Community Life Network (CLN)

The organisation activities include Akudlalwa Communal Theatre (ACT), a developmental theatre projects. Together with members of community, students, nurses, social workers, sangomas (traditional healers) and faith healers improvise and perform plays on tuberculosis, drug abuse, teenage pregnancy, HIV/AIDS, tolerance and trauma. The organisation aims to heal the community from severe political strife that took place around the first democratic elections of South Africa in 1994 and claims to have brought about the first publication of community voices from the East Rand of Gauteng, South Africa.

CLN also runs ERTON PRESS a school newspaper project. The newspaper holds creative writing workshops to support the Afrika Reads Forum (ARF) which aims to inspire people to read, write and buy books and to share their writing in public forums, such as schools, halls, taverns and pubs. Writers from ERTON PRESS, ACT and ARF have sent their work to be published by Chakida Publishers in the collection of poetry and writing titled Walala Wasala. Walala Wasala is a multi-lingual compilation of South African writing by, prisoners, and members of the ARF. The book aims to reveals an alternative potential and authorship. “The book addresses the human condition; love, hatred, bloodletting, hope, HIV/AIDS, life, death and education.”

Youth

CLN objectives are to:

• demystify writing, teaching that writing is not only for elders and established writers, and that the youth can write memorable work if given skills and opportunities.
• fuel the community’s interest in writing and reading.
• encourage South Africans to develop literary interests needs
• enable people to research and write on life in their communities on their own terms, in their own languages if they wish.
• create a new language, not the traditional one.

• In 1995, an ERTON PRESS journalist together with former president, Nelson Mandela, appeared in Allister Sparks’ TV documentary which was screened for three weeks in South Africa and then and overseas.
• In the same year, ERTON PRESS was awarded first prize in a school newspaper competition organised nationally by the weekly newspaper, Mail & Guardian. It competed against prestigious, private schools such as Durban Girls High, Athlone Boys High, and Seheti High. The school received a prize of books worth R5 000 from Penguin Publishers.
• In 1996, when the school was still using typewriters, ERTON PRESS received a donation of computers from IBM and the Institute for the Advancement of Journalism in South Africa.
• ERTON PRESSin 2001 led to the formation of BPP (Boksburg Progressive Press), an inmate newspaper at Boksburg Correctional Services that had no funding. Both inmates and students shared their work and learn from each other. “Our students realized that crime does not pay. Inmates were inspired by opportunities outside.”
• In 2002, ERTON PRESS got funding for capacity building from National Development Agency 22 youths from Katlehong, Vosloorus and Thokoza and nearby squatter camps o the East Rand received training in computers, creative and report writing, project and financial management which included public relations, integration in diversity, and value-based teambuilding, etc.