Nthatuoa Koeshe
SOUTH African author Busisiwe Mahlangu and her friend, poet Xolile Mabuza will on 1 September perform at a show dubbed Surviving loss at Café What in Maseru.
The show will be a collaboration of poetry and book reading for her book titled Surviving loss released in 2018.
The book reading will be accompanied by a poetry session featuring Busisiwe’s friend Xolile Mabuza.
The duo said they were excited since this would be their first gig outside South Africa adding that they hoped this would open up more avenues in other countries. They will perform a two hand which combines book reading and poetry.
“This is our first time being hosted outside South Africa together and we are grateful for this opportunity to share our art with Basotho,” Xolile told the Weekender this week.
Xolile Mabuza is a designer and a poet from Mpumalanga. She spends most of her time designing clothes, bags and earrings but alternates with her poetry and short story writing. She says she writes mostly about things that she cannot talk about including pain and the lessons and experiences that she has had through it.
She hosts poetry shows in Pienaar, Mpumalanga where her community and nearby schools get the opportunity to share their poetry and learn from each other. She also invites poets from different provinces to some of her shows.
“Busisiwe and I are best friends. Traveling together and doing what we love has always been our dream and now we are starting to live that dream.”
Busisiwe is a writer, a performer from Mamelodi, Pretoria. She is a TEDx speaker with hard-hitting work that revolves around poverty, mental health, education, violence and healing.
She is the founder of the Lwazilubanzi Project, a non-profit organisation that focuses on literature and creating learning spaces in townships and public schools.
Her work is long listed for the Sol Plaatje European Poetry Award and has been published in New Coin, Kalahari Review, Best ‘New’ African Poets Anthology and Atlanta Review.
Her debut collection Surviving Loss was published in late 2018 and adapted and produced for theatre as part of the South African State Theatre’s incubator programme in 2019.
She was part of the cast of When Poetry Hits the Fan directed by Bobby Gordon, which ran at the University of Witwatersrand University in 2016.
