(MENAFN- The Post) Starting last week, I have been writing about Lesotho author Morabo Morojele's experience of the 2024 Caine Prize process.

This week I'm looking at his participation in that year's writers' workshop. Here is an interview I conducted with him shortly after the workshop ended (my questions in italics).

Tell me about the venue for the workshop. Was it as lovely as it sounds?

The venue for the workshop was on the shores of Lake Malawi.

The rooms were spacious and always clean, the restaurant was top notch with an abundant menu, including fish from the lake, prawns and steaks of various kinds.

Overlooking the lake, the bar with its endless tab, and thus whiskeys late into the night, had a brilliant band that rendered familiar reggae songs and also performed old African classics such as Sina Makossa and took us back to our younger days.

How many participants were there and how many facilitators? And where were the facilitators from?

There were ten participants, four from Malawi, two from Nigeria, and one each from Kenya, South Africa, Tanzania and Lesotho.

There were two facilitators, one from South Africa and one from Nigeria, and we were shepherded by a woman of mixed Zimbabwean and British extraction.

Was your story written before the workshop or during it?

My story was written at the workshop.

Tell me about the process you went through of presenting your story and having it workshopped.

The writers would spend most of the day writing and two would present extracts from their work to the rest of the group by email, and would read the extracts to the group in the evening and receive comments.

In the workshop process which factors were most useful to you, and which perhaps less useful?

Most useful was being locked in a retreat setting, with no possibilities of running away from commitments to the group; procrastination is a huge impediment to the writing process.

The facilitators were also great at guiding us.

Of the other participants were there some with whom you shared a common approach and writerly outlook, and were there some who were quite different?

Interestingly, I think the writers represented a cross-section of writing styles, with some focussing on the action needed to push stories along, whilst others were more, shall I say, poetic and intent on setting and expressing mood.

Have you thought of setting up writers' workshops in Lesotho?

I would love to set up writers' workshops in Lesotho and have communicated as much to some of our tertiary institutions.

I would have to consider how to structure such or talk to friends of mine teaching creative writing to offer me advice.

Thank you, Morabo.

Very sadly, Morojele passed away shortly after that interview was recorded, so his conducting writers' workshops in Lesotho are amongst the things that might have been.

In three weeks' time I'll turn to discussing Midnight in the Morgue, the collection of short stories that came out of the 2024 Caine Prize process.

But before that some words of praise for another fine African writer who has just passed away, Ngugi wa Thiong'o.

Chris Dunton

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