Contemporary attitudes to personal and political liberty amongst writers at the University of the Western Cape, South Africa are explored on a new website that has just been launched.

Funded by a Leverhulme International Fellowship, the 'Taking Liberties' website showcases the practice-based research that Professor Graham Mort, of Lancaster University, carried out with the creative writing community at the university.

The work produced incorporates multilingual elements in English Xhosa and Afrikaans and spans several generations, from student writers to published professionals who teach there.

Originally set up as a segregated university for ‘coloured’ students in the 1960s, the university had become a centre for resistance to Apartheid by the 1970s.

The outcomes of the Taking Liberties project include a multilingual performance poem exploring collective notions of freedom; a writer's gallery featuring the profiles and creative work of seventeen writers; essays exploring the role of writers and the historical and contemporary role of the university as a site of resistance.

The site also includes a gallery of photographic images and a downloadable eBook containing the core elements of the project.

Many students at UWC are drawn from townships in the Cape Flats area; their location and that of the university are a direct result of the infamous Group Areas Act imposed in 1950.

The contemporary political situation in South Africa represents a complicated intersection of historical and contemporary fractures and there is a sense that the ruling ANC Party, mired in 'state capture' corruption scandals has failed to deliver the opportunities promised by Nelson Mandela's emphasis on 'ubuntu', the vison of a compassionate and inclusive society.

Professor Graham Mort commented: “The results of the research are really varied, individual, and often surprising. The work of writers at UWC is often deeply personal but, even amongst the youngest participants born beyond Apartheid, there is a strong awareness of an historical context that is still unresolved.

“The work emerging from 'Taking Liberties' is not an easy read, as sites of liberty become sites of mistrust and betrayal. What has emerged from the project is a deep distrust of political rhetoric in favour of more contradictory but experientially truthful forms of poetry and narrative.”

You can access the website and its resources here: www.taking-liberties.com