TIMBILA POETRY PROJECT

TIMBILA TO GRACE PRESTIGIOUS BOOK FAIR Limpopo Arts Culture Association’s Ms Alett Franks said during the launch of Timbila 2005 anthology at the Polokwane's Library Gardens last year that it wouldn’t be such a bad idea if every parliamentary session in Cape Town was started with a poetry reading.

Hers could have been quite heroic words to utter in the context of a nation so obsessed with political sloganeering that they tend to neglect the medium that sensitized many people to the evils of the apartheid regime. But a similar statement was uttered by another poet two years ago that we needed to get rid of the morning devotion sessions in schools because all they did was to attempt to Calvinise young children who grow up without a scope of the different religions in the world. The poet suggested that the morning devotion time should rather be allocated to a poetry reading.

Timbila Poetry Project founder and editor Vonani Bila took the argument further in Timbila 2005 after Franks echoed the first telling statement. Bila writes in the editorial of the thickest volume ever, "Visit the hotel and guest house in the neighborhood and tell them that the Bible alone in each room is not sufficient literature. Let them place Timbila in every room"