Edwina Spicer
Blacks don’t buy books. At least, that is the apparent sentiment of many Zimbabwean bookshops. And yet the Zimbabwe International Book Fair (ZIBF) attracted thousands of mostly black visitors, including hordes of children who packed the reading tents.
Harare’s big booksellers display a daunting range of coffee-table books, hard-covered and full-colour, on topics such as cake-decoration and herbaceous borders. They are presumably aimed at white commercial farmers’ wives.
Somewhere round the back, there may be a few local authors, if you can find them. Chenjerai Hove’s novel Bones, which won the 1989 Noma Award and has been translated into 10 languages worldwide, is, in the land of his birth sometimes to be found in the medical textbook section.
Angus Shaw, author of the brilliant Kandaya, says that while the country’s leading bookshop chain, Kingston’s, had a display of a glossy Princess Di biography, he was told that there was no room for his book as “we can only carry so many titles”.
Nevanji Madanhiri, winner of this year’s ZIBF Literary Award for Goatsmell, says his book has never been seen on the bookshop shelves in his home town, Gweru.
With very few exceptions (like once a year at the book fair), a wide range of books relevant to the African experience are hard to find. And yet the demand is there.
Paul Brickhill, owner of Grassroots Books, one of the few outlets where African books are prominently available, was responsible for setting up the Book Marketing Trust.
“From 1993 to 1995,” he says, “we did literature outreach, going to rural centres with a writer and a boot full of books for sale at discounted prices. Over the two years there were about 70 of these, sometimes attended by
1 000 people. The writers — people such as Charles Mungoshi and Chenjeral Hove — did readings of their works. It was a true celebration of literature, but we couldn’t keep up the supply of books. They sold out every time.”
Brickhill is speaking of poor communities. He believes that the “black people don’t buy books” myth is exploded when the two factors of accessibility and affordability are addressed.
“We’re too British in our insistence on high quality. We should perhaps rather follow the Indian example,” he says of the price problem.
At the book fair’s workshop on national book policy, Arvind Kumar of the Indian National Book Trust explained how India’s massive book market was achieved by fitting the product to the price. He claims that a novel can be retailed at 10 rupees (around R1).
Southern African publishers say the African market is different, that the book-buying public doesn’t want second-best. Annari van der Merwe of Cape Town’s Kwela Books, said: “Our people equate second- class education with inferior books. They’re tired of that whole system and want decent books printed on good paper.”
A former member of the Curriculum Development Unit in the early days of Zimbabwe’s independence agrees. “We developed a series of low-cost textbooks printed on newsprint and the teachers hated using them. Their dislike rubbed off on the children and they were a failure.”
George Varghese, chairman of the Zimbabwe Book Publishers Association, said: “Indians are entirely refreshing in their insubordination to Western values. If you are a low-income Indian you buy cheap books and as long as you can read the printed word, that’s good enough.”
Brickhill said he was about to embark on a new outreach book programme in Zimbabwe — a “book bus”. Starting in early 1997, it will be a mobile bookshop selling affordable books. A similar approach has worked in Kenya, with Lake Publishers sometimes distributing books by minibus taxi.
“Let’s test the market with adventure stories that are fun,” says Brickhill. “It is rubbish to say that the people don’t like to read.”
Two years ago, he says, Zimbabwean magazine Horizon launched a competition for readers to write on their favourite authors. “There were 700 entries, and what emerged was an unexpected and passionate love affair with each entrant’s chosen author.”