In the spirit of the moment - of #FeesMustFall and the urgent need to find new narratives in the post-apartheid age - the 19th edition of the Time of the Writer Festival, held in Durban last week, laid itself open - and vulnerable - with its intention to "Decolonise the Book". The student protests, with their accompanying scholarship that's feeding off post-colonial theorists like Frantz Fanon and Amilcar Cabral, are attempting to render speakable that which has been silenced by post-apartheid South Africa's reconciliation project; the black experience of (post)-apartheid South Africa.The festival has drawn the political inspiration to re-imagine itself from these "Fall-ists", said festival co-curator Thando Mgqolozana in his opening night keynote addressThe student movement is saying that "[a]ll the things we have tried are not concerned with undoing colonisation and, if they are not, then they are merely tools with which colonisation is maintained in our times. It took us long enough but we have finally come to the logical conclusion: decolonisation.""Decolonisation," he noted, "is an act of self-love" for people whose very worth has been denigrated during apartheid and into a racist present and it's ''an act of healing - otherwise we remain wounded."Decolonisation is an absolute necessity.We will have to teach ourselves new ways of being that are not framed by notions of coloniality."Mgqolozana, the author of A Man Who Is Not a Man (2009), Hear Me Alone (2011) and Unimportance (2014) had been invited to co-curate this edition of the festival by fellow curator Tiny Mungwe of the Centre for Creative Arts. The centre, which is attached to the University of KwaZulu-Natal, also organises the Poetry Africa festival, the Jomba dance festival and the Durban International Film Festival.The invitation had been extended after Mgqolozana's criticism regarding the "whiteness" of South African literary festivals was first voiced at last year's Time of the Writer. Later that year Mgqolozana extrapolated that initial provocation at the Franschhoek Literary Festival by stating that he would never attend another literary festival in South Africa, unless it was a black one.In the act of decolonisation, the festival was decentralised, taken out of the university and into Durban's surrounding townships. To libraries in KwaMashu, Inanda and Umlazi, among others, where daytime sessions - attended by matric schoolchildren, unemployed youth and aspirant writers - were held.Acts of inclusion led to impassioned debates about the sense of exclusion from the country's intellectual conversation. The exclusion is felt because indigenous languages are low down the language hierarchy; books by local and African writers are difficult to access in public libraries which do not stock them; and the ability to read for pleasure is affected by socioeconomic factors. At around midday during weekdays, almost all these libraries - with their internet access and resource books - are used by schoolchildren, job-seekers and people with agency and hope for their futures.The festival sought to explore writing to this moment: An intention to challenge colonialism in a manner that Edward Said, writing in Orientalism, noted was essential if writers were to counter a project that sought to "divide, deploy, schematise, tabulate, index, and record everything in sight (and out of sight), to make out of every discernible detail a generalisation and out of every generalisation, an immutable law about the Oriental nature, temperament, mentality, custom, or type; and above all, to transmute living reality into the stuff of texts".It is a grand vision still in its infancy - but that has made promising steps. At the very least it's also allowed for a level of chaos and contradiction to challenge the idea of a literary festival and notions of the book itself, in an age of multiple digital platforms.This was apparent from performance artist Tracey Rose's challenging, but rewarding, conversation with Mishka Hoosen, author of Call it a Difficult Night, that questioned the boundaries of human solidarity contrasted with individual narcissism in the political moment.Eusebius McKaiser (Run Racist, Run) and Panashe Chigumadzi (Sweet Medicine) made the conscious decision to not discuss their panel topic: "Why Must a Black Writer Write About Blackness?" as this was too "reductive" to them as writers. Instead, they chatted about form, style and getting personal in their work.Riffing off the call by Ngugi wa Thiong'o to decolonise the mind, the Time of the Writer is at a delicately poised and dangerous moment in its lifetime, which engenders a delicious expectation of its 20th edition.Niren Tolsi is the author of an upcoming book on Marikana. He appeared at the Time of the Writer Festival..