Book dealer now does young African artists a big flavour
African Flavour Books, which has massive support among lovers of African literature, is branching out and opening an art gallery to introduce young and new artists to the public. While growing up in the Free State in the 1980s, book dealer Fortesque Helepi raided his mother’s collection of books. He fell in love with many of them, but especially loved those written in Sesotho, his mother tongue. “I later read books in English, even though I didn’t understand a thing at the beginning,” he says. “But in no time, I grasped the language. The first English novel I read was Cry the Beloved Country by Alan Paton.” As an adult working as an engineer at Sasol, Helepi began his own collection,focusing on African literature written in the 1980s. “What I find fascinating about the attitude of those writers is that they were so committed to their cause that they wrote politically charged books, even when they were uncertain whether the then apartheid government would ban their books or not,” he ...
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