New currents: Publisher rocks the boat

Jacana’s new imprint — Rock the Boat — is based on a crowdfunding model in which authors and publishers share responsibility for the publication of  South African memoir and biography.  

Publishers across the world are constrained by the soaring costs of paper, together with a constricted market, which makes it increasingly difficult for them to accept manuscripts.

Booksellers, in the meantime, are focusing more on bestsellers and catering for books with a predictable market. Rock the Boat is a creative response to the challenge.

With the crowdfunding model, the book will be offered to the public using the author’s and the publisher’s networks. Supporters can decide how much to offer, as with any crowdfunding. Benefits will be offered to contributors in the form of merchandise, artwork or even music-related material.

The first book to be published under the new imprint will be Signal to Noise, a memoir and a history of the recording studio Shifty Records, by Warrick Sony. 

South African writer, journalist, artist and onetime performer Matthew Krouse’s memoir Dark Blue, which will include some of the artwork he produced as a military conscript, is second in line.

“We don’t have any coffee-table books on the cards at the moment,” Jacana Media’s Maggie Davey said, “but Matthew’s book, Dark Blue, for instance, includes a lot of images along with his text. And we’re looking at innovative ways of presenting the artwork.”

Both Sony and Krouse grew up under apartheid and for both compulsory military service marked a turning point in their understanding of their trajectory in the South African arts, music and culture sectors. In their respective contexts, both railed against the status quo and blazed new trails.

Composer, producer, musician and sound designer Sony, who grew up in KwaZulu-Natal, has said his political education was through music. 

A Beatles fan who had a particular interest in George Harrison during his youth, Sony learned to play the tabla at a Surat school where he was exposed to the Indian Hindu community. 

When he was called up for military service in 1972, he reported for duty as a Hindu pacifist and, in a desperate attempt to fail the medical assessment, stopped eating for three weeks. His plan failed. He played the drums and the B-flat horn in the army band. 

On completing his service, Sony changed his name from Swinney to Sony, so the army wouldn’t be able to easily track him down.

“I often climbed the reservoir, as much to escape my younger siblings as to gaze out towards the east over the suburbs of Durban, to the distant tower of Howard College and the strip of Indian Ocean behind it,” Sony writes in Signal to Noise.

“Years later, I would take my Bellini guitar up the grassy mound and practise chord changes. The Bellini factory, located in Pinetown, may well have been visible through the hills. They built their instruments from a sturdy plywood laminate with the green inner label proclaiming the legend, ‘Guaranteed not to split’, with the Afrikaans, ‘Gewaarborg om nie te bars nie’. 

“It was an inexpensive instrument and popular with Zulu musicians who I often saw walking around Westville playing and singing what became known as Maskanda music, the word deriving from musikante, the Afrikaans word for musicians.”

When Lloyd Ross and Ivan Kadey founded Shifty Records in 1982-83, black and white South African youths were listening to each other’s music and defiantly playing music together. 

Recording this music in an era of apartheid repression involved shifting from place and shifting ideas about South African music. The name Shifty Records seemed to fit.

In 1982, Sony formed Kalahari Surfers, a band consisting of a fictional collective of individuals whose names changed to avoid persecution by the apartheid authorities. 

Its first release was a 60-minute music cassette packaged in a silver spray-painted box titled Gross National Product.

When Kadey left to seek his fortune in the US, Sony bought himself into Shifty as a partner. At the time, Kalahari Surfers was a prolific addition to the Shifty catalogue.  

Shifty made its mark as a vehicle for music that was politically radical and scathing in its renunciation of racial discrimination. 

In the mid-1990s, it began producing pan-African music under the Shifty umbrella, importing records by many then unknown African artists.

Growing up in Johannesburg in the 1970s, Krouse described an era in which neighbours would report that black and white people were mingling at an exhibition opening at the Goodman Gallery. When the police raided, black guests would dress up as waiters and walk around with trays serving champagne and snacks.

Krouse’s first exposure to the South African Defence Force in around 1984 was at a screening process on an open field in which “homosexuals, drug addicts, under-achievers and assorted misfits” were relegated to a so-called “queer platoon”, in what seemed to Krouse almost like an “Auschwitz selection”.

Although his father had managed to convince the army he should be given a non-combat, secretarial position, for a while Krouse was assigned to the most demeaning jobs, primarily cleaning toilets. A breakthrough came when he was transferred to the defence force’s media centre, where war photography was processed.

“I was in the fortunate position of being shown hundreds of pictures of wounded soldiers, in operating theatres and in the field,” writes Krouse. 

“Once, I became alarmed when a series of photographs arrived on my desk of an unusual operation that described, to me, the horror of the war in its extremes. 

“They were photographs of a young soldier, unconscious on an operating table. He had suffered an accident while jumping off an armoured vehicle. He had attempted to throw his rifle to a friend before alighting, but his friend had miscalculated and the rifle fell to the ground. The butt bounced on the ground and a shot went off. As the boy jumped off the vehicle he connected with the barrel of his own gun, and his anus was blown out. 

“The photographs were of the unconscious naked youth, lying on his back with his face covered, legs spread in the air, as a nurse held his scrotum aside for the benefit of the army photographer. For obvious reasons I stole these slides, and years later, in an anti-conscription play under the auspices of the ECC [End Conscription Campaign], I projected the slide of this unfortunate victim, much to the ire of the police.

“The opportunities for performance, in the mid-1980s when I graduated from forced conscription, were much enhanced by the existence of a venue in the midst of the city called The Black Sun. It was here that I and my partner Robert Colman staged our play about the life of Hendrik Verwoerd called Famous Dead Man. 

“It was a successful satire that told the story of Verwoerd, the architect of apartheid, in cabaret form. It was a scathing attack on the assassinated leader, written and performed by two angry youths who were hardly prepared for the scandal it inspired.”

The play was so successful the theatrical team was invited to perform at Durban University. Eye-catching posters advertising the play used the slogan Sex, Jokes, Filth and Verwoerd. This was in 1986 — at the height of anti-apartheid repression. 

On their return to Johannesburg, the manager of The Black Sun, where the cabaret was due to be performed again, was served a banning order from the state censors. Newspaper headlines read: “Minister gets cabaret show banned”.

Krouse and Coleman wasted no time writing and performing another satirical sketch for a performance in the bar of the suburban Oxford Hotel, under the auspices of the ECC, titled Noise and Smoke. 

Once again, the performance was structured around the slides of the wounded conscript that Krouse had stolen during his stint in the army.

Apartheid police raided the theatre, blocking off all entrances and exits, claiming they were acting under the State of Emergency. As he was ushered out of the theatre by policemen, Krouse took the slides of the conscript out of their holder, put them in his mouth and swallowed them.

There is no fixed date for publication of the books. 

“I don’t know yet when we’ll publish Warrick’s book; that will depend on the level of support we get when we go live with the crowdfunding,” Davey said.