In the new South Africa it would seem that only what I term celebrity literature sells. This is, however, according to agents from local publishing houses - including those with an international profile.
This mostly relates only to black readership. Accordingly, these publishing houses do not touch any manuscript that is not about the trials and tribulations of some celebrity persona. These are categorised into political icons - past and present - showbiz personalities, religious gurus, sporting cliques and the rest. Like with the readership, this category focuses only on the African side of the equation.
Now let us take a brief walk down memory lane and try to determine where this trend of immortalising own celebrities on print emanated from. Previous black South African literature had to tread a careful path during the apartheid era as the discriminatory legislation censored any form of literature not compliant with the ideology of the times. Many a book penned by African authors never saw the light of the day. If published by some radical publishing house, it would soon be banned even before it hit the shelves of many a bookstore, with the author hounded out of existence. This ipso facto led to the death of publishable black literature.
Allowed to fill in this vacuum was literature written by the conqueror for the conquered. To compound matters there was no easy access by the black majority to any other form of credible literature as any other form was deemed by those in authority at the time as undesirable and inflammatory. This created a persistent dilemma where black people could not have access to good literature on one hand and could not create their own on the other. This inadvertently led to the development of a culture among black people where reading, like cricket, became a minority sport.
Today when pundits speak with contempt about lack of active book readership among black people, they conveniently forget that apartheid censorship laws dealt a fatal blow to that passion. To put it bluntly, during those years there was nothing for black readers except perhaps the daily newspapers.
Most African writers during the apartheid era of the likes of Es’kia Mphahlele, Lewis Nkosi, Bessie Head, Miriam Tlali, Bloke Modisane, Can Themba, Arthur Maimane and others diverted their writing skills into the newspaper industry. They initially plied their trade as journalists as it was the only environment that was most susceptible to budding black writers. It was also much safer in the confines of the press room than out there in the cold hostile world for a rookie black writer. Within the newspaper corridors they could even earn a decent living instead of undertaking to write books that were most likely to be frowned upon by the regime of the time when freedom of speech and expression was anathema.
Now, fast forward to the newly democratised South Africa where publishing houses are grappling with strategies and formulae to attract the black reader who is clearly a dominant majority in numbers but a small minority in readership statistics. Probably through readership research or some self-appointed guru on African reading habits, it was established that the way to go is Celebrity Literature. Fiction writing was declared a no-go area as could be seen today how hundreds of fiction manuscripts written by emerging black writers are rejected offhand and left to gather your proverbial dust by most publishing houses.
The net result is that since the dawn of this new democracy in South Africa, biographic literature became a fad and churned out with regular monotony. What is strange is that those politicians who missed both jail and exile have little written about them. The Celebrity Literature also injected life into the ghost writer industry since celebrities are not necessarily gifted scribes.
The honeymoon of exclusivity in political biographies, however, did not last for long. Soon floodgates opened for others outside the political circle, who believed that they too were celebrities whose status also deserved that holy grail of idolatry, which comes with their life experiences also being literarily documented. They too have now jumped on to the bandwagon as in recent months we have witnessed quite a proliferation of our local black showbiz personalities who have just discovered their literary value.
My dour prognosis about the whole debacle is that celebrity literature does not add any value to our South African literary development. Mere reading cannot be regarded as an end in itself. What is paramount should be the knowledge readers gain out of the exercise. Celebrity literature, especially of the showbiz kind, can easily be equated to trash that readers mostly read from some daily and weekend tabloids. There is hardly any literary value to be gained from that type of reading.
I regard the sidelining of fiction writing by most South African publishing houses as sadly unfortunate and shortsighted.
I further believe that publishing houses need to also practise corporate social responsibility toward the development of South African literary prowess and not merely be singularly governed by the profit motive.
* Maisela is a management consultant and published author.
** The views expressed here are not necessarily those of Independent Media.