Johannesburg: 24 May 2019 – To kick – start the Africa Month celebrations, this year’s theme for the colloquium is centered around, “Celebrating 25 years of Democracy: Building a Better Africa and a Better World”. Africa Month 2019 is focused on literary luminaries, who have fought against racism in the world and whose writings have forged a language of liberation and a culture of freedom.

Leading speakers will focus on “Celebrating Legends in the African Literary World”, and in so doing, they raise the flag for Africa’s languages and African literatures as well as demonstrating “African Solidarity for Africa’s people,” as Africa continues to re-imagine and re-image itself, to establish networks and bonds of friendship as a common people inhabiting one continent and embracing a shared basis for peace, social progress, economic prosperity and cultural development”.

Africa Month 2019 programme, CELEBRATING LEGENDS IN THE AFRICAN LITERARY WORLD: This programme will feature leading Jamaican, UK based  reggae poet, Linton Kwesi Johnson (aka LKJ) .LKJ will deliver a talk at the Luthuli Museum, in rural Groutville, Kwa dukuza on ‘African Consciousness in Reggae Music ’ on Monday, 27 May 2019. He will thereafter deliver the keynote address at the Soweto Theatre on Tuesday, 28 May 2019 on celebrating our Literary African heroes. Linton Kwesi Johnson is a global icon in the music and poetry world. In 2002 he became the second living and only black poet, to be published in the Penguin Modern Poetry series. The programme will feature readings by acclaimed South African writers including Don Mattera, James Matthews, Diana Ferrus and Sindiwe Magona.