Seeber

Southern African Book Development Education Trust
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THE RELEVANCE OF NATIONAL ORGANISATIONS IN SOUTH AFRICA

Monica Seeber

Paper presented under the title of "The role of industry organisations in African publishing" at the International Conference on the Book, Oxford Brookes University, September 2005

In this session we have been discussing African publishing from quite a novel angle – the industry organisations that provide the bedrock, that draw the links in the book value chain together in the advancement of their interests. Henry Chakava has taken the broadest view, the pan-African organisation APNET, and Ruth Makotsi has focused on a regional grouping. I shall zoom in on national book sector organisations, using as a case study the only African country about which I am properly qualified to talk.

In preparing this presentation I was conscious that in many respects South Africa is untypically African. Perhaps it is the African country that approximates most closely the western model of publishing – although what we heard yesterday about the way in which books are promoted and sold in the UK persuades me that the differences may be more significant than the similarities.

Nor is South Africa the average African country, having a relatively large, diverse and sophisticated publishing sector in which, untypically, trade books make up a good 30% to 40% of publishing output. This is not the characteristic African scenario of schoolbooks to the virtual exclusion of all else. Moreover, South Africa has a good transport system, so getting the books out there, physically, is easy. Admittedly, bookshops are, by European standards, few and far between, even in urban areas but especially in rural areas and the townships. Admittedly, there is no culture of reading. It has been estimated that less than 5% of South Africans buy books to read them for purposes other than passing examinations.

South Africans are quite fond of referring to themselves as unique, and in a sense they are right because the fallout from apartheid still contaminates most endeavours, producing a fragmented society with an inherent resistance to being organised into cross-cultural groupings. It’s perhaps surprising, therefore, that the country has a fair number of publishing sector organisations.

The Publishers Association of South Africa (PASA) grew out of the Independent Publishers Association of South Africa (IPASA) which was set up in 1989 to fight apartheid censorship and promote freedom of expression. Among IPASA’s priorities was skills development to empower the few black South Africans working at that time in the industry, all of whom held relatively junior posts. IPASA mounted the very first training courses with funds from the ODA, as DFID was then called. It was our training mission and our determination to alter the demographic profile of the industry which gained us a place in APNET from the start. Fifteen years later, however, and despite the much-vaunted rainbow nation and numerous redress programmes and employment equity, publishing in South Africa remains largely in white hands. Of 123 publisher members of PASA, a mere 21 are headed by a black person at managing director or chief executive officer level. The next question to be asked is whether this skewed demographic profile is meaningful, or significant, in terms of the country’s publishing output. Mere common sense dictates that it has to be, and yet one would take issue with those who contend that black authors in South Africa find it difficult to get into print.

A young black publisher, Solani Ngobeni, writing about race and knowledge production in South Africa, says that knowledge production is an essential component of nation building. Through knowledge production opinions are created, stereotypes are asserted or challenged and influence is exerted. He asks the question whether South African publishers are committed to black knowledge production, and this in turn leads him to a further question: who owns and runs South African publishing houses? He concludes that, at the executive level, black people are mostly found only in language departments, producing African language books, or heading up sales teams to government education departments.

A key question in terms of the current discussion is what role, if any, industry organisations have played in more recent times in promoting demographic change. Moreover, does the desired opening up of the publishing profession to black South Africans signify the advancement of African scholarship and cultural development?

Skills development certainly has to be part of the answer. Before IPASA did something about it there was no pre-service publishing training, and in-service training, taking place in-house, tended to be for editorial staff with English or Afrikaans as their first language. When PASA was established and IPASA subsumed within it, the training void was tackled by the Publishing Training Project, a small NGO which offered short courses across a broad range of subjects. Today two universities, the University of the Witwatersrand and the University of Pretoria, offer postgraduate Publishing Studies courses. There are as yet no statistics regarding the demographics of training, but the Media, Advertising, Publishing, Printing and Packaging Sector Education Training Authority (MAPPP SETA) is in the process of briefing a research institution, the Human Sciences Research Council, to conduct a skills audit of the industry. The results will be available next year.

It is already evident, however, that white students are still in the majority. Some of the reasons black students tend not to be attracted to the publishing profession are that there is little awareness of book publishing as a career at school level (this of course applies across the board), and no bursaries available for students who want to study it at university, which is a crucial factor when the majority cannot easily afford university education. There is also the language barrier when English is not black students’ first language.

Is the Publishers Association of South Africa (PASA) doing anything about this? This year it is running a very promising internship programme, financed partly by the MAPPP SETA, and 28 of the 30 interns are black. It is hoped that this programme will be expanded next year to include the upskilling of black employees already in the industry. PASA’s 2002 snapshot employment profile of the industry showed that Solani Ngobeni’s assessment is fundamentally sound but that the industry itself is aware of the need for change and is currently driving a black economic empowerment Code of Conduct campaign. Dr Francis Galloway, who runs the Publishing Studies courses at the University of Pretoria says that she receives at least two phone calls a week from publishers looking for promising black students.

Knowledge production rests on the twin pillars of writing and publishing but, again, black writers, especially of non-fiction, are relatively few. Yes, the ‘ownership of the machinery of knowledge production and dissemination’ (as Solani Ngobeni calls it) has to be taken into cognisance, but he also asks what can be done to unearth the voice of the black intellectual. Part of the answer lies in the enabling environment in the institutions of higher learning, and the availability of research grants but, noting that even when black scholars work within previously white institutions with a history of vibrant research outputs they still do not engage prolifically in knowledge production, he concludes that this is because they lack experience of actually being published.

In March 2004 the Academic and Non-Fiction Authors’ Association of South Africa (ANFASA), was launched. Its objectives include promoting the writing and publication, in South Africa, of high-quality academic and non-fiction works, and offering advice and assistance to authors – and especially encouraging the personal development of aspiring authors. ANFASA intends not to confine its activities to the academic institutions in the urban centres. It actively seeks to engage authors in rural areas who may have felt marginalised or whose lack of experience is holding them back.

1999 saw the establishment of the Print Industries Cluster Council (PICC), an industry-led non-profit organisation partly funded by the Department of Arts and Culture and with representation from the Paper Manufacturers’ Association of South Africa (PAMSA), the Printing Industries Federation of South Africa (PIFSA), the Publishers’ Association of South Africa (PASA) and the South African Booksellers’ Association (SABA). The PICC therefore represents the whole book value chain and works in partnership with government towards developing the book industries in South Africa – in other words a Public Private Partnership.

According to the organisation’s Director, Elitha van der Sandt, the PICC has been centrally involved in the formulation of a book policy ‘negotiating a common place between the public and private sectors with commitment from both to benefit the growth and development of the publishing sector, both economically and culturally’. She stresses the importance of implementing parallel strategies across the book value chain to achieve sustainable growth. She feels that if the South African sector organisations do not persuade the government to give book development the attention it deserves it will be very difficult to grow indigenous publishing in the face of interest in the market from publishers abroad, notably from India and China.

If there is anyone in the audience who knows my work they will also know that sooner or later I will turn the debate around to the topic of rights, but I believe it is perfectly legitimate to do so because it is in this field – the promotion and defence of publishers’ and authors’ rights – that industry organisations are able to play one of their most significant roles. PASA is on record as saying that intellectual property lies at the heart of the publishing industry and that publishers are creators, acquirers, custodians and managers of intellectual property rights, with a responsibility to exploit such rights to the best advantage of themselves, authors and users and in the interests of cultural advancement and the flow of knowledge and information. In 2003, PASA commissioned a major report on the management of intellectual property rights, a report funded by the PICC and backed by the Department of Arts and Culture. Among the report’s recommendations were amendments to South Africa’s copyright legislation aimed at strengthening enforcement measures and copyright awareness campaigns in which the government would be a supportive partner.

Despite PASA’s active Copyright Committee South African publishers tend not to be knowledgeable about rights issues. Authors are even less so. ANFASA rates conscientisation, the creation of copyright awareness among its members, as one of its highest priorities. Copyright infringement in the form of photocopied books and journals is very common in South Africa’s higher education institutions, and as has famously been said “no-one has sympathy for a publisher” but the voices of authors calling for fair compensation when their works are copied instead of bought fall on more sympathetic ears.

South Africa is one of the few countries on the continent to have an effective Reproduction Rights Organisation (RRO), the Dramatic, Artistic and Literary Rights Organisation (DALRO). DALRO is the only RRO in Africa which is both collecting from users and distributing to rights’ owners, although in Anglophone Africa there are fledgling RROs in Nigeria, Kenya and Zimbabwe, and Malawi has a multi-purpose collecting society.

In South Africa it is particularly opportune for authors and publishers to organise around the issue of rights, and present a common front in the face of an onslaught from the ‘access to information’ brigade which is vociferous in its demands for relaxation of copyright legislation to enable more copies to be made in educational institutions on the grounds that economically disadvantaged students cannot afford to buy textbooks.

I am not, here, referring to the open access movement or, rather, merely the open access movement. It has become increasingly politically correct to claim that ‘information wants to be free’, especially in developing countries where the majority is poor. The politically correct lobby is seeking for creators to make major concessions to consumers or, rather, for the state to make them on behalf of creators. Running alongside this rhetoric is the outdated misperception that African publishing is still colonised by the multinationals and that there is no indigenous publishing to speak of and to protect.

Perhaps twenty years ago, when the few publishers on African soil were subsidiaries of western multinationals and when the vast majority of books were imported, there might have been moral – and economic – justification for this, but when indigenous publishers, struggling with small markets and the lack of a reading culture, find their profits substantially eroded by the cult of the copy, cultural growth and knowledge production are the victims. In fighting back the individual voice is not strong enough, which is where the industry organisations I have mentioned come in.

I haven’t really reached any conclusions about the success, or otherwise, of South Africa’s publishing sector organisations in transformation or in authors’ and publishers’ rights but I hope to have given you some idea of the issues they are tackling.