The value of a conference

Now we enter history

The challenges of the written word

The last bastion of freedom under siege

Nkosi Sikelel' i Afrika

Apartheid - a vigilant witness

Ntyilo-Ntyilo

In the name of art

Restrictions on the media

Shaping the future

Towards a Survey

The aloe and wild rose

The value of a conference - Introduction

By Nadine Gordimer

The value of a conference is in what you take away from it; what endures; in how much your thinking is invigorated - either confirmed or changed - and your actions directed by what has been experienced in those few days. A good conference is not what happens behind closed doors but what opens out from them.

I do not what our comrades-in-exile expected from the CASA Conference. I know that those of us who came from South Africa there was apprehension mixed of excitement, the kind associated with a meeting with members of the family one has not seen for a very long time, or has never met, from whom one has been parted by distance and by circumstances of living often beyond imagining. Exile makes strangers out of intimates. For the young among us - who had been children when these comrades were forced to leave our country - what would these legendary people really be like? For those of us who had known some of them, how much would they have changed inwardly - never mind the extra pounds round the middle or the grey hairs? What would their attitude be towards us? ... READ MORE