WeeklySA_AdminLEGEND: Skotaville founder singlehandedly built the publishing house into formidable force…
By Jo-Mangaliso Mdhlela
What can South Africa ask of Mothobi Mutloatse which he has not already accomplished in the publishing industry, the prolific, courageous, and proudly black-oriented publisher, whose publishing house goes by the name of Skotaville Publishers?
Inexorably, the years have, like a wheel, rolled on – 53 years of them – since the adventure began in 1972, driven by the love and passion to tell a story from a black perspective.
As the African proverb goes, until the lion tells its own story, the hunt will always glorify the hunter. For many centuries our stories were not only told by so-called experts from foreign nations, but were in the process distorted to meet the needs of the imperialist’s wishes, without even bothering to synthesise the context. The dead he has dug up from their graves, and now they speak to us from the grave as if they were biological alive, only that they speak from the pages of several authors’ work, with written text transmitted into spoken words – and this thanks to Mutloatse’s initiative as a publisher and a journalist of note.
Stones speak, says Sigmund Freud, and they have been speaking to us for centuries. Maybe we don’t listen because they are stones, but they have something to relate to the world, and its people.
If you are a Jesus Christ follower, and you know that the tomb, according to the holy scriptures, could not contain him, and that on the third day he walked out of it to be with his friends, and pronounced that he would be with them to the end of time, then you ought to be grateful that this is what Mutloatse, through his publishing house, is engaged in the business of resurrecting the dead through the pens of the living to tell their stories, thus keeping them alive.
There are many we no longer see in their biological form, yet we see them in the spirit of some kind – the spirit of the words that have been bestowed on us as an everlasting legacy, never to have their words expunged from the face of the earth – the words that inspire us; entertain us; remind us that we, too, must do good, so that we too may have our legacy kept alive, even if biological we are dead.
Think of Casey Motsisi, one of the country’s outstanding journalist and writer. He would have been 93, if he were still alive today. Would we even care about his legacy, if he were still alive?
Today, many years after his death, his light-hearted and humorous writings, and their reflections on the life of poverty and squalor, cause us to think more deeply about black people and how they endure oppression, and the negative impact it has had on the black nation. Motsisi’s words reflected on shebeen culture. We know they are simply empty words of entertainment. They have deep-seated socioeconomic implications.
They are words that speak volumes about the deeper socioeconomic factors reflecting social disparities as experienced by black people in a political context that discriminate against them.
Motsisi himself, as an academic, a poet and journalist, was hurting, yet in a nuanced and disguised ways, unconsciously sought to help the academia to find academic tools to understand the phenomenon of oppression pitted against black people.
Life in the shebeens was for some a means by which to escape the trauma of injustice pervading South African blacks. To be oppressed by others in the land of your forebears has a debilitating effect, and causes revulsion and pent-up anger and a sense of hopelessness. Today, Motsisi’s legacy is larger-than-life. He speak to us in the afterlife as if he were among us – and brings into our rooms, our libraries, our studies, a wealth of information of what life in the townships during the raw apartheid years, coupled with injustice, looked like, and what kind of yoke black people bore as they sought to escape oppression and pangs of poverty.
Casey and Company, for instance, is a compilation of scintillating, yet painful stories depicting the hard and unbearable realities of communities living under condition of abject poverty.
In one sense, the writing sought to take a mickey out of the foolishness of the apartheid system designed to oppress others as if to do so had no implication on their well-being.
On the other hand, the writings served as an eye-opener that apartheid was meant to dehumanise the African people, strip them of their dignity.
Also, the squalor was a deliberate way to inflict a social pain and to degrade and dehumanise them.
The depiction by Motsisi of township life, of violence and stabbings and all, was a small way in which the writer, for posterity’s sake, sought to say all is not well in apartheid South Africa.
Think of Can Themba, another doyen of black excellence in journalism and in the academia. Long dead, even before Motsisi who died in 1977, yet Themba lives, and his life will never be diminished by biological death – there is life beyond the grave.
The Suit, that beautifully woven story, penned by the brilliance of Themba, and theatrical adapted by Mutloatse, is a reflection of the versatility of the Skotaville CEO and editor-in-chief of Skotaville Publisher. The characters of Philemon and Matilda, in their hilarity, will never be forgotten, and thanks to the creative mind of Mutloatse.
Recently Mutloatse received accolades, and a Lifetime Achievement Award from the Nick Perren Foundation and the Publishers Association of South Africa.
Mutloatse this week announced that his Skotaville Publishers will collaborate with Nedbank, to launch Prof Eddy Maloka’s book, The Case for a Second Republic. The launch which took place at the bank’s offices in Rivonia, Johannesburg, on February 14. To his credit, among the books he has published recently include, among others, ANC Today Letters and Thoughts of President Thabo Mbeki Volume 1, Ronnie Mamoepa: Like the Dean -Tributes; Leadership for Transformation since the Dawn of South Africa’s Democracy – An Insider’s View, Professor Malegapuru Makgoba; State Capture Part1:3 Volumes; The Legacy of Robert Mangaliso Sobukwe: One Race, Luvuyo Mthimkhulu Dondolo.
• Mutloatse also announced that in the making is the biography to be launched in November to reflect on the life and times of Fr Smangaliso Mkhatshwa, a catholic priest and former deputy education minister in the first cabinet of former president Nelson Mandela. The biographer, the Rev Jo-Man- galiso Mdhlela,is a journalist and editor and theologian who holds an MA degree in theology and pastoral studies from the University of Leeds, England
