The South African world of letters and scholarship is in desperate need of colour.
Black women and men are in short supply when it comes to imaginative writing and knowledge creation. Yet the publishing industry, we are told, is experiencing a revolution — a fiction boom to be specific. What exactly is the nature of this boom?
The black middle class that we hear so much about needs to start buying and reading what the few black writers are producing. After all, books enable a culture to imagine itself differently. And this place we all call home could certainly do with a few newer, gentler and more uplifting images.
Bad writers and lazy scholars are a sign of a corrupt society and a culture going nowhere. If the managerial, business and professional classes actually believe intellectual work is for those without SUVs, who is to call another ethnocentric if he asks honest questions about whether the black middle class is really a middle class or just a bunch of people with newly minted cash or access to credit?
But readers need writers, and black people publish too few novels. For a black population estimated last year to be more than 43million out of 47,3million, we need another 10 Gabeba Baderoons, 20 more Fred Khumalos and Lebo Mashiles and a hundred extra Mary Watsons, Lewis Nkosis and Zakes Mdas. Doubtless, they are part of a growing depth and maturity in local fiction.
But surely that maturing excludes Room 207 by Kgebetli Moele, published by Kwela Books last year. Surely we can do without opportunistic publishing and bad writing. This book stands out, as someone once said, as an example not of writing but of typing.
You do not have to be white or bourgeois to think this is puerile work. The book is full of hackneyed phrases. The characters are always ”poking the opposite sex”. Women are portrayed in the most disparaging way. Black men are nothing but oversexed misogynists out for another ”conquest”. Beer is always the ”god of Isando”. All Zulu men are violent. The narrator once too often says ”excuse the clichÃ