, Rehana Rossouw.
The winner of the Etisalat Prize for Literature 2015 will be unveiled at the Award ceremony holding at the prestigious Intercontinental Hotel, Victoria island on Saturday March 19, 2016. This year’s Award Ceremony will embody the theme Representing the Diversity of African Voices by showcasing the richness of Africa and how our diversity converges into one unique voice of the continent. It promises to be an exciting event with performances ranging from poetry, monologues and musical performances by Darey and Asa.

Speaking on the build-up to the grand finale, Modupe Thani, Head, Events and Sponsorship, Etisalat Nigeria said that already several activities have been lined up to bring the three shortlisted writers closer to the African public ahead of the Award Ceremony. According to her, on Tuesday, March 15 the writers will be showcased at the 2016 edition of Time of the Writer in University of KwaZulu-Natal in Durban, South Africa where they will feature in a panel of literary giants as they take on conversations that matter on book and knowledge.

The literary event will also feature a presentation of shortlisted books to City of Durban Library by Etisalat Prize for Literature followed by a book reading at the the city’s foremost book store with vintage collections, Ike’s Books. The shortlisted writers will also be at the Lagos book reading on Thursday, March 17, the final precursor to the Award Ceremony which will provide Nigerians with a peep into the minds of the three authors.

The winner of the 2015 Etisalat Prize for Literature will receive £15,000, an engraved Montblanc Meisterstück pen and a high end device. The winner will also attend the Etisalat Fellowship at the University of East Anglia under the mentorship Giles Foden. The Etisalat Prize for Literature also aims to promote the publishing industry at large and will therefore purchase 1000 copies of all shortlisted books which will be donated to various schools, book clubs and libraries across the African continent.

The Etisalat Prize for Literature is not only about debut fiction novels. The prize also recognizes unpublished short story writers in the Flash Fiction Category, and this year’s winner will go home with a cash prize of £1,000, a high end device, and will have his or her published e-book promoted online and via SMS.

There are the extracts of the shortlisted authors. 
Enjoy!

The Story of Anna P, as Told by Herself, by Penny Busetto – Extract

She enters, takes her seat without looking at him, and closes her eyes. From outside the windows she can hear the sound of traffic and the uneven dripping of rain. A depressed, empty sound. He clears his throat. – Come sta? I hope you will be able to talk to me today. I am going to put the tape recorder on again. Just in case. He smiles, a thin-lipped smile that is not reflected in his eyes.
Her mind hears his words but she feels no need to respond. She can’t stop her ears from hearing, but she can block her reactions to the words. – Vede, Signorina, posso chiamarti Anna, vero? Vedi Anna, you are in a lot of trouble. You need to help us to help you. Devi parlare.
She opens her eyes but doesn’t look at him. She is aware of his eyes constantly on her, following her breathing, watching her every reaction, trying to get inside, to penetrate beneath the skin. – I’ve been looking at your folder. La cartella clinica. Very interesting. I’m interested in your childhood. Your parents, for instance. Your father.
For a moment she stops breathing. He has noticed her reaction. Memory floods through her. She is ten. She has come home from school thinking the house will be empty as usual and that she will have to make herself some lunch and then do her homework. She doesn’t notice her father’s car parked outside under the tree. He has decided on an impulse to take them to the beach.
Why he has decided this she never knows; he hasn’t been to the beach with them since she was very small. But this day he is determined. She and her brothers are reluctant to go anywhere with him. He senses this and grows angry. – Will you bloody kids get into that bloody car at once? How do you say no? They eventually drag themselves outside to where he stands waiting. What he had wanted to be a happy, fun-filled outing is already turning sour.
As usual his huge black vintage car won’t start. He turns the key in the ignition time after time, pressing the starter, but the car just keeps balking at his efforts, refusing to catch. Secretly they begin to hope there will be a reprieve. – Get out and push! So they all get out and push the car down the hill with him trying all the time to start it. Suddenly, about a mile down the road, where the road has already turned to a gravel track rough under their bare feet, with proteas high on each side and the smell of buchu strong in their nostrils, the car shudders into life with a roar. He puts his foot on the accelerator to warm up the motor, blasting the wilderness with black smoke and fumes. They all jump in, he turns the car on the track with difficulty, and then roars back into the village and on over the hills covered with young green wheat and then down through the rough coastal scrub to the beach.
It is late afternoon by the time they arrive. A few fishermen stand on the long white beach casting their lines out into the surf. Even though it is the middle of winter and their shadows are tall, the sun is warm on their bare legs and arms. The boys dive into the icy water and swim briskly for a few minutes, then come out puffing and covered in goosebumps. The light catches the drops of water in their hair and lights up their faces like haloes. They run up and down the beach to get dry. They start quarrelling as usual, their aggression and frustration more easily unleashed on each other.
He stays near the car, taking slugs from a plain medicine bottle filled with a transparent liquid. After a while he sets off, rather unsteadily now, towards the water’s edge, where he has noticed some fishermen pulling in a catch. – What did you get? he asks them, slurring slightly. – Dis ’n haai. They point at the rough grey shark still struggling on the sand. – Hey, kids, come here. Come and look at this. Their hearts drop but they go and look. They know it is best not to defy him in public. – Wouldn’t it be bloody funny to have a shark in our fish pond, hey? Let’s take it home. Can you imagine what the cat will do when it tries to drink and sees a fin coming towards it in the water? It’ll be bloody funny. They are embarrassed, humiliated at being part of him, of his absurd ideas, of his slurred speech. His shame is their shame. They wish they could disappear.
She opens her eyes and sees him watching her carefully. He looks frustrated, bored. She closes her eyes and lets her thoughts slip back to the past.
Her father negotiates a price and they lug the still squirming creature back to the car. By this time he is staggering slightly. – Who wants to drive? He points at her fourteen-year-old brother. – You drive. David is small for his age and can barely see over the dashboard or reach the pedals with his feet. From where she stands outside the car, it looks as if no one is driving.
Even as she remembers this, she feels her stomach turning. She pulls the cushion out from behind her back and snuggles it against her body. But the memory keeps coming. They all pile in, their father in the back. He is drinking steadily and openly now, and is barely coherent. No one says a word. It is growing dark quickly, and her legs have turned mottled with the cold. Blue and pink and white. Sand scratches her thighs where they rub against the leather seat. She feels a tight bitter anger in her chest.
Sitting as tall as he can, David drives slowly down between the dunes and along the shady avenue of bluegum trees. The cold dusty scent of eucalyptus fills the car. He doesn’t notice the police car parked by the side of the road in the long shadow of the trees. Only when he hears the siren behind him does he turn his head and see the policeman signalling him to stop. – Dad, it’s the cops! – Oh Christ! Quick, hide the liquor! They push the brown medicine bottles under the seat and sit paralysed, waiting. An overweight policeman saunters up to the door of the car. – License please, lisensie asseblief. Her father opens the door on the far side, trips and falls out on to the ground. He pushes himself to his knees and then unsteadily to his feet. He holds on to the door of the car for balance. – Listen here, officer, my son’s just having a driving lesson. The policeman studies him, and then inspects each of the children in turn. No one says a word. – Meneer, you are drunk. Come with me. Don’t you kids move! They sit in the dark vehicle and wait. They isolate themselves within themselves and don’t see their father being led away.
After what seems like a very long time of cold and dark, the policeman returns and points at David. – You, seuntjie, come with me.
A different policeman gets into the car without saying a word and drives the two remaining children over the dark hills to home. The car pulls up at last outside the house and they slip out while the policeman speaks to their mother in a low serious voice.
As on so many other occasions, she doesn’t know what the outcome of this episode was. It is blanked out in her memory.
It is now almost completely dark in the room. She breathes deeply, flicks an invisible spot of dust off her jeans. He sits forward and looks at the small clock on the table beside her. – È quasi ora. Dobbiamo finire. Ma riprenderemo domani. I’ll see you tomorrow. He stands and shows her to the door.

 

Tram 83, by Fiston Mwanza Mujila – Extract

In the beginning was the stone, and the stone prompted ownership, and ownership a rush, and the rush brought an influx of men of diverse appearance who built railroads through the rock, forged a life of palm wine, and devised a system, a mixture of mining and trading.

Northern Station. Friday. Around seven or nine in the evening. “Patience, friend, you know full well our trains have lost all sense of time.”

The Northern Station was going to the dogs. It was essentially an unfinished metal structure, gutted by artillery, train tracks, and locomotives that called to mind the railroad built by Stanley, cassava fields, cut-rate hotels, greasy spoons, bordellos, Pentecostal churches, bakeries, and noise engineered by men of all generations and nationalities combined.

It was the only place on earth you could hang yourself, defecate, blaspheme, fall into infatuation, and thieve without regard to prying eyes. Indeed, an air of connivance hung ever about the place. Jackals don’t eat jackals. They pounce on the turkeys and partridges, and devour them. According to the fickle but ever-recurring legend, the seeds of all resistance movements, all wars of liberation, sprouted at the station, between two locomotives. And as if that weren’t enough, the same legend claims that the building of the railroad resulted in numerous deaths attributed to tropical diseases, technical blunders, the poor working conditions imposed by the colonial authorities – in short, all the usual clichés.

Northern Station. Friday. Around seven or nine.

He’d been there nearly three hours, jostling with the passers-by as he waited for the train to arrive. Lucien had been at pains to insist on the sense of time, and on these trains that broke all records of derailment, delay, and overcrowding. Requiem had better things to do than wait for this individual who, with the passing of the years, had lost all importance in his eyes. Ever since he’d turned his back on Marxism, Requiem called everyone who deprived him of his freedom of thought and action armchair communists and slum ideologues. He had merchandise to deliver, his life depended on it. But the train carrying that son of a bitch Lucien was dragging its wheels.

Northern Station. Friday. Around…

“Would you care for some company, sir?”

A girl, dressed for a Friday night in a station whose metal structure is unfinished, had come up to him. A moment to size up the merchandise, a dull thud, a racket that marked the entrance of the beast.

“Do you have the time, citizen?”

He had adequately assayed the chick and even imagined her lying on her mean little bed, despite the half-light. He pulled her body against his, asked her name, “Call me Requiem,” stroked his fingers across the young creature’s breasts, then another line: “Your thighs have the allure of a vodka bottle…” before disappearing into the murky gloom of the slimy, sticky crowd.

Instructions were required. To designate a place they could chat without distraction. The young woman grew pushy. He sighed, bit his lip, and sputtered: “Meet you at Tram 83.”

Quite pointless, of course, for he had to take that Lucien home. Requiem shook his head at the very idea. And then there was the merchandise to be delivered to the tourists freshly arrived from Eastern Europe. Meanwhile, the racket had increased tenfold. The curse of these trains that arrived at this time of night was that they carried all the scum, be they students or mineworkers, who couldn’t get back to town under their own steam.

For reasons still unknown, the railroad cut the only university in the region in two. Afternoon classes were disrupted not by the ruckus of the engine but by students gathering their things and leaving the premises, because if you missed those trains, you’d piss your pants, dear intellectual. The few professors who crashed in the suburbs of the City-State slipped their moorings along with their disciples. The survival instinct can’t be learned. It’s innate. Otherwise they’d have introduced instinct classes at university already. The trains passed without stopping, which meant the swiftest students had to grab ahold of the beat up railcars. All’s fair in love and war!

In stark contrast to these impulsive students with their sense of entitlement were the brutish diggers, who departed and returned on the same contraptions. The former reproached the latter for selling short their dignity to the mining operators and brokers of diverse origin. The latter couldn’t care less, displaying, through their rotten luck and bodies stiffened with radioactivity, that you needn’t spend time in the classroom to fuck and then clink glasses of ice-cool beer after.

Some students even scratched out a living in the mines to pay their debts.

Requiem began to search for the needle in the haystack. The scrawny students, overwhelmed by the goings-on, and angry too, brandished theories like spoils of war. The miner- diggers, or digger-miners, it depends, voiced imprecations we shall refrain from expressing. Every evening, the same opera. They eyed each other up, balked, traded insults, and even came to blows. A legend suggested the figure of one thousand seven hundred dead in the most recent clashes, without counting suffocations and other serious injuries.

Weary from the noise, and the alcohol he’d just consumed, Requiem leaned against a pillar, waiting for them to vacate the field. They loitered on the platforms till late into the night: the students with their strike, the miner-diggers with their stinking rusty breath.

“I’m a free woman, but I’m still looking for the man of my dreams.”

He was already thinking of the silicone breasts of the girl waiting for him at Tram 83. But after so many years apart, how could he abandon Lucien and slip into the folds of the night with that doll? The students and the diggers of mines were still squaring off. As the flurry of insults reached its peak, they headed off on the same road to nowhere. Requiem sensed a presence. He raised his eyebrows: Lucien, in the flesh but skeletal. Requiem stepped forward. He realized that his friend had lost all his weight. That an era was on the wane. That a civilization was champing at the bit. Lucien was dressed all in black, the harmony broken only by a red scarf, the wad of papers under his arm, and an imitation-leather bag, worn thin, slung over his shoulder. Tousled hair. Crumpled face. Mustache intact. Cold gaze. Hoarse voice. They embraced without much enthusiasm.

“The bastards, don’t tell me they’ve mangled your brains.”

“What’s your news?”

“What about Jacqueline?”

“Long story.”

“How did you get out?”

“I’ll tell you.”

“The bastards, the bastards, they…”

“Shall we go?”

“Yes,” replied Requiem, coldly, no doubt haunted by the girl dressed for a Friday night in a station whose metal structure is unfinished, where dissident sex-starved rebels, students, and diggers head off on the same road.

“I’m a really sensitive girl.”

Two fat tears slid down the face of the man who’d arrived by train in this station whose metal structure… In silence, they crossed the concourse and the other fragments of the station, where neglected single-mamas roamed, along with professors selling their lecture notes, intellectuals reeking of salted fish, and Cuban musicians performing salsa, flamenco, and merengue for no reason at all.

 

What Will People Say? by Rehana Rossouw – Extract

Neville checked his watch. It was still light out at eight o’clock on a February evening, although the sun had gone behind the mountain a time ago. In the distance Table Mountain was a slab of black stone carved into a sky slowly darkening from blue to purple.

He made his way down Lemon Road. On the wall of the next block down, Orchid Court, he saw something that made him stop in his tracks. An American flag had been painted on the wall flanking the pavement. The wall was stained dark from the fires the young men guarding the flag kept going through night. The strong smell of piss on the walls was proof that they never left their posts. There were three young men on duty tonight, squatting with their backs against the flag, their backsides hovering above the grey sand.
Although he walked past Orchid Court every weekday on his way to the taxi rank, Neville saw for the first time that someone had attacked the flag with a thick paintbrush and black paint. The letters JFK were evenly spaced across the stars and the stripes. It meant nothing to him, but he was sure it meant something to the Americans, who had marked Orchid Court as their turf.

Neville stared at the wall and hoped there wouldn’t be trouble. Children often got hit in the gangsters’ crossfire. Their grieving parents always said the same thing afterwards: “He was just going to the shop. He was just going to buy bread.” It was time to keep a close eye on his children, specially Anthony who was getting to that difficult age. Thirteen-year-old boys never listened; they always thought they knew
better than everyone.

He reached the park; shards of broken glass scattered across the grey sandy field glittered in the last of the sunlight. Grass tried and failed to grow in patches of litter at the edges. The park had a set of swings, a metal climbing frame and a roundabout. It wasn’t much, but it kept the children off the streets.
He spotted Anthony playing soccer on the field with five other boys. Four of them were still in their school uniforms. Their school bags were the goalposts; they probably hadn’t been home since they left for school that morning. Anthony had been home for supper; he had left to play outside seconds after he cleaned his plate.
He was about to call his boy over when he heard a mighty crash. Neville’s head swivelled towards a group of young men circling the roundabout. A concrete kerbstone lay on top of the shattered wooden floor of one of its sections. One of the youngsters had another slab lifted above his head, his T-shirt riding up his skinny torso as his arms
strained to hold the weight.

Hey, you! Neville shouted. “What you think you doing?” The boy holding the slab turned towards him, gave him a dark look, faced the roundabout and smashed the slab through its floor. Neville ran towards him. “Hey, stop it! Stop right now! Are you out of your mind?”
The skinny boy split off from the group as Neville came close. “What the fok is got to do with you what we doing, timer? Does this fokken place belong to you, huh? Fok off.”
Neville tried not to show his panic as the six young men drew close and made a semicircle around him. He lifted his hands, palms facing front, and spoke in a slow, even voice. “This park belongs to all of us. We get little enough from the council for our children. The least we can do is look after what we got.”
“Fok the council. Give your laaities to me, Ougat will show them a good time. You got any girls?” The young man grabbed his crotch and cackled. His friends laughed in tune.

So this was Ougat. Neville had heard a lot about him, from the neighbours. He had been released from Pollsmoor Prison a few months back; he had finally made the big time after two spells in the Ottery School for Juvenile Offenders. Neville heard that Ougat had caught the eye of a gang general in prison. Some said he was the general’s wife. There was also a story going around that he had stabbed a prisoner who tried to make him a wife in the showers; and the general was impressed with the way he took a life.

Neville was surprised at how small Ougat was, and how young. He must be older than eighteen if he served time in Pollsmoor, although with his baby face he could pass for fifteen. The boy was short; his closely shaven head barely touched Neville’s shoulder. But dynamite came in small packages and the youngster looked ready to explode. His
eyes were bulging in his head like the small, ugly dog in the Hendricks’s flat downstairs.
Neville wasn’t taking any chances with the kortgat gangster; he tried to make the peace. “Look, I don’t want any trouble. All I’m saying is think about the children who use this park. What must they do now?”
Ougat leaned forward and pushed his face into Neville’s. The two gold teeth flanking the gap in his mouth where his four front teeth were missing gleamed in the last of the twilight. “I can take care of the laaities, moenie worry nie. This here is Ougat’s turf and he got a lot to offer, you know mos?”

Neville couldn’t make out what Ougat was saying. The other young men were nodding their heads in agreement and one reached out and shared a complicated hand-slap with Ougat that looked like congratulations for wise words. He tried again to stop the boys from wrecking the park. “Just think of the children. Some of us are trying to raise our children decent, and it’s hard enough in a place like this.” Ougat’s eyes swelled in his face. “You saying Ougat is not decent? Is that what you fokken saying, you naaier? You can’t come here and talk such kak to me. Nooit, my man.”
The semicircle of young men took a few steps forward. Neville started to sweat. What had he started here? How did it get out of hand so quickly? He couldn’t see a weapon in Ougat’s hand but he was sure there was one nearby.
“Dedda? What’s going on Dedda?”

Anthony and his friends had abandoned their soccer game and came to stand next to him. Neville drew his boy close and put an arm around his shoulder, smiling and hoping he was hiding how poepscared he was. “Is okay, Anthony. I was just leaving. Isn’t that so?” Neville looked up at Ougat hopefully.
Source:http://prize.etisalat.com.ng/news-update/all-is-set-for-etisalat-prize-for-literature-grand-finale/

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