There is this old photograph by Jürgen Schadeberg hanging on a wall of one of the rooms at the Rhodes University Africa Media Matrix building.

In black and white are the young and up-and-coming Henry Nxumalo, Can Temba and Arthur Maimane amongst many other names, cramped in a 1954 Johannesburg Drum newsroom. During those days, the reportage of social injustice and inequality was what woke a writer up in the morning. I always imagine that perhaps – had there been many female writers at the time – I would have looked fairly dashing on a chair behind one of the wooden desks with a pen behind my ear and a hand typing away on a typewriter.

Although, I know that any sign of a hard-hitting political story at the time would instead have me running in the other direction, the sound of a rubber bullet would have left me without words, and the latest news of riots and racial attacks would have left my writer’s hands limp in timidity.

The hard-news stories demanding to be written would – in actual fact – remain unwritten.

As much as I would like to, I have never been an overly-engaged journalist – you know, those writers who fling themselves into high risk areas for a scoop. Instead I was born for the soft stuff – of literary journalism and flowery narratives that aren’t quite meant to alleviate social upheaval but to at least entertain you over a cup of hot coffee.
Revealing the reasons for why I write remains an awkward task for me, as my reasons – when actually said aloud – are entirely self-serving. For starters, I write to ogle at a beautifully written final piece once I have written it.

To convince myself that I am capable of creating something other than scrambled eggs.
When I was younger, every time my dad would travel, he would ask me what he should bring back with him and I would always ask for a book, and I often wondered why I could not be like all the other kids who would’ve instead requested toffees or slabs of chocolate. By seventeen years old, I ran out of books to ask for, and the clichés in young adult fiction books made me swear off of them for a while. I started hating the way in which authors would kill off my favorite characters, and I finally understood the financial inconvenience that came with over-spending on paperbacks. So, I decided I would try to write something myself.

I write because I am a perpetually dissatisfied reader who selfishly wants to control the plot.

I write because I want to start liking the way words sound after I write them.

I write because I want to tell people’s stories.

I write because I often do not like to say much.

I write because even though I am not a Can Themba or a Henry Nxumalo, I want to prove that there is space in this grand world for soft-news like there is for hard-news.

Years from now, I imagine that I will have the ‘eureka’ moment that will direct me towards my calling. Years from now I might even feel the desire to write for human rights. For legal justice. To comment on the actions of Trump and his administration. All that is still uncertain.

So, for now, I will continue to write as means to find out why exactly and what exactly I was meant to write.