WHAT was markedly different this year were a few panels where the focus was not literary, but concerned with the currents everyone had become more clearly aware of, writes Karin SchimkeThe Franschhoek Literary Festival turned 10 this year, but in a sense it only turned one.This is the first festival that has been held since a black writer last year publicly denounced this and all other SA book festivals — plus the entire publishing industry — as being too white.The sense that anything could happen at this year’s festival was an undercurrent among writers in the build-up to it. But the “anything” they imagined could not — even in a writer’s mind — have been as surreal as the appearance of apartheid’s foremost villain among the polite, intellectual audiences, materialising from the mystery of his parole whereabouts in the most public way possible.Eugene “Prime Evil” de Kock not only sat in on panels where Anemari Jansen, the author of Eugene de Kock: Assassin for the State spoke, but ...
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