Launch of "The Spoken Word Project" in Germany
15 March 2015 saw the launch of The Spoken Word Project: Stories Travelling Through Africa edited by APC senior researcher Mbongiseni Buthelezi, lecturer in the English Department at UCT Christopher Ouma, and APC alumna Katleho Shoro. Buthelezi participated in a panel discussion at the launch at the Leipzig Book Fair in Leipzig, Germany alongside popular German spoken word artist Julian Heun. The launch was organised by Brigitte Doellgast from the Johannesburg Goethe-Institut office.
The book brings together essays on spoken word performance traditions in seven African countries – South Africa, Madagascar, Cameroon, Uganda, Kenya, Mali and Ivory Coast – written by authors from those countries. It is the culmination of a process of partly documenting and partly supplementing a project by the same name as the book title that was run by the Goethe-Institut in 2013.
The Spoken Word Project was a competition initiated by the Goethe-Institut in 2012. As curator Linda Gabriel writes in the book, “The main idea was to create a platform that would allow spoken word artists to share and connect their stories online, thereby catering for a wider audience. Their stories would travel online from one African country to another.”
The seven countries named above as well as Angola hosted events. An event was held in Johannesburg in May 2013 to start the project. The winner of each leg of the project got to travel to the city that hosted the event. Over half a year performances took place in 8 cities. Performances at each event were video recorded and the idea was for artists in the next city to draw from narrative threads, performance styles, images, etc. from the previous city to weave into their performances so that stories travelled by being performed. The videos were also posted online to provide a glimpse into what goes on in the spoken word scene in those cities.
The book brings together essays sourced by the editors from the various countries in which events took place, bar Angola where it proved impossible to find someone to write about the project and spoken word more generally. Authors were asked to produce chapters for a public audience of non-specialists that gave a glimpse of what happened at the events convened by the Goethe-Institut and put the events in larger contexts of how spoken word scenes function in those countries and regionally, as well as what traditions of spoken word performance the artists in each country or region were drawing from.
The result is a book that is the first of its kind to bring together spoken word as it occurs in different parts of the continent. All essays are in English even though some were initially written in French and over two dozen languages were used during performances.
The launch in Leipzig took place in the hullaballoo of the book fair. The audience fluctuated between approximately 40 and 80 as people drifted through the exhibition halls and stopped to listen to Heun break into performance. The hour-long discussion moderated by Hanna Hesse from the Goethe-Institut was wide-ranging and fruitful. The main difference between German spoken word and what emerged in the competition is that spoken word in the cities that hosted events is about much more raw political issues than the matters of personal identity and politics that German artists focus on.