T Manuel: Cape Town Book Fair

16 June 2006

Director of ceremonies,
Dear friends;

Let me welcome the Book Fair to Cape Town as an additional stimulus to
discussion and debate, but more importantly to the extension of literacy in our
country.

If it were true that a nation becomes what it reads, then a scan of the list
of bestsellers has me rather worried. The top sellers in South Africa are the
Platters Wine Guide; the Brett Kebble story; Branson’s “Screw It, Let’s Do It”
and the ubiquitous “Da Vinci Code.” What does this eclectic mix of titles
suggest about us at face value, perhaps, a nation in need of debauchery and
ready to unravel the time tested mysteries of the church? Some of these titles
feature uniformly across the English speaking capitals with the Da Vinci Code a
particular favourite. Further, the New York Times fiction list is headed by a
novel entitled “The Husband.” But we should leave those musings on titles to
future historians.

Indeed we can because books provide such an incredibly strong link between
nations and across generations. Books also guide what we understand of the
past. So we believe that amongst the great contributors to global civilisation
were the Romans, there are books and an entire Latin language to prove that.
Yet, there is the following account of Julius Caesar at Alexandria.

It is often said that the Romans were civilised but their most famous
general was responsible for the greatest acts of vandalism during antiquity.
Julius Caesar was attacking Alexandria in pursuit of his archrival Pompey when
he found himself about to be cut off by the Egyptian fleet. Realising that this
would leave him in a desperate predicament, he took decisive action and sent
fire ships into the harbour. His plan was a success and the enemy fleet was
quickly aflame. But the fire did not stop there and jumped onto the dockside
which was laden with flammable materials ready for export. Next it spread
inland and before anyone could stop it, the Great Library itself was blazing
brightly as 400 000 priceless scrolls were reduced to ashes. As for Caesar
himself, he did not think it important enough to mention in his memoirs.

There is no link between this account and the fact that the New York Times
best sellers advice section is headed by a book entitled “Cesar’s Way.” What we
recall of antiquity is what books allow us to recall. Differing with the
established views on these matters raises the temperature, as President Mbeki
recently discovered after his “Inaugural lecture of the Parliamentary
Millennium Project. He argued,

“What past and present information is available on Africa? Who gathers and
disseminates such information? Who interprets events and processes in Africa?
From what point of view are these interpretations made? Whose views dominate
the daily discourse in our country and the rest of the continent? In other
words, what is the world outlook of those who present news to us, those who
analyse events and those who interpret processes taking place on the continent?
Whose ideas drive our societies?”

In the discourse that followed that lecture it was clear that there were
some who in a different era would have been ready to burn Thabo Mbeki at the
stake. How could he be so impertinent? Now perhaps there would have been less
debate if Caesar had himself recorded the razing of the Royal Alexandria
Library, Africans do not know these things or if they do its impertinent for
Africans to raise such sensitive issues.

In his lecture President Mbeki highlights the fact that Africa is home to
some of the world’s greatest civilisations such as Egyptian, Nubia, Aksum,
Mapungubwe, Ghana, Mali and Great Zimbabwe. He notes,

“The Malian civilisation reached its pinnacle when Timbuktu became the
intellectual and trading hub between the 14th and 16th centuries.

Timbuktu was a confluence of ideas, languages and cultures. We are proud
that today we are in a partnership with the government of Mali to preserve and
restore the thousands of manuscripts of Timbuktu which tell a story of a great
civilisation and a centre of learning.

However, this period was also particularly a time of great expansion for
Islamic empire which by the eight century included much of North Africa, parts
of West Africa, the Iberian Peninsula, India and Indonesia. With Baghdad as its
intellectual capital this empire regarded information so highly that it offered
traders a book’s weight in gold for every book put on sale.”

Books, those threads that bind past, present and future are so exceedingly
important. It is no accident that we open this book fair on the 13th
anniversary of the Soweto Uprising. We celebrate the day now as Youth Day in
honour of the phenomenal sacrifices of young people. The spark for the uprising
was in education ostensibly about the compulsory teaching in Afrikaans. More
importantly it was a battle about the book. In the 1973/4 fiscal year, the
apartheid government spent R483 on the education of every white child as
against R28 on the education of every black child. The R28 bought no book! More
importantly the Bantu education system was premised on denial. In 1953 already,
the Minister of Native Affairs, Hendrik Verwoerd, explained to parliament,

“There is no place for (the Bantu) in the European community above the level
of certain forms of labour. For what reason it is of no avail for him to
receive a training which has as its aim the absorption in the European
community. What is the use of teaching Bantu child mathematics when it cannot
use it in practice?”

The cruelty of apartheid as evidenced both by Verwoerd’s statement and the
mowing down of young learners 30 years ago, today is that the thread that binds
past, present and future was severed. We are learning about just how difficult
it is to reconnect how, when education had wiped out successive generations of
mathematics learners and teachers do you suddenly reconnect? How do we
re-establish the great intellectual traditions obtained here in South Africa?
We have set ourselves the monumental task of developing our eleven official
languages this task will not succeed without many writers, publishers and
readers. Achieving this within the context of nation state also demands that we
can cross reference and cross-pollinate to prevent the skewed development of 11
different tribes. So we need books and we need readers.

Education remains the single largest category of spending on our budget. In
the 2006/07 fiscal year we have budgeted to spend R92,1 billion rising to
R110,3 billion in 2008/09. Over the three year period we have added some R565
million in the form of a conditional grant to provincial governments for the
further funding of community libraries.

Sadly, none of this is adequate unless together we can generate the appetite
for reading. The forces arraigned against such endeavour are many. We might
need to change our definitions. Apparently many students are engaged in the
battle to define what a book is “the book is also both meaning and the vehicle
by which it is conveyed” writes one, while another argues that “the book is a
practice a collection of social, economic and artistic activities not an
object.” We can deal with that discourse we need to adapt as our forebears
adapted from papyrus scrolls to paper and through various evolutions of
lithography.

Our collective responsibility is to increase the love of reading. I trust
that this book fair will make a huge contribution to that responsibility we all
share.

Thank you!

Issued by: Ministry of Finance
16 June 2006