The Cheeky Natives

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What does a body do when the world was never built to hold it? 

In this live Pagecast recording from Open Book Festival 2026, Advocate Letlhogonolo Mokgoroane sits down with poet, disability awareness activist and lead editor of English Alive Kirsten Deane to talk about Disabled, But, her debut poetry collection from uHlanga Press. 

The conversation moves through the unfinished "but" of the title, a word that refuses to let anyone settle into a comfortable sentence about disability. Deane reads the opening poem of the collection, a piece that treats seizures as the body dancing and scars as big girl teeth coming out. 
We talk about the difference between visible and invisible disability, about pain as a companion rather than an enemy, about the cruelty of childhood and the arithmetic of desirability when the culture has never once put a disabled body on its mood board.
 Deane is unflinching about sexual violence against disabled women, about a world that swings between pity and erasure, and about poetry as the only form that can make a reader feel the discomfort of navigating the world in a body that "switches its mind." 

When asked what a poem can do that a campaign cannot? Force people to listen. A conversation about bones, honesty, and the refusal to be left behind.
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What happens when a woman who built her name behind a camera picks up a pen to tell the story a photograph cannot hold? 
In this live Pagecast recording from Open Book Festival 2026, Dr Alma-Nalisha Cele sits down with Nigerian-American author, photographer and international bestseller Lọlá Ákínmádé Åkerström to talk about Bitter Honey, her first historical novel spanning four decades and three continents. 
The conversation moves through the discipline of chasing light, the politics of who gets to frame African women and how, and why the stories we most urgently need to tell sit in the middle, between the poverty narrative and the affluence counter-narrative. 
Ákínmádé Åkerström reads from the backstage scene that cracks open Tina's world, speaks about going back to 1970s Stockholm to find the source beneath the symptoms of contemporary displacement, and why writing a character like Leif meant refusing every label in favour of tenderness. 

Toni Morrison said write the story you want to read. Alice Walker said go where the silence is. When asked what grace allows two very different women to do? See a bit of themselves in each other. A conversation about light, language, and the stubborn insistence that we are already enough.
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What happens when a god no one believes in anymore still has something to say?

In this live Pagecast recording from Open Book Festival 2026, Letlhogonolo sits down with Nigerian writer I.O. Echeruo to talk about his debut novel Comfort of Distant Stars, a 2026 Orwell Prize for Political Fiction finalist. The conversation moves through the novel's opening: a three-year-old led through rain and red clay to be made a high chief, and from there into the collision between Igbo cosmology and modern physics, the quiet comedy of family, and what it means to question reality at every level, from religious belief to the very notion of personhood.

Echeruo speaks about Anyanwy, the Igbo sun god almost no one remembers, and how that forgetting became the engine of the novel. We talk about whether madness is a disagreement about reality or a numbers game, why Chinua Achebe's Arrow of God remains his reference point for everything he writes, and what it means to bring a deeply Nigerian story to a South African readership. He also picks Ghanaian jollof, on the record, under what he insists is duress.

A conversation about myth, mathematics, and the fever dream where they meet.

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What does it take to remember what a continent keeps trying to forget?

In this live Pagecast recording from Open Book Festival 2026, Dr Alma-Nalisha Cele sits down with East African feminist practitioner, writer and award-winning poet Jessica Horn to talk about Feminist Practice: Cartographies of Liberatory Worldmaking, her landmark book chronicling decades of African feminist mobilization. The conversation moves through the politics of archival memory, the radical promise and failure of Ubuntu for gender non-conforming people, and why reclaiming Winnie Madikizela-Mandela was an act of feminist mercy practice, not soft revisionism.

Horn speaks about Sonia Sanchez and the haiku mind, about needing to watch YouTube videos and listen to movement songs again and again to channel what had been sacrificed and forgotten. We talk about coloniality's hold on African women's sexuality, pleasure as a site of political agency, and her feature documentary The Temple of Her Skin, which treats tattooing and scarification as the body's own archive across 14 African women's lives.

When asked the reward for being a bad, ungovernable woman? One word: freedom.

A conversation about memory, mercy, and the ceremony of writing it all down before it disappears.

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A freedom fighter can be a legend to the world and still feel unreachable to her own child. Kagiso Lesego Molope, acclaimed author and playwright, unpacks the raw emotional core of We Inherit the Fire, where mother-daughter love lives beside anger, disappointment, and the kind of silence that grows when survival takes up all the oxygen.
You'll discover how the novel's alternating perspectives build empathy without forcing easy forgiveness, why tenderness seems to skip a generation, and what happens when a nation and a husband both want a "hero" but refuse her full humanity. We explore the prison chapters as spaces where women are given names and full lives, not reduced to symbols, and break down the brutal power of white women's tears to flip guilt into punishment.
We delve into desegregated schools as quiet violence, the daily armour Black girls are forced to wear, and the dangerous ways institutions claim progress while practising harm. We unpack naming as a form of claim and hope, and why keeping Setswana on the page without translation matters for cultural memory and decolonial storytelling. Perfect for readers invested in South African literature, intergenerational trauma, Black feminist fiction, and language politics, this conversation confronts the private cost of liberation and demands we sit with what freedom leaves behind.
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