The Bookseller.com

13th October 2008

Gary Cummiskey is founder, editor, and publisher of independent South African publisher Dye Hard Press.

Cape Town Book Fair – Day 3

16.06.08

The wind was strong in Cape Town today, and I felt almost carried along as I walked down to the convention centre about 9.30am. With its being Youth Day, a public holiday, visitors started arriving in vast numbers from about 10am, and throughout the day the aisles were packed – very much like last year’s fair.   

An interesting talk at Struik’s stand was by Margie Orford, whose two crime novels, Like Clockwork and Blood Rose, were published by Struik’s women’s writing imprint, Oshun Books. Crime writing has become a popular genre in South African fiction, and its success may well be a reflection of the crime-ridden country we live in.

Orford explained how she first came to be interested in crime writing when she returned to South Africa in the 1990s and worked as an investigative reporter. She was struck by the tensions of living in a country where violent crime is so rampart and yet the people are generally warm and friendly. She was also struck by the tension between the sense of intimacy of living in a loving environment of friends or family, and an alternative, more terrifying intimacy of being in a powerless position against an attacker. She became aware of how on the one hand South Africa was in a process of democratic change and was striving for equality, yet at the same time the aggressors in society still retained power over the defenseless.

There is therefore a sociological as well as psychological foundation to Orford’s work, even when she shifted the locale from the ugly underbelly of Cape Town in Like Clockwork to that of Namibia in Blood Rose. As Orford explained, when South African troops pulled out of what was then South West Africa, there was no Truth and Reconciliation Commission, and so wounds did not heal easily and scars are still evident.

In the early afternoon Botsotso editor Allan Kolski Horwitz interviewed poet and academic Kelwyn Sole at the Isis X exhibition stand. The title of the talk was Consumer heaven and Cappuccinos, in which Sole shared his views on how the commercial publishing industry has gained near-control of the market, and has got to a point where it can almost dictate what should be regarded as good or bad writing. In this situation – particularly because commercial publishers are driven by the need to make a profit – explorative and innovative creative writing is not being introduced into the market, and is being stifled. The publication of poetry in South Africa in particularly suffering as commercial publishers now focus on the mass introduction of popular fiction. And while independent or alternative initiatives continue to publish creative writing, the constraints and obstacles they face are considerable.

Towards the end of the talk, which was well-attended, Horwitz took the opportunity to lambast national book chain Exclusive Books for taking a narrow-minded view on what to stock, as well as the Publishers’ Association of South Africa, which he regarded as inept and effectively dormant, plus the public libraries for  underspending on government funding.

Another fascinating discussion focused on the newly published book Africa Writes Back, by James Currey, published by Wits University Press.  The book, which has been simultaneously published by seven imprints in seven countries, traces the history of the Heinemann African Writers Series, which from 1962 put African literature on the world publishing map. The book’s publication is timely, since June 17 is the 50^th anniversary of the publication, in hardcover, of Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart.

When it was felt that Africa needed a paperback range for new writing, a sort of African Penguin, the idea for the African Writers Series was launched and a paperback edition of Things Fall Apart became its first title. The series went on to publish writers such as Dennis Brutus ( who participated in the discussion), Nadine Gordimer, Gabriel Okara, Bessie Head and Zimbabwe’s “black outsider” Dambudzo Marechera, whom Currey – who had headed the series during its most productive period from the late 1960s to the early 1980s –  described as being an “engaging nuisance”.

Until the early 1980s, when Africa moved into a severe debt situation, 80% of the series’ readers were in Africa, with the remainder being mainly in the US and the UK. After the 1980s, the majority of sales moved to the UK.  Of the hundreds of titles that the series produced, only about 60 remain in print today.

When I left the fair at about 5pm, there were still quite a few visitors in the aisles.  The final day is tomorrow, there will still be events and discussions, but most of the exhibitors will start packing up mid-morning.  It will be interesting in a few days’ time to obtain statistics from the fair’s organisers on how many visitors attended. My overall feeling was the fair, while still a success, was quieter than last year. Having said that, because the aisles were a lot wider this year, there was a lot less congestion, and this could have given off the impression that the fair was less busy.      

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