Alert! 
Tonight, Exclusive Books launches its new web retail portal, Exclus1ves, at a gala do in Fourways, Johannesburg. Follow my and others’ livetweets at #x1s to learn more about the online retail revolution that Exclusives hopes to bring SA.
Alert! Tonight, Exclusive Books launches its new web retail portal, Exclus1ves, at a gala do in Fourways, Johannesburg. Follow my and others’ livetweets at #x1s to learn more about the online retail revolution that Exclusives hopes to bring SA.
Something Wicked, South Africa’s first (and only) magazine devoted to horror and science-fiction short stories – which featured breakout works by largely unknown authors and stunning full-page illustrations by a talented group of (primarily) local artists – was started in 2006 by Joe Vaz, in partnership with Vianne Venter. Over the years the publication has had its ups and downs, largely due to financial problems (a major one being the cost of printing on paper skyrocketing to prohibitive levels over the past few years, a problem that has seen even established magazines with massive financial backing folding left and right), but, nevertheless, it gained a patient, understanding, loyal following all over the world due to its focus on quality publishing. The readership understood, and celebrated, what the magazine was trying to achieve and therefore was largely unfazed by the delays and problems.
The same readership now mourns, for the publishers have announced that the current issue, number 10, will be the magazine’s last in print.
The death of the print version requires a suitably macabre eulogy (should someone wish to write one in the comments below), but, equally, Something Wicked’s achievements should be celebrated. The magazine set precedents that will be hard to follow and there are many lessons to be learned – especially for those wishing to traverse the quagmire of niche publishing in this country.
I interviewed Joe to hear his thoughts on the magazine’s successes and (sometimes very gory) hiccups – and on what brought him to the decision to stop printing.
Where did the idea come from and how did it all start?
The idea has been around for decades in magazines such as Cemetery Dance, and Interzone, Fantasy & Science Fiction, and Weird Tales. What frustrated me was the fact that there was no South African alternative for these international magazines, the realisation that South African genre fiction writers really had no outlet for their work.
Horror and SF short-story magazines have been around in the UK and the US for decades and yet in 2006 there still wasn’t a single publication of that type in South Africa. So one night around 3am I thought to myself, “Why don’t you do it?” So I did.
Talk us through the typical process of putting an issue together.
It starts with receiving and reading piles and piles of submissions and selecting seven to 10 stories for the magazine. Once the stories have been selected contracts are sent out to the authors and every single story goes through a preliminary edit by Vianne Venter. Every edit is then sent to the authors for their approval and correction.
At the same time art is being commissioned from various artists for each story.
Once the edits come back from the authors the stories go through a second edit and a final approval. They then get proofed by our wonderful proofer, Mark Sykes, who sends us back his edits and notes. Vianne goes through each story one last time and sends me final “to print” versions of all the stories.
By that point I have received final art and have begun prelim layout on the magazine. While all that is going on DVD, game, and book reviews are being sourced and written, columns are being commissioned, and interviews are being conducted.
Once everything is ready to go I will do a final layout followed by one last proof of design and reviews. We then send everything off to the printer and pray we haven’t made any major errors. Once we’ve signed off on the proof the print run goes ahead and the magazines are delivered to the distributors.
Meanwhile the web site is being updated, publicity information is being sent out to magazine reviewers, the e-book version is being laid out, and invoices are being collected and claimed.
Once the magazine is delivered subscriber’s copies are packaged and posted off.
Rinse and repeat.
How did you manage to organise international distribution?
I did some research and found out who was distributing similar types of magazines and contacted the distributor. I then sent them some sample copies, which they sent out to their retailers. They then contacted me with an order request.
The magazine featured both writers and illustrators. Who were some of your favourites and what were some of the success stories?
Favourite artists is kind of hard to choose since over the last four years we have had some amazing talent grace our pages. Obviously Vincent Sammy, who illustrated both our first issue and our last print issue; Hendrik Gericke and Pierre Smit, who have had illustrations in every single issue; Jesca Marisa who has given us two beautiful covers; Joe Doe; Kobus Faber; etc etc – the list is endless. We love all our artists.
Favourite illustrations would probably go to Vincent for his illustrations for The Protector [by Evan Morris] in Issue 1, Kobus Faber for The Lighthouse [by Karen Runge] (SW03) everything Hendrik, Jesca, Pierre have ever done. But seriously, it’s hard to choose. I love them all. Check out the double-page spread Kobus gave us for Werner Pretorius’s I Will Come For You in SW07. It’s astounding.
The Lighthouse by Karen Runge, art by Kobus Faber
Favourite stories, personally would be Freemantle Mons The Leviathan Smile by Michael John Grist, The Resident Member by Paul Marlowe, The Lighthouse by Karen Runge, The Protector and The Breeding Season by Evan Morris, Night-Time Is A-Coming by Werner Pretorius, Brother Evil by Ryan Saunders, The Subtle Thief by C Hellisen, Child by Gareth Robertson, White Rock by Charles Paston, and anything Sarah Lotz has written.
Again, there are many more, I just can’t remember them all.
Success stories, well there’s Sarah. We were her first published credit. She won our first ever short-story competition and went on to work for Clockwork Zoo as a writer on URBO: The Adventures Of Pax Africa, followed, to date, by two published novels.
We published Abigail Godsell’s Making Waves when she was just 15 years old. For me personally this was always the point of Something Wicked, to be able to inspire and reward a teenage writer and, hopefully, help nurture a talent that she will continue to explore.
In terms of the magazine’s successes, I guess just looking at my subscriber base and realising that we have readers in Japan, Australia, all throughout Europe, the USA, and Canada is pretty fucking awesome. Who knew this little project could reach so far?
What did the readership especially enjoy? I recall at one point you were considering widening the scope, which was horror, to include more science fiction.
It’s all across the board. One of the things that Vianne and I are especially proud of is the diverse reactions we receive to the stories. What it means to us is that there is something in there for everyone. Some of our favourite stories will sometimes not even blip with some readers while others will completely fall in love with them.
We decided to broaden the scope from horror to horror and science fiction simply because I felt it would appeal to a wider market and because I love science fiction.
Something Wicked Issue 1 - cover art by Vincent Sammy
Talk us through the problems you encountered that eventually caused you to have to make the difficult decision to stop printing the magazine.
Finally a simple question.
Something Wicked has only ever had two problems: time and money.
Throughout the history of the magazine it has never turned a profit, though over the last year we have managed to begin to break even. As a result most of the financing of Something Wicked has come from paying work that I do. What that boils down to is when I am earning money I don’t have the time to run the magazine, and when I am not earning money I don’t have the finances to run the magazine.
We cut a huge break in 2008 when the National Arts Council gave us partial funding (which covered about half of the printing costs for five issues) but inevitably a business needs to turn a profit.
Something Wicked has always been Vianne and myself with a lot of help from friends (Sarah Lotz, Digby Young, Erik G, Mark Sykes, and Brett Venter) but the bulk of the work has always been just the two of us and since we’re not getting paid for the work inevitably Something Wicked ends up on the back burner when actual paying work comes through.
In the last year both Vianne’s and my career have picked up significantly, which has completely obliterated our time. So, once again, the magazine ends up suffering.
We are hoping to keep it alive online but at this stage I’m still working out the kinks. It looks like one of the few possibilities is if I step down as editor as it seems to be my lack of time that is slowing the progress of the magazine. We’ll see.
What were some of the most important lessons you learnt about publishing due to this project and what do you think is important for those that might want to start a similar project to know?
Start online.
Seriously, keep your overheads as low as possible. We started in print and right from the beginning we started losing money.
Printing paper is ridiculously expensive (easily 90% of our per-issue cost).
Build up a fan base through online marketing and publishing and then start pulling in the advertisers.
Be prepared to work for free for at least two to three years. Once, and only once you’re turning over a profit, hire some staff to help you out.
Do that for a couple of years and you may be lucky enough to move up to printing on paper.
But to be honest the print industry is an extremely difficult place to start building a business. The work never, ever stops. Every deadline you make is just the beginning of another one. As businesses go, I am glad I started Something Wicked, and I am extremely proud of the work we have done over the last few years, but it’s not a great way to earn money. It is definitely a “for-the-love” business.
Any regrets?
I regret not being able to get back to writers fast enough. I know exactly what it’s like to send a story through to a publication and have to wait months and months for a response. Other than that, none whatsoever. Every mistake is a lesson, every experience, good or bad, is a learning opportunity and the more you learn the better off you are in the future. And if you’re gonna lose a bundle of cash over four years, at least pick a fun way to do it, which this was.
Alert! Small and independent African publishers are encouraged to register for the second annual Jozi Book Fair, to be held from 7 to 9 August this year.
Here’s the press release from co-organising institution Khanya College:
Press release
JOZI BOOK FAIR REGISTRATION OPENS 1st of MARCH 2010
With a bigger and more accessible venue, the second Jozi Book Fair will be taking place from 7 – 9 August in Museum Africa in Newtown. Small and independent publishers, NGOs and community organisations from South and Southern Africa are invited to exhibit at the Jozi Book Fair 2010. Registrations open on the 1st March and closes on the 19th of June 2010.
What is the Jozi Book Fair?
Jozi Book Fair was established by Khanya College as a response to a decline in progressive writing and publishing in South Africa in the past 20 years.
Jozi Book Fair is committed to developing a robust and sustainable culture of reading in South Africa and engages with various reading circles, libraries, readers, writers and publishers in an effort to help develop and grow literacy and a culture of reading and more importantly, writing in South Africa.
Why Jozi Book Fair?
The culture of reading in South Africa is in crisis. Homes and schools are mostly deserts of reading matter. Public libraries are thin on the ground and poorly supported. Books and paper are expensive and beyond the reach of the majority of South Africans. Few communities have bookshops. Few teachers understand their roles as instructors, practitioners and promoters of reading. Even South Africans with advantaged backgrounds tend to aliteracy (they can read, but don’t). Social contexts are often hostile to reading.
It is within this social context that small publishers and writers must struggle to operate, forcing them to not only be producers of books, but also to take on the role of literacy developers and activists in South Africa if they wish to have any kind of market for their publications.
What about the first Jozi Book Fair in 2009?
On the 8th of August 2009 Jozi Book Fair debuted at Museum Africa in Newtown. With over 45 publishers exhibiting and 63 authors and speakers taking part in various round-table discussions and events, the Fair set itself up as a vital and necessary intervention for small and alternative publishers in South Africa.
Commercial publishers can’t always justify the publication of books that would probably only have limited markets, especially in a country like South Africa where the book-buying market is very small. A project such as the Jozi Book Fair makes possible the promotion of more marginal works, as well as the strategic networking between writers and publishers and distributors.
Jozi Book Fair has opened up entry points into publishing, and has created new opportunities for new and marginal voices. Even writers and small publishers who have not worked through the Book Fair, have been encouraged by it through various events and seminars that have been hosted by the Jozi Book Fair team since August.
For more information visit: www.jozibookfair.org.za
Or contact Thobile Disemelo on 084 377 3013 / 011 336 9190
E-mail: jozibbokfair@khanyacollege.org.za
Ends
BOOK SA hopes to be at the fair this year – all going well, we’ll see you there!
Hello Nigeria! has been the sense on the ground since word broke of Arts and Culture Minister Lulu Xingwana’s dismissal of a photography exhibition at Constitution Hill as “pornographic” and “immoral”.
Penny Siopis voiced her dismay. Bongi Bhengu, curator of the exhibition held in August last year, and photographer Zanele Muholi, have responded to the schizophrenogenic insult.
Xingwana’s disingenuous response inspires little optimism. She claims, “I was not even aware as to whether the ‘bodies’ in the images were of men or women”. Oh, sister, did they pluck out your eyes? Are you also the victim of hate crimes? What will it take for you to look?
One can’t help wondering what her budgeteers have told her about the forthcoming slew of South African authors attending the London Book Fair, some of them on her coin.
Special to BOOK SA, Yvette Christiansë, poet and novelist, unpacks the Minister’s recent utterances, pondering the meaning of the Xingwana’s stance for practitioners of the written word – particularly those in the LGBTI community:
**
One name came to mind as I read the article in The Times: Eudy Simelane.
For a government minister to accuse women who love women of being destructive to nation building is dangerous discrimination. Discriminatus: to be in a state of separation. Set apart…Need I say more?
And I seem to recall the only too recent linking of intimacy with immorality and nationalism. Will the Minister strike a special squad? Why, it could be called the Immorality Squad.
Perhaps a key procedural question is: Can a government minister be so cavalier about a nation’s hard won Constitution? Surely such cavalier disregard is unconstitutional, which is to say dismissive of the foundation of rule and law that is a nation’s highest aspiration. A Constitution is, or we hope it is, where the idea of nation resides and is imagined, in the articles of law that protect us all from each other and even from ourselves (as when we are moved by any unexamined discriminatory impulse). Is there not an oath that a minister swears?
Can a government minister, a leader of an elected government, elected according to the provisions of a Constitution, be dismissive of her/his Constitution? If the answer is yes then everyone, but everyone, must be afraid. If the answer is no, we are talking about unconstitutional declarations.
Pornographic? How quickly that word came up. And how revealing. Perhaps the meaning of pornography that comes immediately to mind is that which refers to the explicit display of sexual subjects to explicitly arouse the viewer sexually, and for the personal gain of the pornographer. This is clearly not the case in these photographs. They are moving, yes, in very, very different ways from what the Minister clearly thought.
This is a very touchy subject, but one issue about pornography is the way that it renders feminine and feminized subjects as the passive, mindless players in a script that cares nothing for them as people. Zaneli Muholi and Nandipha Mntambo produce caring, respectful, mindful images that are critically aesthetic. I don’t have to rehearse a long history of portrayals of bodies that have nothing to do with pornography even if they show the erotic (the erotic is not divorced from the aesthetic in the portraits I am thinking of, and that is why they are not reductive and pornographic).
Porno: from prostitute. Graphos: to write. To depict (only) the body vacated of all interiority that is not relevant to sex.
The images that Muholi and Mntambo create are explicitly caring of their subjects. They show love. And sexuality. Not simply sex. There is a difference. With due respect to the Minister, to reduce someone to sexual object alone is to misread.
While we are all invited to be viewers, as the artist is herself, not all viewers see pornographically. The risk that the artist and her subjects take is that she and they cannot predict or control the fact that some viewers only see women’s bodies as displayed for pleasure no matter what the artistic intent is, or that some viewers would only see the erotic and not the aesthetic.
Discrimination is pornographic in the extended usage of the term. The extended meaning pornography that is so often overlooked is the pornography of violence. Discrimination is violence because, outspoken, it has a purpose. Its purpose is to illicit or stimulate reaction and further discrimination. In the Minister’s case, such outspoken statements are clearly able to ’stimulate’ action even at a bureaucratic level as, according to The Times, some of the Minister’s remarks imply.
The Times reported the Minister as demanding to know why the exhibition “was not censored and why her department had contributed R300,000 to it” (let all of the participants be warned-there is no freedom of association, they are all implicated and that is the real unraveling power of discrimination; it cannot stop at one group, it can only begin to look at anyone associated with that group). Discrimination is pornographic because it incites social, political, unconstitutional violence.
And in a context in which homophobia has already targeted women who love women, the Minister’s statements are not simply unfortunate. They are downright dangerous. I say this name here and we should all inhale and have a moment’s silence: Eudy Simelane.
South Africa is preparing for the World Cup Soccer. Whether one is a fan of soccer or not, or a sports minded person or not, soccer has been described (by Achille Mbembe for one) as a sport that cuts across race, class, ethnic and, to some extent, gender boundaries. Bafana Bafana is hailed as a team that brings positive attention to South Africa.
Eudy Simelane’s team, Banyana Banyana, has represented South Africa internationally and South Africans were very happy to cheer them on and send them off under the flag. They play as South Africans, members of the nation that their parents worked to bring into being, and that they are proud to represent. Eudy Simelane played as a South African, as someone who helped bring positive attention to the nation in Cyprus, in Holland and they have their eye set on Germany 2011.
A visit to Banyana Banyana’s facebook shows such statements as “Go play with pride for our motherland” and “do us proud” or “go make South Africa proud and lets do our best.” This is the language of inclusion. It is exactly the expression of “social cohesion and nation building.” Or is this not the kind of social cohesion and nation building that the Minister envisages?
Let me stress that I am not suggesting that all of the women in Banyana Banyana love as Eudy Simelane did. I was drawing attention to her participation in this team’s achievements, which, for the team’s considerable fan base, reflect positively upon the nation. And I was drawing attention to the fact that her team members accepted and valued her for the fully rounded, fully contributing person that she was.
But, in truth, it should not be necessary to marshal Eudy Simelane’s role in Banyana Banyana’s achievements as evidence in order to counter the implication that someone like her could/should be discriminated against or singled out as being an improper citizen or, worse, be accused of being a presence that threatens social and national cohesion.
If this were true, there could be no single nation existing on the face of this planet because gays and lesbians are a fact. We are here. We contribute. We believe. We serve our communities, our nations. We love each other. We love in complex ways. We love with all our hearts and minds, with our bodies. We pay the price for love. We cannot, ever, take our love for granted. And we therefore are very, very mindful and careful about squander. Love can never be squandered. Never. The squandering of love is hateful because hate fills the place where love should be.
It might not be the Minister’s intention to incite violence, but the cold and deadly fact is that her statements would be welcome among those who seek to justify their violence. They already believe themselves sanctioned by all the hoary, spurious biology about gays and lesbians.
I am tired of being scapegoated. But my weariness is a privileged, lucky distance from what happened to Eudy Simelane. It is a distance that should not be a privilege or luck. It should be the right it is. A Constitution says that. And the Minister is sworn to uphold the Constitution. A Minister is sworn to put into practice the ideals that have liberated a country and leave them to be dead letters of law.
Why am I still being so over polite about this business? Is the Minister ashamed of South Africa’s Constitution? Shame on the Minister. Shame.
**
In a second piece special to BOOK SA, poet and academic Gabeba Baderoon writes “On Looking and Not Looking”, an open letter responding to the Minister’s comments about the Innovative Women Exhibition:
**
On Looking and Not Looking
by Gabeba Baderoon
Dear Minister Xingwana,
To place yourself before a work of art is a complex and potentially transformative experience. Sometimes that means looking at something you’d rather not see. But as the Minister of Arts and Culture, you preside over a realm in which that line between what you’d rather not see and what you need to look at is an ever-present factor, and a theme of much art.
Minister, I invite you to look at art that challenges you, like that of Nandipha Mntambo and Zanele Muholi. That looking is an active and complicated experience that includes all the discomfort, shock, unsettling of established notions, new ideas and feelings that you appear to have had at the Innovative Women exhibition, and that together can amount to illumination. That is what art does. The problem with walking out of an exhibition is that you miss the many meanings that the works evoke, both separately and together. You miss what they create and unsettle, and therefore the possibility of transformation.
Immoral, offensive and going against nation-building … there were children as young as three years old in the room … where do we draw the line between art and pornography.
Minister, where does this language come from?
When you turn to such justifications for your actions, it is our duty as artists, writers, feminists and citizens to point out how revealingly close your words are to those of the apartheid censors.
Artists and governments have always had a contentious relationship. Artists can reach into the minds of people and change them. That is a power that states are wary of and want to regulate. But to constrict art is to erase the capacity for imagining what does not yet exist. We need that capacity because our world is imperfect and we need brilliant, epiphanic initiatives if we are to succeed in changing it. Art generates epiphanies.
So let us name what happened in that brief glance, that instantaneous assessment, that abrupt walking out, and the explanations from your office that followed. Let us name it and its dangers.
The name is censorship, and the dangers are reactionary ideas about art and the fueling of homophobia.
Fortunately, there is another language for thinking about art and artists.
Minister, what would you have seen if you had stayed and viewed the works of Nandipha Mntambo and Zanele Muholi alongside all the other artists in the Innovative Women exhibition and talked about them with other visitors?
You would have seen works that use the language of allusion, intimacy, beauty and pleasure.
During your brief glance, you may have mistaken the intimacy in Muholi’s images for pornography and the erudite allusions in Mntambo’s work for carelessness about sexual violence, but that mistake can only be sustained if you don’t truly look at their art. If you stood in front of Muholi’s photographs, you would see lesbian lives outside of the narratives of violation and pornography through which they are more commonly presented to us. You would see how her work opens up a discussion about visibility itself.
For lesbians, visibility carries an immense cost – the feminist writer Pumla Gqola calls this a “hyper-visibility” that has been used to violate lesbian lives through a sensationalistic focus on suffering that has simultaneously made it possible to ignore that suffering. Muholi’s images confront such hyper-visibility and reclaim a space for the women in her photographs away from denigration and hostility and toward presence, pleasure and wholeness. Her work show us there is no category of human being whom it is safe to despise and whose hurt it is expedient to ignore.
And once the photos existed and came into public view, other good followed. Some of the best new South African writing on art, citizenship and belonging has been sparked by Muholi’s work, including essays by Desiree Lewis, Pumla Gqola and Gabi Ngcobo. You might be pleased to know, Minister, that this new direction has also been traced by a vanguard of the African continent’s finest feminist scholars, among them Sylvia Tamale, Patricia McFadden and Charmaine Pereira.
No artist is afraid of being a dissident to conventional thinking. That is their role. Mntambo, Muholi and other artists continuously spark our creative, ethical and political responses, but also our personal and affective ones. We envisage ourselves anew after their art enters our imaginations. If we see someone’s wholeness, can we continue to ignore their violation? The most radical possibility of art is to generate change – and in the process create a more inclusive notion of community.
Minister, perhaps unintentionally, your words have generated a great deal of alarm in the world of the arts and among those of us who strongly support the rights of gays and lesbians. We wonder if we are entering “our George Bush years,” as Gender Commissioner Yvette Abrahams asserted on hearing your comments.
I would like to imagine a different possibility, Minister. I want to imagine you will come back to the images you walked away from, and look deeply at what you thought you didn’t want to see. I imagine you rethinking received ideas about art and pornography (the great poet and activist Audre Lorde gives us some beautifully nuanced insights on this) and arriving at a hard-earned transformation.
I think of you reflecting on your responsibilities as the guardian of the nation’s best impulses in art and culture – which is not to limit but to enable such work. Then perhaps this experience of looking again at the thing you didn’t want to see will have brought you closer to the best and most expansive possibilities of art.
**
Should you feel disconsolate, dear reader, don’t do what I did. Avoid the comments from Joe Public on these articles, lest you find yourself compelled to vomit with grief.
We must ask once again: Minister, where does this language come from? Where indeed?
Book details
Photo courtesy Victor Dlamini
In her latest Sunday Times books column, Kalk Bay Books‘ Ann Donald names Antjie Krog’s Begging to be Black as her non-fiction book of 2009. Donald hosted a talk with Krog and Marianne Thamm at her shop in February; if the book were read widely enough, Donald thinks, it salutary effects might even reverse the trend of racist commenting in the SA blogosphere!
As a white South African, I’d like to write to other whites about a book I believe offers a new way of understanding our role in the “race issue”. Into this divided country, one of our deepest thinkers, Antjie Krog, has dared to publish Begging to Be Black – my choice for non-fiction book of the year in 2009, and a book I maintain is one of the most important to be released post-1994.I realise that is a sweeping statement, that many people don’t like Krog’s writing or her politics, and that many whites are of the opinion that the past is past and it’s time to move on. Nevertheless, I stand by it because in her book Krog lifts the carpet and asks us at least to look at the elephant in the room.
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Alert! Thursday 11 March will go down in history as the date upon which Cape Town’s first indie bookshop war began.
Tensions have been simmering, it must be said, for some time, with young-lion indie heavyweights The Book Lounge and Kalk Bay Books fighting for the spoils of the launch business, while the (comparatively) grizzled Clarke’s Books and The Bay Bookshop held themselves above the fray.
Now, however, one of the old warriors has decided to regird and chase the glory of yore, and has sent a mighty salvo across the bows of its rivals. The Bay Bookshop will open its new, fringe-of-the-CBD Waterkant premises with the launch of Evita Bezuidenhout’s Evita’s Kossie Sikelela on the fated Thursday, 11 March. This is an event that would normally count as The Book Lounge and/or Kalk Bay Books’ meat and drink.
Not to be outflanked, Kalk Bay Books has responded to the threat with the clever and wholly unlooked-for strategy of offering its customers… meat and drink. That’s right, Ann Donald will preside over the opening of her new bookshop’s annex, a restaurant called, erm, The Annex, later this month – possibly, even, on the night following The Bay’s launch, when the bookshop will host Breyten Breytenbach and Gus Ferguson.
But the loudest roar of defiance at The Bay Bookshop’s brazen challenge has come, not unsurprisingly, from The Book Lounge, which is countering the threat of a new indie store on its turf by… opening a new indie store of its own.
That’s right! The Book Lounge has teamed up with Idasa to start Lobby Books, a shop that will operate from Idasa’s Cape Town premises at 6 Spin Street in the CBD. It will be opened in grand style on – you guessed it – the 11th of March, with the launch of Idasa’s Democracy Index 2010. As counterweights against Tannie Evita’s flair – which The Bay Bookshop will be flaunting on the city’s west side – Lobby Books has lined up both Njabulo Ndebele and Richard Calland as the stars of its show.
What will these developments portend for Cape book lovers? Plenty of good reading, one suspects. BOOK SA will cover the new indie bookshop wars as diligently as possible! Meanwhile, here are the details of the second indie bookshop launch on the 11th of March:
Event Details
Here’s a story on the Idasa book that ran in this week’s Sunday Times:
The dominance of South Africa’s ruling party was eroding the security of the country’s 16-year-old democracy, the Institute for Democracy warned in a book due out next week.
According to Testing Democracy, the country scored only 5.8 overall on a scale of 10. Idasa’s democracy index rates anything below five as unacceptable and anything above eight as being “as close to the democratic ideal as possible”.
In individual categories, South Africa scored 6.9 for electoral independence – but only 4.8 for accountability.
“Weak institutions – a significant characteristic of South Africa’s democracy – struggle to promote the effective functioning of the state and fail to provide the checks and balances necessary… ” said co-editors Neeta Misra-Dexter and Judith February.
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The Mail & Guardian’s Tarryn Harbour covers Jonathan Jansen’s recent speech in front of the South African Institute of Race Relations (SAIRR):
In his talk, Jansen described the country as being in “a very dangerous state” concerning racial issues. “What we must ask ourselves is, ‘How did Mandela’s country end up on this precipice? How did we get here?’”
He listed seven key areas of crisis — moral leadership, public schools, human and race relations, academic freedom, public confidence, public behaviour and university education.
On moral leadership — “the single most important threat to the country” — he said: “Young people make choices based on what they perceive to appropriate behaviour by adults, what they see as normative behaviour in the country in which they live.”
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Alert! The 2nd Annual Northern Cape Writers’ Festival (NCWF) is on this week, with literary events set to enliven Kimberley from Thursday 25 to Sunday 27 Feb.
Writers involved include Belinda Kruiper, Duncan Kgatea, Sindiwe Magona, EKM Dido, Julia Martin, Tina Schouw, Credo Mutwa and Marita van der Vyver – plus a series of “latest published authors from the Northern Cape”.
The full programme is above – please note that registration is essential, no bookings will be taken on the day, look for registration forms in the Diamond Fields Advertiser – and here’s the press release from the festival’s sponsor, the Northern Cape Department of Sport, Arts and Culture:
NORTHERN CAPE WRITERS FESTIVAL 2010 – a celebration of Writing and Reading!
This year 2010 sees the second Northern Cape Writers Festival (NCWF) taking place over three days, 25 – 27 February 2010, here in Kimberley. The NCWF started as a project to encourage a culture of reading as well as exposing the community to the many artistic talents that the Northern Cape has to offer. It has had an unbelievable response in its first year. Truly, the Northern Cape was ready for this platform.
Within the NCWF the Northern Cape Book Fair (at the NC Theatre Foyer) forms the standard platform for books and This year we will hear and see the likes of Belinda Kruiper, Vonani Bila, Credo Mutwa, Marita van der Vyver, Duncan Kgatea, Tina Schouw, EKM Dido, Leonard McKay and Thozamile Mooi and interacting with audiences on what inspires them to write coupled with a reading from each of their publications. Indeed, a not-to-be-missed occasion! Within the netWorx Café (adjacent to the Theatre Foyer) a series of Poetry and reading will be offered every morning on a programme billed as “Wake-up-to-Words!” from 09h30 to 10h30. For the not-so-early-birds, a “Food-for-Thought” platform is offered at the same venue in the afternoons with notable speakers delivering comment on topical issues such as “Women as a powerful catalyst for nation building and social cohesion…” Speakers are Dr Credo Mutwa, well known sage and Mr Ronald Harrison, the artist and author of “The Black Christ”.
The ever popular Round Table discussions will be back at the WHAG (William Humphreys Art Gallery) Auditorium. Panels will speak on women in the media, the influence of gender, class and ethnicity on the public portrayal of women as well as offer a commentary of women’s perceptions of the world, i.e. the woman writer as a social commentator. The WHAG is also hosting an exciting art exhibition of the work of the late Vetkat Kruiper, a true son of the Northern Cape, from 23 February 2010 already. His widow, Belinda Kruiper, will engage with audiences on the “Wake-up-to-Words!” programme of Friday, 26 February 2010. Her book, Kalahari Rainsong, is a must read!
Youth of all ages will be workshopped in the art of writing during the series of Creative Writing Workshops. A limited number of seats are still open (30 participants), register now!
A dedicated focus on the artistic talents of the Northern Cape exclusively highlighting the voices of poetry and song will be offered after “Wake- up–to–Words!” in the netWorx Café daily. A must see to appreciate the rich talent this province has to offer. Performances in Nama, Setswana, isiXhosa, Afrikaans and English can be expected…
The younger audience will have a dedicated programme of storytelling, arts and crafts, educational playtime and puppet theatre at the FET College Gardens. On Saturday, 27 February 2010 they will be able to enjoy the company of Zakumi!
This year book sales will be handled by Exclusive Books at the netWorx Café throughout the festival.
No registrations will be done during the festival, pre-registration is essential. Complete the form in the DFA and fax it to 086 616 8291 or collect, complete and deliver the registration form at the Department’s offices in Ashburnham. See you at THE event in the Northern Cape!
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Alert! The Penguin African Writers Series has just debuted in the UK – featuring five of the six books that appeared under the series’ aegis in South Africa (BOOK SA can’t determine which one was left out; any help on this score is much appreciated) – but the event has left Guardian books critic Akin Ajayi underwhelmed.
The books give the series a backward-looking feel, Ajayi writes. Rather than showcasing what’s new on the continent – with material from the generation driving the likes of Kwani?, Chimurenga or Saraba, for instance – he feels the new AWS editors have opted for works that convey the dusty, if freshly-liberated, Africa of the 20th century:
Perhaps I’m hard to please, but I can’t help feeling a little underwhelmed by Penguin’s new African Writers Series, launched last month and published by its Modern Classics imprint. It’s not that I think the series is a bad thing, far from it, but by modelling itself upon the iconic Heinemann imprint of the same name, the impulse to compare the two is irresistible. And, to judge from the first five books published, I fear that Penguin won’t come out of this looking very good.
First, a bit of context. The original AWS was inaugurated by Heinemann in 1962, the brainchild of publishing executive Alan Hill. Hill, whom Chinua Achebe describes in his book of autobiographical essays Home and Exile as “an adventurer with all the right instincts”, recognised that the nascent post-colonial publishing industry was not supporting the growth of original African literature. Domestic markets at the time were dominated by foreign publishing houses, and were considered primarily a territory for selling books written and published abroad. Not much was happening to encourage and promote new writing from within.
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Alert! Today marks twenty years since Nelson Mandela was released from prison, and South Africa took its first few shaky steps toward a new dawn.
We’ve tracked down a website that gives lengthy excerpts from Mandela’s monumental autobiography, Long Walk to Freedom, which was first published four years after the historic scenes at Victor Verster prison.
Brush up on your knowledge of Madiba’s life:
Excerpts
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