A voracious appetite for books led Solomon Solani Ngobeni to study African and English literature at Wits University, where he stumbled on the newly established publishing studies programme. Years later, he has founded a publishing house and was recently nominated as the South African finalist for the International Young Publisher of the Year Award.
‘For me, it’s an affirmation of the industrious work I’ve been doing in higher-education publishing in the past five years,” he tells me over the phone from Cape Town, the adopted city of a man who hails originally from Mamelodi.
In 2004 the British Council and London Book Fair launched the publishing award to celebrate young publishers with entrepreneurial and leadership qualities.
Finalists travel to London in April where they go on tours of the British publishing industry and take part in the London Book Fair. The winner nets a £7 500 prize for a project that builds a relationship with the United Kingdom publishing sector.
Ngobeni certainly fits the bill as an entrepreneur. He left local publishing giant Juta, where he managed publications related to further education and training, to found S&S Publishing in 2007.
Partnering with the 12-year-old school-book publishing house Nutrend enabled him to overcome funding obstacles in a relatively cash-intensive industry.
S&S is Nutrend’s academic imprint that concentrates on the social sciences and humanities, especially psychology and development studies texts. It will also publish further education and training books.
‘My passion, the reason S&S Publishing has to exist, is that I strongly believe in indigenous knowledge,” he explains. ‘It’s a tragedy that you have kids from the Cape Flats going to [the University of Cape Town] reading for a sociology degree and reading about gangsters from American textbooks. For me, it’s not on.”
A personal experience underlies these remarks. While studying literature, Ngobeni had to read Geoffrey Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales. He says that he related more closely to Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart than Chaucer’s 14th century work.
‘The kinds of books that we read and the paradigms that they embody shape who we become,” he reflects.
He says that more could be done to decolonialise university curricula and locally produced knowledge could help deconstruct European notions.
In his own research, Ngobeni has tackled notions of the family. He used the prevalence of single-headed households in South Africa to question the premise of Hollywood film Boyz N the Hood that mother-headed households are inherently dysfunctional.
Will focusing the work of South African academics on deconstruction not maintain the centrality of Western discourses?
‘We are not necessarily reactive but are also building new African knowledge, that should be our concern or preoccupation,” he responds, adding that the two approaches are not inherently opposed.
‘Publishing unconventional wisdom, shaping rough African diamonds,” the motto of S&S publishing, which features on its bright orange and green website, conveys Ngobeni’s desire to develop local knowledge production.
He describes himself as a ‘talent scout”, going to universities and looking for those ‘fine voices that have not been heard before”.
One way that Ngobeni encourages promising young academics is to team them up to edit a book with experienced, published academics, something he has done with several PhD candidates.
He hopes that initiatives of this type will help balance out the field of knowledge production dominated by white males, many of whom are over the age of 60.
‘S&S Publishing aims to break the monologue of white voices, that persist in knowledge production, by consciously and deliberately publishing black academics,” he says.
‘I’m not saying that we should not publish white authors, but we need to develop black voices,” he clarifies, continuing to explain that the more black voices emerge, the more black academics will be encouraged to do post-graduate degrees and research.
In general, he comments that black people occupy marginal positions in the knowledge economy and publishing industry, where they might be in marketing and sales divisions but are not often publishers.
Yet this is a critical role, he adds, explaining that publishers ‘read manuscripts and basically decide what society should read”.
One of the challenges to realising his vision for the publishing industry is the country’s small knowledge base, he says. In the United States, there are about 300 000 psychologists, while there are about 12 000 in South Africa and he notes that the majority of them are in private practice.
He observes that an outcome of this situation is that publishing houses compete to publish prominent authors, such as Patrick Bond.
Another challenge for the publishing industry is South Africa’s book buying and reading habits, or lack thereof. Part of the problem stems back to attitudes to reading at universities.
‘People are studying for degrees; they are not reading for knowledge,” he says, adding that in this context book-buying becomes a grudge purchase. Students would rather photocopy a text than shell out R320 to read only 20 pages of a 300-page tome.
‘University students have very little regard for intellectual property,” he laments.
As a former university student who delighted in the second-hand book market for pecuniary reasons, I question whether price concerns trumps respect for copyright law.
‘I don’t think books are expensive, I think it’s our value system,” he answers, ‘Instead of buying The God of Small Things, you buy an Ipod.”
He describes reading to his three-year-old son as a way of nurturing good reading habits.
‘The reason I took on literature was that I had a love for reading,” he says. He recalls attending an international writing conference at Wits at the age of 14, and hearing renowned authors such as Sipho Sepamla and Nadine Gordimer speak.
His latest read is The UN at 60, a publication from the Institute for Global Dialogue, his first place of work when he completed his master’s. This choice reflects his interest in international relations but in the past year he also enjoyed books by his contemporaries, such as the late Phaswane Mpe’s Welcome to Our Hillbrow.
‘As publishers, we have to ask how to capture this mass of the young black middle class and bring them into the realm of readers. They must see themselves reflected in the industry,” he says, adding that he looks forward to the day when black boy and girl children are both producers and consumers of knowledge.