The Poetry Africa Festival of KwaZulu-Natal is set to launch next week, running from October 5th to 10th at the Playhouse and other venues across the city. Throughout the week, the festival will host a variety of events, including stage performances, poetry slams, industry panel discussions, workshops, and a program for schools. The centerpiece event will be the 5th World Poetry Slam Championship, which will bring together 40 slam poets from 40 countries and five continents in Durban.
The festival will open at the Playhouse Drama Theatre. The program will be presented by local poet Lebo Mashile, with Koleka Putuma serving as the keynote speaker. Participants include Ana More from Ukraine, Haroun Amri from Algeria, Nanda from Gabon, Steel the Poet from South Africa, lifetime achievement award recipient Dr. Gcina Mkhlope, and renowned Jamaican-Canadian dub poet and playwright D'Bie Young Anitafrica.
The World Poetry Slam Championship will continue through its quarterfinals, semifinals, and finals from Wednesday, October 7th, to Friday, October 9th. The final day of the festival will feature a theatrical production titled 'Water,' which was developed based on Putuma's famous 2016 poem of the same name. This work received the PEN South Africa Student Award and is widely studied for its reflections on water access as a political and racial legacy.
The Poetry Africa curator, Sifindile Khonhwa, spoke with the great storyteller Dr. Gcina Mkhlope about the festival. She noted that the conviction that poetry belongs to everyone, not just pages or academic circles, remains constant. However, the scale and diversity of voices have changed, as the festival now incorporates slams, theatre, film, publishing, and business poetry, in addition to traditional readings.
The festival's theme is 'Every word is a street, every voice is a city.' According to the curator, this signifies the collaborative construction of poetry. Every word becomes a street, and every voice complements a city filled with truth, memory, and possibility. This is evident in the lineup: poets from all over Africa, Europe, America, Asia, and Oceania share one stage, and Durban serves as the city they create together.
By participating in the 5th World Poetry Slam Championship, Durban places itself on the global poetic map. Local poets gain the opportunity to compete and learn from the world's best slam poets without leaving their home city. For audiences, it is a rare chance to witness a world championship—quarterfinals, semifinals, and finals—live at the Playhouse.
The festival also pays homage to the anniversaries of 1976, 1996, and the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC). These dates serve as reminders that freedom of expression was hard-won, and it is a responsibility that must be renewed every time a poet takes the stage. Poetry has always served as a means of telling the truth for South Africans when it was dangerous. This year's program honors that history while simultaneously questioning how freedom sounds today.
Unlike traditional poetry readings, slams offer the audience energy, competitive spirit, and active engagement in the performance itself. Slam poets have only a few minutes to move the audience, and judges are selected from the crowd. It is poetry as a live, loud, and often unforgettable event.
The importance of including young poets through the 'Chalkboard Slam' is to ensure that students see that their voices deserve a stage like the Playhouse. Starting the festival with high school students on World Teachers' Day demonstrates that the future of this art form has arrived, as many contemporary professional poets began in this way. Furthermore, there is an emphasis on viewing poetry as a profession; talent alone does not guarantee a career, so poets need knowledge of contracts, rights, branding, and cross-border work for the art to thrive.
If one can attend only one event, the curator recommends the World Poetry Slam Championship final on October 9th, as it allows attendees to see the world's best poets at the peak of competition in one venue in a single evening, which is the most vivid expression of the festival's essence. In conclusion, the organizers hope that after attending the festival, people will leave feeling seen, moved, and slightly bolder, realizing that their own words matter, and some of them will start writing at home.