This book was published to coincide with Wits Press’s centenary. It is a highly competent, well researched and produced book. The chapters flow and are organized around consistent and overlapping themes – as one might expect from one of the continent’s most prestigious university presses. The book is recommended to readers and researchers with interests in South African literature, the history of the book and publishing studies, and African anthropology and intellectual history.
Wits Press is South Africa’s first university press, established in 1922. It has published over 1,500 titles in 100 years. The peak period of productivity was the 1970s and 1980s when at least 770 titles appeared, more than half its total. The press was originally run through the library of the University of the Witwatersrand and is governed by the University’s Publications Committee. As the Introduction notes, the press was embedded in the contradictions of Johannesburg, and shaped by the racial and gender inequalities of the social order. Essentially funded by the mining industry and racialized black labour, it derived from a settler-colonial and apartheid context.
Its early works were mostly in linguistics, literature and anthropology; ‘Bantu’ or ‘Native’ studies. Scholars associated with the Press include Clement Doke, Winifred Hoernle and Isaac Schapera. The chapter by Elizabeth le Roux notes its politically cautious publishing programme and nervousness about publishing anything that might be banned, and that by Veronica Klipp (the Press’s current Publisher) its ‘determinedly apolitical stance’ (253). Despite the bulk of the list coming from the 1970s and 1980s, radical scholarship of the same period in South Africa was generally published outside the university, notably with Ravan Press, as le Roux has written about elsewhere.Footnote 1
This situation changed in the 1990s under the editorship of Eve Gray. In this period, the Press published plays – including by Zakes Mda and Athol Fugard – as well as some books for schools, notably Junction Avenue’s Sophiatown and John Kania’s Nothing But the Truth – the latter a best-selling title. Nowadays Wits Press publishes twenty to twenty-five titles per year, mostly in the humanities and social sciences.
Wits Press served a tiny white male author elite, publishing black writers ‘in infinitesimal numbers’ (two) until the late 1980s. The few published women were almost entirely white, though included key figures in South African anthropology, notably Winifred Hoernle, Eileen Krige, Hilda Kuper and Monica Wilson – a topic Andrew Bank has written on in depth.Footnote 2 This decisively shifted in the twenty-first century. Gabeda Baderon highlights how Wits Press’s commissioning editor, Roshan Cader, ‘who is also a black feminist Muslim woman like me’ (264), published her book Regarding Muslims.
Isabel Hofmeyr’s chapter titled ‘African Studies: a journal on a fault line’ discusses the history of Bantu Studies, now African Studies. This journal was started in 1921 and carried a Wits University Press imprint until 1996 when it was ‘taken over by Carfax, subsequently absorbed into Taylor & Francis’ (159–60). The journal reflected and contributed to the professionalization of anthropology and publishing in linguistics. The first editor was Winifred Hoernle, described as ‘exceptional’ – having been educated both in Cambridge under A. R. Radcliffe-Brown and at the Sorbonne under Emile Durkheim.
Women in the house
My favourite section of the book is titled ‘Women in the house’. Shireen Hassim, Elizabeth le Roux and Veronica Klipp document the importance of women at the Press. However, women’s experiences largely followed gendered assumptions of the time. From 1947 a full-time staff member (‘Mrs Logie’) was appointed, but women remained in junior positions:
Wits Press records and archival documents are filled with the work of women. These women – editors, secretaries, bookkeepers, and so on – have worked in the background, largely invisible and unrecognised. (le Roux, 216)
le Roux examines the case of Margaret Hutchings, an experienced librarian, who worked from 1950–69 and would become ‘an institution at Wits Press’ : ‘she resigned several times due to the unacceptably high workload and lack of support, but she was persuaded each time to remain’ (218). The Press relied heavily on the work of temporary assistants; women were preferred for such positions, which were ‘precarious, part-time and certainly underpaid’ (ibid.).
Publishing from the South
‘Publishing South’ is used by the editors to locate the contributions of Wits Press. Srila Roy, though, suggests that ‘Wits University can be described as the North in the South’ (278). Both these descriptors, with their evident limitations, offer some insight into the contradictory location and programme of the Press.
In many ways, South Africa is an exceptional case in the continent’s publishing, more allied to a European/industrial country model than publishing elsewhere in the continent. Reading the book and writing this review from the International African Institute (IAI) in London, I was struck by the similarities and convergences with Wits Press: the considerable academic innovations of both institutions; having authors who sometimes published in both Bantu/African Studies and the IAI’s journal Africa; the political caution of institutionally driven publishing alongside more recent radical work.
Equally, one notes the male academic dominance, whilst the publishing programmes of both institutions have been heavily reliant on women since the 1940s. Paul Richards has written about Barbara Pym who ran the publishing at the IAI from 1945–73, only subsequently becoming the well-known novelist she is today.Footnote 3
‘Publishing South’ does fit with the outputs of the Press that are overwhelmingly on South African themes. From its early days, Wits Press looked to Oxford University Press as its model, a stance the editors describe as ‘hubristic’, when in reality the press was a ‘modest, home-made’ affair (3). For the first forty years, the Press published nearly exclusively scholarly works by academics at Wits. There has been more recent diversification, licensed and translated editions. But even now, there are comparatively few books from the wider region: Mozambique, Lesotho, Namibia, Botswana.
The editors would likely tell you there is little ‘market’ or ‘readership’ for books on/from these countries, and in the case of Mozambique a (colonial) Ianguage barrier as well. In this sense Wits Press is akin to a (post)colonial publisher, facing precarity and subjection to the market in a world dominated by large commercial houses.
I am struck too by the fate of Wits Press’s pre-eminent journal, African Studies, absorbed into Taylor & Francis. Nowadays the publisher has only one journal, Wits Journal of Clinical Medicine, not a great deal of research publishing output for a leading university press. It should be acknowledged that UNISA Press in Pretoria publishes many more journals (around forty, some of which also with Taylor & Francis), and criticism of Wits Press is unintended. But this is symptomatic of the extraversion and fragmentation of academic journal publishing in the African continent.
