Shaun de Waal
CONTRARYto reports – including one in this paper last week – and information supplied by retrenched staff, Ravan Press is not closing its doors. Gerald de Villiers, executive chairman of Hodder &Stoughton Educational and Ravan, writes:”Yes, Ravan Press, in which Hodder has held a majority shareholding for several years, has recently been through a difficult period … To stabilise the situation, we were left with no choice but to embark on a process of rationalisation. The fact that Ravan is now back on course is proof enough that our decision to act was the correct one.”
Ravan co-founder Peter Randall – and its first director, until he was banned in 1977 -also wrote to the Mail &Guardian, contradicting the report of Ravan’s demise and taking issue with some historical points made by Tony Morphet in his “elegy”.
Ravan, he says, was not a “child of the Christian Institute”, but “an organic outgrowth of the Sprocas publishing programme” and Randall “declined foreign grants and donations during the fraught early years”. He also says that the decision to publish JMCoetzee’s Dusklands was not simply “a moment of inspiration”:”My sober judgment was that this unsolicited manuscript by an unknown author, which had been rejected everywhere else, was the work of a writer of genius.”
Randall writes that in his opinion Morphet’s emphasis on the time during which Mike Kirkwood headed Ravan “does rather trivialise Ravan’s role Before Kirkwood and After Kirkwood. Before 1977 Ravan published seminal works and identified several significant new writers. After Kirkwood left … it actively continued to contribute to South Africa’s cultural and political life, and its titles won more awards than any other publisher in Africa.”
Ravan recently published Jeremy Baskin’s book on labour in South Africa, Against the Current, as well as a reissue of the Steve Biko collection, I Write What ILike.
And, as Randall points out, “there is a list of forthcoming titles that includes familiar and distinguished names in South Africa’s literary world. Ravan will celebrate its 25th anniversary next September and a commemorative volume is being planned.
“So there’s still some life in the old bird yet!”