The AFRO-Freedom Book Club is a monthly gathering that celebrates Afrikan writers, aiming to spark dialogue and civic engagement within the community. This club is a fantastic space for Afro-centric, creative, opinionated, and open-minded individuals, and the meetups take place on the second Wednesday of each month. Here’s what you need to know.
Critically engage with African literature at the AFRO-Freedom Book Club
The AFRO-Freedom Book Club is a public gathering that celebrates Afrikan writers, aiming to spark dialogue and civic engagement within the community. This club is a fantastic space for Afro-centric, creative, opinionated, and open-minded individuals, and the meetups take place on the second Wednesday of each month. Anyone can join in, regardless of whether they’ve read the book or not.
The AFRO-Freedom Book Club is a public gathering that celebrates Afrikan writers, aiming to spark dialogue and civic engagement within the community. This club is a fantastic space for Afro-centric, creative, opinionated, and open-minded individuals, and the meetups take place on the second Wednesday of each month. Anyone can join in, regardless of whether they’ve read the book or not.
The book selection for November is The Djinn Waits a Hundred Years by Shubnum Khan, A New York Times Book Review Editor’s Choice.
Rebecca meets The House of Spirits in this sweeping, gorgeously atmospheric novel about a ruined mansion by the sea, the djinn that haunts it, and a curious girl who unearths the tragedy that happened there a hundred years previous
Akbar Manzil was once a grand estate off the coast of South Africa. Now, nearly a century since it was built, it stands in ruins: an isolated boarding house for misfits, seeking to forget their pasts and disappear into the mansion’s dark corridors.
Until Sana. She and her father are the latest of Akbar Manzil’s long list of tenants, seeking a new home after suffering painful loss.
Unlike the others, who choose not to look too closely at the mansion’s unsettling qualities – the strange assortment of bones in the overgrown garden, the mysterious figure seen to move sometimes at night – she is curious and questioning and finds herself irresistibly drawn to the history of the mansion.
To the eerie and forgotten East Wing, home to a clutter of broken and abandoned objects – and to the locked door at its end, unopened for decades.
The monthly book selection is shared via the mailing list and on social media (Facebook and Instagram). Email [email protected] for more information.
Cost: Free entry
When: Wednesday, 11 November 2026 from 7pm to 9pm
Where: Goethe-Institut South Africa, 119 Jan Smuts Ave, Parkwood, Johannesburg
More about the Goethe-Institut
The Goethe-Institut aims to cultivate international and local cultural exchange through the arts, sciences and languages. With over 100 institutes worldwide, and 14 in the sub-Saharan region, including the one in Johannesburg, the Goethe-Institut is committed to fostering transnational diversity, understanding and trust.
The Johannesburg institute’s Language department offers German lessons in the Goethe-Institut and otherwise, supporting German teachers in the country and working closely with the South African Department of Education.
Their Library and Information Department works in partnership with libraries and other institutions involved in book and reading promotion in South Africa and encourages exchanges between information specialists and publishers in South Africa, sub-Saharan Africa and Germany.
And their Cultural Programmes Department focuses on a variety of different artistic approaches from the visual arts to drama, dance, literature, film, and others to support the local cultural scenes and strengthen pan-African dialogue through the arts.
Website: goethe.de/ins/za
Email: [email protected] | [email protected]
Tel: 011 442 3232
Instagram: @goetheinstitut_southafrica
Facebook: @goethe.joburg | @AfroFreedomBookClub
