With world attention focusing on South Africa before the football world cup in June, last week's London Book Fair was an opportunity to explore the country's literary and cultural life, writes David Tresilian The annual London Book Fair is a major event on the international publishing calendar, with publishers, editors, scouts and agents coming together for three days each spring to meet and thrash out deals. While the Fair remains very much an industry event, in recent years the organisers have tried to reach out to a wider audience by designating a country or region "market focus" and organising a series of seminars and talks designed to promote the publishing industries of the non-Anglophone or extra- European world. This year's market focus was South Africa, following last year's focus on India, and, a year before that, the focus on the Arab world that gave Egyptian publishers an opportunity to promote Arab and Egyptian books to the international publishing industry (reviewed in the Weekly in April 2008). South Africa is already the focus of international media attention because of the football world cup that will be held in the country in June, and the London Fair's South African pavilion was festooned with the kind of glossy iconography and advertising slogans being used to promote the country ahead of this event. A South African choir greeted visitors to the Fair on its first day, and South African publishers Pan Macmillan had taken out prime advertising space to promote Nelson Mandela's Conversations with Myself, a memoir by the former South African president expected in October. Inside, the Publishers Association of South Africa, in association with the London Book Fair and the British Council, had brought South African writers and publishers to London for a series of talks and seminars, with English PEN and others pitching in with a series of talks on the translation of South Africa's 11 official languages, nine of them originally African in addition to English and Afrikaans While the eruption of the Icelandic volcano that grounded air transport in northern Europe last week had taken quite a toll on the Book Fair, with attendance figures down an estimated 50 percent from the previous year and many South African participants left stranded either en route or in Cape Town and Johannesburg, even this could not dampen the spirits of those able to attend the Fair's South African events. Much of great interest was said that went far beyond standard representations of South African society, throwing intriguing light on a literary and cultural landscape of considerable depth and variety. There were also a few surprises. According to figures provided by participants at a seminar giving an overview of the South African book market presided over by Brian Wafawarowa, director of the country's Publishers' Association, while the vast majority of South African books, both imported and locally produced, are for the educational market, there is still a healthy trade book sector. Representing 30 percent of the total, this is much larger than general publishing in the rest of sub-Saharan Africa, where educational publishing still makes up 95 percent of all books sold. Yet, while the South African educational books market is healthy and growing, with 50 percent of the country's 48 million people being under the age of 25 and representing a potential market of some 20 million learners, the same cannot be said of the trade book sector. While South Africa has the largest, best-established and most-experienced publishing industry of any country in sub-Saharan Africa, making the country a potential "gateway to Africa" for this as for other industries, its trade book market is about the same size as Ireland's, a country with a population a tenth the size. According to Wafawarowa, the average South African reader is still "white, middle-class and old," and while there is some appetite for computer books, self-help titles, business manuals and sports biography among the larger population, it is a fact that "only four percent of reading takes place outside institutions." The boom in black South African readership that had been expected to take place after the end of the apartheid regime in 1994 has not happened, and there is no significant publishing taking place in any African language. Conversation at the seminar naturally turned to why this should be the case, with the absence of a significant black readership in South Africa being a leitmotif of many of the events that followed. According to Wafawarowa, "tough questions have to be asked," and he attempted to answer some of them by suggesting that too many South African schools are failing to inculcate a culture of reading, due perhaps to poorly trained teachers. In addition, book distribution in South Africa is still concentrated in well-off and white majority areas, and the content of the books put out by the country's publishers may not be appealing to black readers or perceived by them as relevant. According to Fathima Dada of Pearson South Africa, one of the country's largest publishers, South Africa consists of "three worlds in one." There are the country's rural areas, where literacy rates are low and where there are high levels of poverty and deprivation, the developed areas, still largely white, and the country's emerging black middle class. It was the latter market that should be targeted, at least in the short term, she said, in order to grow the country's readers. Perhaps trade books could be originated in African languages, or African classics translated and published in English, though such strategies would require considerable editorial and research efforts and are unlikely to be economic for private companies to perform. Perhaps bookstores could be opened in the former township areas, though results thus far had been far from encouraging, with books still being perceived as a luxury product by many South Africans. Perhaps, as speakers at a later seminar on trade book publishing in South Africa suggested, there should be more efforts made to develop school libraries -- only eight percent of South African schools apparently have functioning libraries -- or perhaps lessons learned from successful South African publishing ventures, such as mass-circulation newspapers, could be carried over into book publishing. Whatever strategies are selected to meet the challenge, anyone attending the seminars not directly familiar with the South African situation is likely to have been struck by the apparent absence of a willingness on the part of the South African government either to support the country's publishing industry, which surely cannot be expected to promote reading in the country's nine African languages alone, or to promote reading by improving educational facilities, removing VAT on books, and developing libraries and distribution networks outside traditionally white majority areas. As speakers at the various seminars noted, the governments of other developing countries, such as India, have long intervened in the market to subsidise books as part of state cultural policy, and in many other countries, not least in Egypt, the state is itself a major publisher, making books available at low prices to the majority of the population, playing a significant role in distribution, supporting translation, and keeping classic works in print and circulation. It seems extraordinary that the South African government is apparently not doing anything similar and that it seems not to have a language policy designed to support South African writers writing in languages other than English and Afrikaans or to promote the use of African languages. HOWEVER, despite such surprises things were not all doom and gloom, and speakers gave often fascinating insights into the literary and intellectual landscape of today's South Africa. While there have been few efforts made to develop black South African writers, with other sub-Saharan African countries like Nigeria, Kenya or Zimbabwe offering greater levels of support to young and emerging authors, speakers said, the very high levels of mobile phone and Internet access in South Africa, reaching as much as 83 percent of the overall population, might suggest new forms of distribution, including e-books on mobile platforms. Book clubs of a Book-of-the-Month-Club type were also being set up in South Africa specifically targeting young black readers and often providing genre and other types of popular fiction. The success of the Anglophone Daily Sun newspaper, a tabloid- style daily, suggested that there were readers out there, if they could but be reached with relevant content. A further finding to emerge from the seminar series was the existence of a growing market for work published in Afrikaans, representing half of the trade book market in South Africa. A fifth of this is for religious books, and there are three large publishers specialising in religious books written in the language. There is also a thirst for fiction in Afrikaans by South African authors, participants explaining that members of the Afrikaans-speaking community, whether in South Africa or in the Diaspora, "want to read and to preserve their language." Overall, participants at seminars entitled "Why buy South African Content" and "South African Fiction Today" explained that the end of apartheid in the country had enabled areas of South African life that had previously gone unexplored to be opened up to literary treatment. According to South African crime novelist Deon Meyer, one beneficiary of the new spirit of openness to have emerged in the country was the writer of genre fiction, from crime to "chic lit" and romance, this going hand-in-hand with a new appetite for "fun and enjoyment." Crime and horror writing would have been unthinkable under apartheid, he said, since "the horror then was on people's faces." Under the pre-1994 regime, South African fiction had tended to be "dour and worthy," with writers feeling that they had to take a stand or write the kind of protest literature expected by international audiences. Today, things had changed to the extent that South African writers now felt a greater freedom to be "loud, witty and subversive," supplying a literature that could stand on its own two feet and was not written with half an eye on foreign audiences. Writing under apartheid, other speakers said, had meant that questions of subjectivity were almost crowded out by politics. There had been a feeling that writers were almost "not entitled to individual experience and that they had an obligation to address the moral crisis of South Africa." Today, on the other hand, writers felt a freedom to explore, to write about themselves, and to engage in "aesthetic play" that had not been possible earlier. Sometimes this new spirit could be misunderstood by foreign audiences, who still expected a certain kind of subject matter from South African writers. According to writer Nadia Davids, a young woman who would have been classified as "coloured" under apartheid, overseas audiences were often resistant to work from South Africa that did not reflect majority white or black experiences. "There is always a need to explain and frame material, which I find exhausting," she said. "It would be nice if work could be read just for the story." Similarly, fellow writer Henrietta Rose- Innes commented that "what strikes a chord at home in South Africa may not be what is wanted by the international market or what international audiences require from South African writing." This latter may not be what South African writers themselves want to do, or "what is relevant to us." At the moment, Rose-Innes said, there was a thirst among international readers for "South African disaster stories," of the type demanded by international audiences from other African countries, such as Zimbabwe. But such disaster stories are "an oversimplification" of the situation, she said. If there was an obligation on the South African writer, Davids said, it was to "narrate stories that have been overlooked and to fill in some terrible gaps in the national archive," rather than to write on certain well-worn themes. Doing the later, the participants said, in the expectation that more obviously political material would strike chords with foreign readers, could only result in "dead literature," since "any writer can only write what she can write." WANDERING OUT of the South African seminar series into the Book Fair proper, the largest stands were taken up by multinationals such as the Anglo-American publishers Harper Collins and Random House, the later promoting Tony Blair's memoirs, entitled The Journey and due to be published in September, for which the former British prime minister received what is rumoured to be a five million GBP advance. According to gossip doing the rounds at the Fair, Blair had been due to attend a publisher's party in London on the Monday night, but like many others he had been held up by the Icelandic volcano. Elsewhere, many foreign publishers had pooled their efforts, with France in particular putting on a sturdy show in a joint stand representing all the country's major publishers. The Abu Dhabi and Sharjah International Book Fairs had also arranged large stands, using these to promote Gulf-based publishers. Aside from the American University in Cairo Press, there seemed to be no Egyptian representation at the London Fair, with the Dar al-Shorouk stand forlornly deserted, perhaps another victim of the Icelandic volcano, and being used by visitors for in-Fair nibbles. Russia had bagged a prime location across from the English PEN literary café, used for interviews with visiting novelists, and, judging from the rows and rows of Russian books on display, the country has already started its campaign as next year's market focus. A whole area of the Fair had been designated a "digital zone" by organisers, perhaps in anticipation of what is expected to be the next major trend in publishing as audiences increasingly move away from paper supports and towards digital readers. A booklet had been produced giving details of the several dozen South African writers invited to the Book Fair, few of whom in the event were able to travel to Europe. One writer who was present, however, was André Brink, perhaps best known for his novel A Dry White Season, made into a 1989 film with Donald Sutherland and Marlon Brando. Brink published his memoir A Fork in the Road last year, and Random House was promoting a paperback edition alongside works by fellow South Africans Antjie Krog and Nobel Prize winner J.M. Coetzee. Some absent South African writers were able to join the Fair by Webcast from Cape Town, but Brink was there in person, and he used the opportunity to speak about the co-existence in his mind, and in South Africa, of English and Afrikaans and the movement between the two. Writing in Afrikaans, Brink said, meant writing in a language that had originally been seen as a kind of patois of the oppressed, an Africanisation of Dutch that mixed it with elements taken from Malay, Bantu and Khoisan languages, but that was later taken up and solidified as the badge of the apartheid regime. Yet, even under apartheid, Afrikaans had continued to develop as the language of individual experience, Brink said, and it remained today a majority language among South Africa's coloured population. Listening to Afrikaans and using it for literary purposes, he said, meant rediscovering it as a language of humanity, as well as originally as the speech of the dispossessed. "When apartheid was dismantled," Brink said, "it was no longer necessary to use Afrikaans to cry out against oppression, but it is so much a part of how I write that I would not consider not using it." Building on the interplay of English and Afrikaans in his work, Brink said, he sometimes wrote a book in English and then rewrote it in Afrikaans, or vice versa, discovering different possibilities by moving between the two versions. Brink's comments on the movement between and among the country's languages, and the different communities and histories they represent, seemed an appropriate way of thinking about the many possibilities offered by today's South Africa. It might seem a pity, therefore, that according to Brink the South African government is pushing Afrikaans aside in favour of English, while, if other participants at the Fair are to be believed, apparently doing little to promote the use of the country's nine other African languages.
