We are all characters in history's next chapter

14 May 2017 - 02:00 By Jonathan Ball
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As he looks back on an illustrious career, publisher Jonathan Ball reflects on his times, the nature of language and history, and the need to persevere

It was in June 1976, such a watershed month in our history, that I decided to embark on my own Adventure in Publishing.

I knew that great change was afoot, there would be much to publish and as it was my intention to publish books on politics, current affairs and history, I formulated the editorial plan: "To publish books that enlighten and entertain, books of a liberal sanity that pander to neither right nor left nor clever contemporary fashions in thinking."

I must draw your attention to the small letter "l" in liberal by appropriating the words of Alan Paton: "By liberalism I don't mean the creed of any party or any century. I mean a generosity of spirit, a tolerance of others, an attempt to comprehend otherness, a commitment to the rule of law, a high ideal of the worth and dignity of humanity, a repugnance of authoritarianism and a love of freedom."

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Our constitution — now under such threat — adequately embodied these principles.

This has been a guiding principle of our publishing for 40 years and I hope it will be into the future.

"Evenings, mornings, afternoons, I have measured out my life", not in "coffee spoons" but in books published.

The thrill of sending new books out — your new books out — in proud and colourful livery remains undiminished for me.

Of course there have been highlights and anxious moments, the predations of the censor, raids by the old security police, bullying threats from cabinet ministers and court actions, even being summoned to appear before the speaker of parliament.

The life of a publisher is a life of reading and the more I read, the more I realise how little I know. What a small dent one makes in the great canon of the world's writers.

I have been asked umpteen times: "Have you read all these books?" Will Self provided me with an answer: "There are many ways of reading: we scan, we dip, we skip and we speed through texts we know to be intrinsically dull ... In contradistinction: we are lost, abandoned, absorbed — tossed from wave to wave of language as we relapse into the wordsea. Time, space, and all the workaday contingencies of identity — sex, age, class, heritage — are forgotten; the mind cleaves to the page."

Not beyond, but as a corollary of reading I have taken immense pleasure in the English language. It is largely the language in which the world communicates.

Dare one suggest that, acknowledging the injustices of colonialism, at least this one good emerged?

Even Eusebius McKaiser, when castigating colonialism, writes in English.

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Today, words need to be carefully chosen — would a more judicious choice of words have saved Helen Zille — an implacable foe of apartheid and I doubt a defender of colonialism? Hers was an error of judgment — like not publishing her memoir with us!

And on the tortured subject of colonialism, the history of the world is littered with the dead of colonial empires that have risen and fallen.

I have tried to think of a single country that was not, at some stage, conquered or colonised.

Wikipedia provides an A-Z of empires from the Achaemenid empire of Persia through all the European ones and others, including the Gupta empire in India, which lasted 230 years, to yes — the Zulu empire.

The creation of empires, almost without exception, equals conquest and colonisation. The pages of history are strewn with bodies ... the story of man's inhumanity to man ...

And don't forget Hitler, Mao, Pol Pot or Stalin and others too many to recount who, in addition, wreaked havoc on their own populations.

Humanity has ever stumbled into the future — three steps forward, two steps back (sometimes more). The most it can hope to learn from the past is not to repeat it, but it seemingly refuses to do so.

Instead we seem intent on mining the past for grievances to use to inflame and divide us in the present.

History is not a good CV for humanity.

We should not build the present and future on revenge. Churchill said: "If we open a quarrel between the past and the present, we shall find that we have lost the future."

South Africa is planning a new history syllabus. I hope that this will teach South Africa's troubled history — and the bloody history of the world — as never to be repeated and place an appropriate emphasis on our common humanity.

In closing, the last lines of one of the greatest books I've read — The Wealth and Poverty of Nations by David Landes: "The one lesson that emerges is the need to keep trying. No miracles. No perfection. No millennium. No apocalypse. We must cultivate a sceptical faith, avoid dogma, listen and watch well, try to clarify and define ends, the better to choose means."

Finally to all of you, in your endeavours in the printed word, a final word from Orwell: "In a time of universal deceit-telling, the truth is a revolutionary act." Thank you and good luck.

Ball recently retired after 40 years at the helm of Jonathan Ball Publishers. This is an edited, abbreviated version of a farewell speech to authors at the Inanda Club, Johannesburg

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