Conversation #9: Polo Moji & Laura Nkola-Wenz (Cape Town, South Africa), Open Book Festival 2023 (English)

Mapping Literary Cities - or the return of geography During Open Book Festival in September 2023 in Cape Town we had a conversation about the cross disciplinary "African Literary Cities Project" with Polo Moji and Laura Nkola-Wenz from African Centre for Cities, University of Cape Town.  For a general reportage from the festival in Cape Town we recommend listening to a previous episode of our radio show. In the conversation they are referring to the UNESCO Creative Cities Network and questioning the network critically. After the conversation with Laura and Polo we introduce Thando Mgqolozana (founder of the Abantu Book Festival in Durban), who has a slightly different perspective on the UNESCO Network. Laura Nkoal-Wenz is a human geographer and lecturer in Critical Urbanism, while Polo Moji arrives from the literary field and is a senior lecturer in English Literature. Toward the very end of the podcast there is a section on saying thank you, which is NOT part of or connected to the above mentioned conversation on literary cities. In this section we also reflect on race and the future - by mentioning Thandiwe Ntshinga's book about South Africas Unfinished Work on Race. It has been brought to our attention that the fact we air out the title of her book has been interpreted as offensive language - altthough it is NOT our language, but a reference to a title of a book published in South Africa. It has never been our intention to offend anyone or cause damage, therefor this paragraph has been added to the podcast description as clarification on November 14th, 2023, after the publication of the original podcast. WARNING: The section in question is from minute 36:00 - 38:30. Published by Foreignness and Friendship, Sunday 29th of October, 2023