150 S. Africa Writers Opposed to Apartheid Form Wide Movement

About 150 novelists, poets and playwrights Sunday launched the Congress of South African Writers, the country’s first national movement of anti-apartheid authors.

In a declaration after a two-day conference, the writers, including leading white author Nadine Gordimer, pledged their “total creative resources to advance the struggle for the creation of a non-racial, united and democratic South Africa.”

The group wants to set up workshops to foster writing, theater, music and painting. It hopes to promote writing in African languages and to produce creative and informative children’s literature. It also said it would fight censorship.

Gordimer conceded that there is a risk that writers now might attract more harassment from the government, which has cracked down on opposition under a national state of emergency.

“There might be some problems for writers in this greater exposure. But on the other hand, our feeling has been that the sense of solidarity . . . gives courage to writers and publishers to intensify their efforts against censorship,” she said.

Njabulo Ndebele, a black novelist and president of the congress, added, “I think it would be naive not to expect that the formation of a congress of this nature will call forth some kind of response from the state.”