Echoes: A Collection of Historical Short Stories (working title)

This project looks back at history via the short story genre. It focusses on historical events of the 19th and early 20th century in the Natal province. Most of these mammoth historical events were monumentalised by the geography of the province – the Ncome river, the Mome Gorge, the Shiyane mountain, agricultural-sprawling cane fields on the Natal coast, horses-as-transport, to name a few and the people – the “warring” amaZulu, the “trekking” Afrikaners, the “colonising-settling” British, the “indentured” Indians and the “emerging” Coloureds – were groups of people often referred to in stereotypical identities shown above in inverted commas. Creative writing, the not-too-commonly-used genre, the historical short story, will shape stories grounded on the selected historical events. This is a project of fiction founded on fact, in order to surface ordinary-voices-below-the-radar, narrators: two rivers, a mountain, the cane fields, a horse, people (women, journalists, migrating groups, missionaries) and the impossible-to-ignore King Shaka Zulu. Wars, battles, sieges, and rebellions that ensued as these categories of racial populations claimed space and their right to the land, will feature through these narrators. Intensive research and site visits on these documented histories will kickstart the conceptualization of the ten stories.