I’ve published nine books and numerous articles and speeches like I’m doing now. I’ve also written the scripts and produced and directed countless TV stories and films for news and documentaries from Afghanistan to Iraq to Rwanda, Congo, and, of course, about our own fascinating country.
I don’t think of myself only as a ‘writer’, but as a story teller with so many different ways to tell stories both imaginary and real.
So how do you tell stories? I’m going to start with three simple questions. Questions that just popped into my head when I was thinking about what to say to you all.
I’m not going to ask for a show of hands because there’s a magic in writing and telling stories, a magic that always begins somewhere in our own minds, in our own lives, in our experiences and, most importantly of all, in our own imaginations.
So I’m going to ask you these three questions, the answer to each one of them brings out something similar in each of our lives, but also something very different for everyone, something only you can know.
Who of you has ever seen a tree?
Who of you has ever seen an elephant?
Who of you has ever seen a ghost?
We can probably say that all of us have seen a tree, or even a forest. Its quite likely that some of you might never have seen an elephant – maybe not in real life, but you have probably seen one on TV, or as a picture in a book, so you know what an elephant looks like, you know its very big, that African elephants are a slightly different species to Indian elephants. I’m pretty sure all of you know that even though elephants are the biggest animals in the bush, they don’t eat smaller animals. Nowhere in the world will you see an elephant munching on an impala, or spitting out the bones of a giraffe.
BUT, of course, if you want to, then you can imagine an elephant that eats another animals. Maybe you can imagine one that has a taste for crocodiles and likes to catch them in its trunk in the river and crunch them down like ice lollies. And then . . . the terrified crocodiles meet a tiny bird who lives in the trees in the forest where the elephants hide after they have eaten as many crocodiles as they can. This bird likes to eat the insects off the elephants big hairy ears and has heard all the secrets that the elephants tell each other in their deep rumblings to each other… and the bird is brave and wants to help the crocodiles and it flies off to the river where the crocodiles live, but one of the elephants sees the brave bird talking to the crocodiles and then… well, and then from thinking about the answer to just one question in a strange and different way you have the beginnings of a story …maybe, it would be a difficult story to tell but it could be quite funny, or even very scary, depending on the way to you tell it, but main thing is that you’ve got the beginnings of a story, a wild imaginative story that only you can write.
The same goes for ghosts. Ghosts and ghost spotting are as old as human beings are. Ghosts are really mysterious. We don’t know what happens to us after we die, we have all sorts of ideas, and hopes and fears about what might happen, but we just don’t know. So some people, lots of people even, will tell you that when we die our spirits live on and that sometimes they come back to earth to haunt us or tell us things that we need to know in order to live better lives.
So lets say in real, real life your grandmother used to tell you that she saw ghosts, she saw one ghost in particular called, I don’t know, Absalom, who used to visit her in the kitchen whenever there was trouble in her life or in the family’s lives. So lets say your grandmother was really poor and lived in a small house in the township. So you could start your story in her tiny kitchen that you remember. Maybe with her sitting at the small plastic table where she would cut onions for her chakalaka that everybody loved so much. And then you could write about the delicious smell of the onions frying, and how you had to go and fetch water from the tap outside in one of her battered aluminium pots. And through the window that was broken and there never seemed to be enough money to fix, you could hear her talking. At first, you thought she was talking to herself, but then you heard her saying. ‘Yes, Absalom,’ and your heart went cold because she was talking to the ghost. And then you stretched up and peered carefully through the broken window, spilling the water from the pot all over your toes and your new sandals that Mom bought after saving for months, and as you looked through the broken window, what did you see?
Did you see Absalom, or was the kitchen empty except for Grandma?
….. I don’t know. You know. It’s your story, but you can be sure we all want to know what happens next…. So you can see. You might have thought there was nothing special, nothing particularly worth writing about in grandma’s tiny kitchen, but actually, from one of the most ordinary of places, you ended up writing a real, true story with real detail about real peoples’ lives that brings the reader into the oldest and greatest mystery of human existence, what happens in to us in the afterlife.
From three very simple questions – you might have even thought they were a bit silly when I asked them – but you can see how just thinking about things a little bit differently we can begin to create worlds that nobody else has ever thought about. Worlds that might make us laugh or cry, or even be a little bit scared, but in no more than a few moments, we have discovered totally different things in the quiet branches of a tree, in the silent majesty of an elephant, and through grandma’s broken window. Some of these things are true and real, and others of them are funny and ridiculous, but they are new and different, and they are yours to share with the whole world.
Winner of the Standard Bank Sikuvile Journalism Awards for Columns and Opinion, 2023.
Winner of the 2022 National Press Club’s Journalist of the Year: Print/Online Features/ Investigative Journalism Award.
Author of 10 novels, including Red Air and House of War.
Author of a best-selling children’s adventure series called Arabella.
In television, he has worked for a number of international networks, including National Geographic, CNN, BBC, NBC, Al Jazeera English, ZDF, and ARD.
He has written hundreds of articles for publications including BBC, National Geographic Traveler, GQ, Maclean’s Magazine in Canada, TravelAfrica in the UK, The New Zealand Herald, The Buffalo News in the US, The Sunday Times, Business Day, The Sunday Independent in Johannesburg and many others.