One Needs a Strong Stomach

Siphokazi Magadla, The Con

The Texture of Shadows by Mandla Langa is set in 1989 South Africa, amid murmurs of Nelson Mandela’s release from prison and the unbanning of national liberation movements by the apartheid state. Not knowing how events will unfold in the country, a group of guerillas of the People’s Army in Angola are infiltrated as couriers carrying a trunk with highly classified contents that could potentially put the lives of those in the liberation movement in jeopardy if it were to land up in the wrong hands.

Mandla Langa speaking at the Grahamstown launch of 'The Texture of Shadows'

Mwelela Cele's introduction to Mandla Langa

Launch of The Texture of Shadows by Mandla Langa at Rhodes University in Grahamstown (eRhini) on Thursday the 5th of March 2015 at 17:00pm. 

Good afternoon ladies and gentlemen. Greetings to Academics and Students. As has been mentioned, my name is Mwelela Cele and I am the Librarian at the Steve Biko Centre Library and Archive, where our concern is with both the past and the future, honouring the legacy of Steve Biko, and facilitating the application of his philosophy to help improve the current conditions and prospects of the disadvantaged, and the prospects of future generations. The Steve Biko Centre is situated in Ginsberg King William’s Town (eQonce). I greet you all, and all protocol observed.

I would like to begin by thanking Rhodes University’s Unit for Humanities (UHURU) for organising this launch and giving me the opportunity to introduce Mandla Langa. Similarly I also thank most sincerely Siphokazi Magadla from the Rhodes University Politics Department, and Dr Richard Pithouse for inviting me to this launch, and for giving me this honour.

Mandla Langa's New Novel to be Launched on the 5th of March

Rhodes University Unit for the Humanities (UHURU) is pleased to announce that Mandla Langa’s acclaimed new novel, The Texture of Shadows, will be launched in Grahamstown at Barrett Lecture Theatre 1 at 5:00 p.m. on Thursday 5th of March.

Mandla Langa will be introduced by Mwelela Cele from the Steve Biko Centre and Siphokazi Magadla from the Rhodes Politics Department will be the discussant.

Mandla Langa interviewed by Azania Mosaka

Mandla Langa Interviewed on his new Novel, 'Texture of Shadows'

Let's speak the languages we dream in

Mandla Langa, Mail & Guardian

The vexed question of language dominated last Wednesday evening’s launch of my novel The Texture of Shadows at the auditorium of the Steve Biko Centre in Ginsberg in the Eastern Cape.

Earlier in the day I had visited the museum, library and archive. Stammering with memory and unresolved aspirations, the images, artefacts and an encounter with the widowed Ntsiki Biko at the centre took me back to the heyday of the black consciousness movement, as did the visit to Biko’s well-tended grave. It had originally been planned as a mausoleum. Uncomfortable with ostentation in a region struggling with the deaths of young people from HIV and Aids, the Steve Biko Foundation quickly scotched this notion.

Let's speak the languages we dream in

Mandla Langa, Mail & Guardian

The vexed question of language dominated last Wednesday evening’s launch of my novel The Texture of Shadows at the auditorium of the Steve Biko Centre in Ginsberg in the Eastern Cape.

Earlier in the day I had visited the museum, library and archive. Stammering with memory and unresolved aspirations, the images, artefacts and an encounter with the widowed Ntsiki Biko at the centre took me back to the heyday of the black consciousness movement, as did the visit to Biko’s well-tended grave. It had originally been planned as a mausoleum. Uncomfortable with ostentation in a region struggling with the deaths of young people from HIV and Aids, the Steve Biko Foundation quickly scotched this notion.

Mandla Langa - The Texture of Shadows: Launch at the Steven Biko Centre

A brittle memory of chains

by Mandla Langa, Business Day

FEBRUARY 10 1990 was an unseasonably warm afternoon for London, a circumstance, I remember thinking, which must have been favourable for a group of derelicts sipping from a flagon of cheap wine on Green Lanes, a lower middle-class neighbourhood straddling Islington and Stoke Newington and typified by barbershops, butcheries, restaurants and kebab joints servicing the mainly Greek Cypriot and Turkish communities. None of us — not the Saturday afternoon shoppers sampling Mediterranean fruits and dolmades from pavement stalls, nor the tramps risking liver sclerosis — could have guessed that an event of historic importance was to happen in the next 24 hours.