The beginning of the end of apartheid came very suddenly so was a turbulent period with emotions running very high, veering from extreme euphoria at the prospect of a free and democratic South Africa, to an overwhelming sense of fear that this dramatic change might prove illusory. There are memories of the period that remain very vivid, in spite of the time that has elapsed since then, and these remain relevant, not least in understanding the turbulent responses to the introduction of a new copyright regime.
The key memory for those of us living in South Africa at the time is of the day of the turn-around – the day that the traffic reached a total standstill at one of the busiest time of day around Wits University campus near the city centre, where I worked as the university press publisher. Suddenly all the surrounding streets of Wits University, near the centre of Johannesburg, were jammed with stationary vehicles. What had caused this huge traffic jam was the then State President’s totally unexpected radio announcement, at the opening of parliament in February 1990, broadcasting as we watched, announcing that the ANC and other opposition political movements had been unbanned and that the governing National Party was to step down. The Apartheid laws enforcing racial separation in the country were to be removed – all of these signalling the effective end of the apartheid regime and its pernicious laws of racial separation.
As the speech continued, traffic stopped, hooters blared, car radios were turned up loud, as students and staff, local businesses and passers-by poured into the streets, where strangers of all races were hugging each other and dancing together in the middle of the road, on the seats of sports cars and on car roofs. Eventually an impromptu march started up and hundreds of us marched in celebratory mode to the police station down the hill, where instead of tear-gassing us – the usual outcome of such a march – the police came out and joined the celebration, more or less cheering us on.
But also, strong memories still persist, following on from this announcement, of a continuous series of mass meetings and workshops about the future of the universities and, in our field of interest, as university publishers, about the future of the creative industries. Most of all I remember, from the outset of these talks, the vehement expressions of rage and pain from black members of the universities and the creative industries. It was here that we encountered the fierce, incandescent, and painful anger of the people who had suffered the brunt of apartheid. This was especially true of the creative industries, where there were vehement and emotional speeches from the writers and artists, film actors and producers – and, most particularly, musicians – who had been so badly marginalised and impoverished by the apartheid regime; cheated most painfully of their biggest personal and national asset, their right to earn a living from their creativity. And now, at last, they were able to speak out.
This announcement of a new beginning triggered a long series of mass meetings, workshops and discussion forums on the future of the cultural industries, and what our cultural heritage would be in the face of a new era. Some of these were convened by the universities; other meetings were held in government departments. An interesting feature of these meetings was the incongruous presence of white men with very short haircuts, sitting very upright in groups of two or three, in pale grey suits, standing out from the informally dressed university and creative industry participants. These were the South African Security Branch police, still monitoring us for potential subversion. Their ears must have burned as they listened to the anger of the oppressed as it mas eloquently expressed in these meetings.
From the first meeting and throughout the process that followed, there was a continually growing understanding of the high level of emotion that arose from stories of academics denied their careers in South Africa and from black creative artists – musicians; writers; play-writers and actors; film-makers; creative artists and photographers, authors and illustrators. This was, in equal measure, inspiring and painful; a battering experience, as incandescent rage was expressed with passionate intensity from the first mass meetings at the start of the process of transformation and then encountered again and again as we discussed the details of how the cultural industries were to be transformed.
In the case of publishing sector, as in many other sectors, particularly music and film, one of the first issues to come up was the question of the payment of creative artists through royalty payments, as it progressively became clear how comprehensively the different creative sectors had so often denied a living to their artists. Rather than being offered royalties, under apartheid, Black creators were all too often given a once-off payment – a widespread practice across the whole creative sector. These payments were often set at a derisory level for contributions made by black authors and artists, as compared with their white equivalents.
It is this that surely prompted the controversial introduction into the draft Copyright Bill of 2018, of provision for and mandating of royalty payments to creative artists – lest we forget. Placed in this context, the requirement set out in the new SA Copyright Bill – making the consideration of royalty payments compulsory for publishers and other rights holders in the creative industries – does not seem so far-fetched.
Back then, the message was the same across industries, but strongest from those in the film and media industries, from musicians, singers, actors, and scriptwriters. They complained that they had all too often faced derisory levels of payment from recording companies and film-makers, an insult to the creative skills that they had provided and the products that had resulted. In particular, SAMRO[1], the music, film and theatre licensing body, came in for searing criticism, as did the bigger record and film production companies. However, publishing companies and the literary collecting society, DALRO, were not spared, either, as the creative artists attempted to recover their self-respect.
The South African publishing industry – with the exception of a handful of smaller radical publishers like Ravan Press, Skotaville, Taurus, Ad Donker and David Philip – at that time published comparatively little Black writing of quality, at every level. Publishing for Black readers was largely educational, in the form of school textbooks, was religious, with church organisations taking the lead in African language publications, or was popular, at the level of thin books published on cheap paper, providing popular thrillers or romantic stories
Alongside these were the not-quite publishers, but nevertheless effective disseminators of alternative radical narratives – the university-based research units, such as the History Workshop and the Centre for African Studies at Wits University, who published online reports and books, often photocopied to be used as alternative teaching materials in humanities departments and disseminated informally through like-minded networks. Of course, school textbooks were the exception, as this is a large and profitable sector (although the authors were overwhelmingly white). The exceptions to the white profile of the sector were the missionary presses, which had long dominated publishing in local African languages.
However, a continuing problem with the publishing industry, especially where profitable schools educational markets are concerned, remains, to this day, the level of foreign ownership in the companies that dominate the educational markets. In fact, educational publishing remains a largely untransformed business in terms of ownership, still predominantly White, and when it comes to English language publishing, dominated by British publishers and their local, South African branches or partnerships with local publishers. There are also some big Afrikaans companies, formerly connected to the apartheid government, but with diversified interests in the post-apartheid period – Naspers, for example now has very big holdings in cell phones in China[2].
Wits University, where I was working at this time, was regarded as a radical university; however, because of apartheid legislation, it had very few black students and has had to consciously and rapidly grow the levels of black students and staff. Scholarly publishing had to be rebuilt from the ground up, building more radical and multiracial publishing lists.
To go back to the transition period: the rage and pain of individual musicians and writers who attended meetings in the wake of De Klerk’s announcement was overwhelming, their comments and narratives searing, the product of decades of oppression, and resentment of the long-drawn-out humiliation inherent in the situation of legislated racial segregation. This was evident in meeting after meeting, as the victims of apartheid expressed themselves eloquently and vehemently, although they were amazingly free of personal antagonism against their white colleagues.
There had been successes, admittedly, some[3] of them spectacular, and there was acknowledgement of those who had worked honestly and respectfully with Black artists musicians and writers, but they were outweighed by the level of humiliation and anger at a ludicrously unbalanced situation, given the demographics of the country. The symbolic narrative that dominated this discourse was that of Solomon Linde, the composer of Mbube – the Lion that Sleeps Tonight – the song appropriated and vulgarised by Disney in the US, to become the signature tune of the film The Lion King, a massive success that paid not a cent to the South African composers and singers of the original version of its theme song[4].
I first encountered this bitterly angry discourse at consultative meetings between the cultural industries and the university sector, held at Wits University in the early 1990s, then at a long series of policy-making discussions in a variety of venues, convened by government and by the university sector, that brought together among others, members of the relevant government departments, cultural bodies, creative artists, publishers and academics meeting in smaller groups to discuss questions of policy reform. As the talks about the future of the cultural industries continued, the eloquently expressed pain and searing anger remained palpable – not something that was going to change very fast.
Sitting in a meeting room in a government ministry, I felt at times as if the back of my neck was on fire, as I listened to comments and histories from black creatives, expressed with eloquence, biting humour, a capacity for ridicule, but revealing – overall – considerable, deep pain, in spite of a capacity for wry and bitter humour.
This anger was present also in the negotiations for the new, post-apartheid status of the publishers’ association and the collecting societies. I was elected Chair of the Copyright Committee in the first post-apartheid elections in the Publishers’ Association and was immediately challenged by the problem posed by the existing copyright collection society, DALRO, a privately-owned company, apparently National Party aligned, with limited public reporting of its business and its revenues.
Having surveyed the field, the publishers’ association, post-apartheid, agreed to explore the possibility of moving SA copyright licensing to a Nordic model, in which the management of the collecting society would be in the hands of the rights owners themselves – collectively, transparently and democratically managed. We had meetings with the Norwegian collecting society, Kopinor. at book fairs and then in visits to Oslo and Bergen. It seemed an effective and equitable system, and Kopinor offered support in the process of getting a new organisation in place. It would have been a model with a great deal more control and transparency for the South African industry than what it had then or has now.
However, there was some opposition from publishers to this proposal. Looking back, it would seem that this probably came from UK subsidiaries in the educational and academic sectors.
The Nordic model collecting society is a co-operative body, owned and run by the rights holders themselves, with profits distributed collectively, targeted at industry development. Surplus funds were distributed, by democratic agreement, to industry development projects. We had got some way down the road of debating this move – a very turbulent process, as there appeared to be strongly entrenched interests in retaining the current supplier – DALRO – in spite of previously expressed reservations and complaints by a number of rights owners of excessive costs and foreign control – when there was a sudden change of direction, which has still not been satisfactorily explained.
Where we are now
We were ready to move towards implementation of this proposal when, at the next PASA Annual General Meeting, the MD of Oxford University Press South Africa, a local, branch if the Oxford company, was elected to the Chair of PASA; and Monica Seeber, who, industry informants suggested, had strong British connections, elected to the Copyright Committee Chair. Seeber immediately cancelled the discussions with Kopinor and went back to DALRO, in spite of the widespread reservations in the industry about the undemocratic nature of PASA’s relationship with this organisation, which had had National Party associations and had turned out to be an expensive option. In short order, she flew to the UK to ensure British support for this option, and the process was put in motion of re-appointing DALRO. DALRO was a wholly owned private company was linked to SAMRO, the collection society for music and – prospectively, at any rate – with aspirations to collect from the film industry. A new structure set up DALRO as a privately-owned company delegated to handle literary rights collections for the publishing industry, reporting to SAMRO for rights distribution.
When this new structure was established, it was reported to PASA in a series of meetings and explanatory briefings. `The finances of the new DALRO contract were to be managed through SAMRO, also a privately owned company, which would handle the collection and distribution of funds on behalf of DALRO.
At the presentation to PASA of these new arrangements when they were being put in place, a separate venue was set aside for negotiations with the formerly ‘Bantustan’ universities, now predominantly Black tertiary institutions in provincial locations. I appeared to be one of the very few members of PASA attending these briefing sessions. The presentations on the proposals were made by a team of very bland young Englishmen, endowed with a high level of natural hauteur. They appeared to have a public institutional status – British Council, perhaps. The Vice-Chancellors and senior administrators of the universities at the meeting were seething with rage as they were told with casual arrogance by these young men that a deal had been struck on their behalf to pay the costs of joining the ‘new’ collecting society for the first few years. Extra financial support for the rebuilding of these very neglected institutions was dependent on their agreement to join DALRO. The costs of this would be borne by UK donor funding for the first few years.
The ‘Bantustan’ university administrators were less than impressed. They pointed out that they ran universities that were so badly funded that their libraries were stocked with photocopies. They did not want to join DALRO – they did not in fact want a collecting society at all – particularly a private organisation over which they would have no control; but were told firmly that funding from government and donors, for further development of their seriously under-resourced institutions, was conditional on their doing so. I was shocked at the level of casual arrogance and thinly veiled contempt that the VCs were treated to. They could take it or leave it, they were told. And if they did not take this offer, there would be no more development funding at all.
The outcome was that these universities signed up for the subsidised payment of collection fees, but that only a few years later, some dropped out of this deal. These universities are still badly off as far as library holdings are concerned and it is probable that few, if any of them, are now affiliated to a collecting society.
The current situation in relation to copyright collection in 2019 is happening at a time in which the academic publishing industry is likely to be under huge financial pressure as the result of the changes in the distribution of bursary funds paid to disadvantaged students as part of their annual bursary support. The amount of money that will be collected by DALRO from university subscriptions therefore appears to risk a substantial fall. As from 2019, the money for textbook bursaries has no longer been ring-fenced, as in the past, but will be provided directly to the students, without constraints on how their overall bursary funding for living costs and studies can be spent. The risk is that the students will not buy textbooks, but might spend the money on other items. The result would likely to be very damaging to performance levels of students in the universities, but also a financial disaster for publishers and booksellers in the sector, in this financial year.
At the same time, there are reports in the media that, as a result of unwise investments and extensive losses in a venture in Dubai, SAMRO, a privately-owned company, is reported to be under financial pressure, with the likely impact on DALRO as yet unknown.
What has emerged overall from these events is that the South African educational publishing sector is largely in the hands of British companies, either directly involved in South Africa, or represented through South African subsidiary companies. As a result, most of the money collected by DALRO for the academic sector appears to ultimately go to UK or US holding companies, with very little going directly to South African publishing houses. It is difficult to establish the exact shareholding patterns of the different publishers involved in the tertiary sector, because of the layers of private company and overseas ownership that characterise DALRO’s membership. A scan of the publishing companies listed in the PASA directory as operating in the higher education sector shows a substantial dominance of foreign (UK, and, to a lesser extent, USA) companies either as foreign-owned companies, or as subsidiaries of international publishers operating with South African local subsidiaries.
In the end, it would appear that the
proposed revision of copyright legislation has considerable justification for
its provisions for the recognition and payment of creative artists from the
history of these industries in South Africa. And the question arises as to
whether we are still colonised to a degree.
[1] This is at odds with reports on SAMRO in David B Coplan, In Township Tonight: Three Centuries of South African Black City Music and Theatre to the effect that SAMRO was in the 1970s highly valued by black musicians for the revenue it generated for them. Things appear to have changed since then. Or perhaps this has always been a divided industry….
[2] For an overview of the publishing industry at the time of this transition, see Eve Gray and Laura Czerniewicz, ‘Access to Learning Materials in Post-Apartheid South Africa’, in Shadow Libraries, Ed. Joe Karaganis, Cambridge Mass, MIT Press, (2018) pp. 107-158,
[3] For an overview of the creative environment, see David B Coplan, In Township Tonight: Three Centuries of South African Black City Music and Theatre. Jacana Media and University of Chicago Press, 2008. (First published by Longman Inc. and Ravan Press in 1985.)
[4] For a detailed discussion of these events, see Coplan, p. 187-9
