Bianca Marais, is a two-time author, co-host of the top-rated podcast The Shit No One Tells You About Writing, and creative writing instructor at the University of Toronto’s School of Continuing Studies. She is raising money to help South African writer Keletso Mopai pay for her education.
In late October of last year, Marais started a GoFundMe page to assist Mopai, who had been approved for Master of Fine Arts (MFA) programs across the world, including in France, Edinburgh, and South Africa, but didn’t have the money to enroll.
“She’s a geologist—that’s what she studied for,” says Marais. “She’s still in huge student debt, trying to pay off the geology degree that she cannot get employed for in South Africa, and she wants to write.”
So far, Marais has raised nearly $6,600 out of her $9,300 goal to help Mopai. This doesn’t include the additional $5,400 she was able to raise through a course she ran where all the proceeds from their costs went toward this cause.
“We managed to get enough for her to attend the University of Cape Town for one year to do her MFA and to be able to stay in the residency, which was amazing. And, you know, she’s so talented, and it’s just barriers to entry, which are frustrating.”
According to Marais, these barriers to entry are not uncommon in South Africa. Originally from Soweto herself, she has seen first-hand the financial challenges that come with being a female writer in her home country, including limited access to international exposure.
“South Africa, unfortunately, has a very small book buying public,” says Marais. “Because you know, poverty is going to do that. When you have 80 per cent of the population living in desperate poverty, books are a luxury. And libraries aren’t really well funded in South Africa.”
Marais says, these limitations are much more difficult for Black women, which is why in 2019 she reached out to Thabiso Mahlape of Blackbird Books, an indie publisher in South Africa, to see how she could help make a change—even all the way from Toronto.
“I said to her, Look, what can I do? I want to work with you to help empower young black woman to tell their own stories. But you know, where do we begin? What do we do? And at that point, she said, there are no residencies in South Africa for writers. So I joined up with to be so in Black Bird books and someone else called Casa Lorde, and we came up with a residency for black woman writers in 2019.”
This collaboration is how she and Mopai, who was one of the company’s published authors, first met. Marais got to know of her collection of short stories and featured her on the podcast. Mopai’s stories are centered around what it is like to be a Black woman in South Africa, facing both sexual violence and physical violence on a daily basis, as well as the queer experience. To Marais, these stories are important, not only for South African women to share, but for women all around the world, including in Canada.
Jemilla Mills-Smith, a Toronto-based young self-published writer of a young adult fantasy novel called Bastet’s Legacy, who is of Jamaican descent, shares a similar sentiment. She says that without diverse voices in storytelling, entire lives and communities will be wiped from existence.
“BIPOC and LGBTQA+ will never be able to see themselves in certain situations, as certain people, or being able to achieve different things,” says Mills-Smith. “A lack of diverse voices means a lack of awareness and understanding. And how can we understand people who have a different upbringing from us and different life experiences if we don’t have access to their stories?”
For this reason, Marais’ plight to help South African writers is not limited to only Mopai. Since these efforts, she’s reached out to Alexandria Brown from an independent Canadian publisher called Rising Action Publishing. And they have now partnered with Blackbird Books to publish South African stories in Canada.
“It’s not just these authors who benefit from getting their work their stories on an international stage,” says Marais. “We as Canadians are benefiting from from reading and experiencing these stories, because Canadians love hearing about all different experiences.”
For now, Marais says she hasn’t closed the GoFundMe and is leaving it on hold because it has reached just enough money to support Mopai for this year. Still, she hopes to re-open it later on so that she can continue to study and will continue to champion her over the course of her career.
“For me, this isn’t just helping Keletso, it’s going to have a ripple effect,” says Marais. “Because Keletso wants to empower other young, Black women writers to tell their stories. And once she has success, and once she’s opened these doors, she can hold the door open for people behind her.”
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