BOOKS: The latest from the literary world
Courageous anti-apartheid publisher Ravan is no more. TONYMORPHET pays tribute to those who first published JM Coetzee and others
RAVAN Press has finally closed its doors. Not even the name could be saved as it was swallowed by Hodder &Stoughton Educational. It’s no use mourning the loss – it was bound to go sooner or later. Like its kin among the NGOs, the legal resource centres, the independent unions, the new-left academics, the alternative press and the black consciousness movement, it was a child of a very special time.
Everyone has now grown up and left home. Some have risen high; others have fallen. In their different ways they did amazing things, but the times have changed the order of action and the intense, creative and dangerous openings of the 1970s and early 1980s have closed. Big capital, long-term planning and strict accounting have taken the place of hunch, energy and networking.
Ravan was a remarkable invention that changed the meaning of books for a generation of South Africans. It was a child of the Christian Institute; born in the moment of Spro-Cas, suckled on foreign money, and brought up to defy the proscriptions of apartheid. In its early days, it showed its ecclesiastical colours fairly prominently — in 1972 Rick Turner had to filter his argument for participatory democracy and socialism through the meshes of Christian conscience, not because he was a Christian but in order to show his respect for the team he was in.
But it wasn’t long before Ravan began to make some unexpected moves. In 1974, in a moment of inspiration, it published Dusklands, JM Coetzee’s first, astonishing, novel, and at a stroke entered publishing history forever.
In 1977, when Mike Kirkwood took over, Ravan came out of the cloister and began to mix it in the cultural and political market place. It gives one an odd quiver to remember that Walter Felgate played midwife to the transition from ecclesiastical to demotic. The picture remains murky to say the least, but rumour had it that he was running messages and money between Gatsha, the Exiles and the Big Bankrollers of the opposition. Ravan fitted into the picture somewhere.
Kirkwood brought some big ideas that he had thought out in Durban while editing Bolt – a quirky little literary mag which once sported a Paul Stopforth cover of Harry Oppenheimer as Count Dracula (Anglo promptly withdrew their subs). Bolt didn’t live long, but it seeded the ideas.
The first of them was that there was a surge of writing in the black townships that was not making it to the magazines, the bookshops or the street. The second was that the maverick academics, especially the Marxist historians, not only had great things to say about the country, but also made for better reading than most novels. The third was that there were a whole lot of intelligent people who could be writers if they were just shown how. Ravan was the place where he began to test these ideas out.
Each of them, in its way, was winner. Staffrider shook the world of literary magazines and introduced a whole generation of black people to the strange pleasures of seeing themselves in print. Kirkwood proclaimed that he would publish anything literate he got, and he stuck to it. The flood proved him right, but the row about falling standards was deafening.
The academic idea was right too, but it took longer to prove. Jeff Guy, Charles van Onselen, Jeff Peires, Peter Delius, Phil Bonner et al – one by one the London School of Oriental and African Studies doctorates made their way to the shelves – and they sold. It wasn’t only history – sociology, contemporary political analysis, cultural studies of one kind and another, along with poetry and novels. In 1983 Ravan published an unheard-of 5 000 hardback copies of Coetzee’s Life and Times of Michael K. The Booker Prize saved the day – they sold.
The third idea was perhaps the most daring. Unknown people were enticed, even wheedled into the business of starting to write. The most dramatic success was Marguerite Poland, whose first children’s story The Mantis and the Moon, the editor maintained, was the best thing Ravan had ever published.
Alongside her were writers like Miriam Tlali and Mtutezeli Matshoba, both of whom responded to the persuasions of the editor. It would probably amuse Studs Terkel to know that it was Working, his book of reportage, which stood behind both.
A different kind of initiative grew out of the belief that a tradition of black prose was anchored in Sol Plaatje, and the republication of Native Life in South Africa and Mhudi, together with the Brian Willan biography, was an act of obeisance.
This made the connections with key contemporary writers like Chabani Manganyi and Njabulo Ndebele. The tradition got a new turn from contact with Yashir Kemal’s Anatolian Tales, which nourished both the fiction of Fools and, later, the theory in The Rediscovery of the Ordinary. Kirkwood was pushing Kemal after reading Walter Benjamin’s essay The Storyteller.
In the mid-1980s the wave of quasi-religious enthusiasm for direct democracy broke on Ravan. It promptly installed a collective in the editorial seat, with the usual dismal results – a steady rise in backstabbing and a steep fall in output.
Rumours of fisticuffs began to circulate and the team started to break up as the financial base crumbled. Kirkwood left the country, and it was eventually left to Glenn Moss to weld the fragments into a stricter and more modest operation. While Ravan was on the way down, others were making their way up. Skotaville had already captured the black consciousness field and the Congress of South African Writers rose to embrace the Mass Democratic Movement; together they cleaned up the donor pool.
Ad Donker remained sniping from the side and the nightmare of tumbrils woke David Philip; Witswatersrand University Press began to take the academic material and even the mainstreamers like Heinemann and Longman realised that the market had moved.
It was really only a matter of time. Monica Seeber was the last editor left, with only the Faulknerian role of trying to protect the corpse from the vultures.
The dead Ravan has one last big contribution to make: to let some really good historian into the archives to tell the full life and times of the bird and the book. It might just make the best book of the whole lot.