Beginning/middle/end – children's literature at IBBY

Report by Lara Scott

Once upon a time the IBBY congress came to Cape Town, September 5-9 2004 to be precise. It became known far and wide as an opportunity for grown-ups to sit quietly and listen to children’s stories in the name of exploring the weighty topics of books, children, education, development, international communication and the future of literature. A auditorium of nodding heads, packed out with literature experts who ran for the headphone handing-out table as soon as they heard that the next story would be in Spanish. The storyteller’s belief that children’s books shouldn’t be all light and love and frivolity led to her telling a harsh story of a young Cuban girl whose mother died, leaving her an orphan who can only sit and pray to be able join her. However much magical realism it was steeped in, a seven-year old’s desire for death was not what the audience was expecting at story time, but then it is all about intercultural communication, and didn’t we learn a lot about Cuba with that tale? Cape Town's Baxter Theatre is suddenly a bright and beaming place, full of stalls full of books full of pretty pictures for children. Full of adults looking at them.

Then the ten minute story telling session, every teacher in every school was to tell a story at ten to ten on Tuesday, the whole country in unison. Nice if the adult nation, its traffic and workplaces and shopping malls, came to a complete standstill, or preferably lie down and we all just listened. Kind of thing that would happen in a children’s book, but alas, alack, oh dear, what are we to do, we all just carry on while across the country schools stop with the maths and the geography for a bit, and read a little passage. It’s a romantic image – children’s book conferences bring out the softie side of our policy makers.

Finally, the exhibition at the National Library, Amandla Ebali – the power of the story. The catalogue claims brightly that South Africans "have been fortunate to really experience the power of the story, one which began a long time ago and which was written for a limited readership. And very slowly and often painfully, more and more people added sentences, chapters, images and captions to eventually force the story to change so that more people would read it. This story has turned into an epic not confined to any one genre, it’s central power being that it is a story by, about and for everyone".

Even childhood is not a separate land, the books for children still remind us of how we’ve developed, what stories are for. Included in the exhibition are the classics of South African literature, the ones that would be part of every South African’s childhood memories if they hadn’t been banned, like Beverley Naidoo’s Journey to Joburg from 1985, which tells the story of two children going to find their mother in the city, scared that their little sibling will die without her to look after him. Banned in South Africa, it won international awards for its realistic depiction of apartheid life. Both Beverley Naidoo and Niki Daly spoke at the conference – Niki’s Not So Fast, Songololo was the first ever depiction of an urban black kid, going shopping with his granny for red takkies. It was loved, is still read and has been through multiple reprints and translations.

The mid-1980s spawned the true classics of South African children’s literature, some of which slid past the censorship board as it fretted over less innocent sounding literature. Two Dogs and Freedom was published in 1986, the first ever collection based around township children’s experiences, complete with their own handwriting and drawings. And future plans and dreams– eight year old Moagi wants a "big house and two dogs and freedom".

And the teenybopper’s version of Waiting for the Barbarians was there: Child in Darkness by Robert Hill, which terrified me completely at 12. I had forgotten it until I saw the front cover, with its angular and bold eighties-style illustration of a perfect blonde boy holding out an apple to a greenish alien figure living below ground. I had to look at it out the corner of my eye like a kid again. Whether, as the exhibition asks, children ever picked up the deeper significance, or rather the blatant analogy between the above and below ground relationship and South Africa’s segregated society was doubtful, they don’t tend to look for those things as much as we do, which is partly why they are children (apologies for old school thinking).

One that wasn’t included in the exhibition: Love, David, the story of a young boy living in the Cape Flats. It’s a beautiful book and had a big impact on the white population of South Africa. Maybe not me personally though, I lived down the road from him in affluent Somerset West as a ten-year old, and remember thinking, what’s so bad about living in a flat? Not a proud moment.

Is there ever any respite for the young ones from heavily loaded fables steeped in historical significance? Do English kids simply fail to interpret Postman Pat as a depiction of working class reality?

Then, suddenly we hit the nineties, and saw "the publishing industry seeking to rise to the challenge of escaping the legacies of the past and its direct shaping of our literary heritage and local book culture", according to the exhibition blurb. Read: it all got a bit wafty. This is partly why the exhibition chooses to exclude this decade entirely, apart from the Centre for the Book’s really cute ‘First Words in Print’ series. Galloway, a publishing analyst quoted throughout, laments "what happened to the vision of a multicultural and multilingual celebration of home-grown books?" Maybe we are just somewhere a little vague for now, a kind of, sort of, maybe lost in transition position that doesn’t make for people urgently telling each other things about reality in every format available, and so leaving the industry unsure as to where to turn to look for new stories (and lacking funding, but in the name of children’s stories, aiming for a little whimsy). While children’s books may be being protected from being overtly political anymore, the change in publishing focus continues to tell the story of South Africa’s transition. When the old is not yet dead and the new not yet arrived now is the time to head straight for the sentiment expressed by everyone’s favourite granddad, Nelson Mandela, who wants children’s books to ‘enlarge their earthly dwelling place with the magic of stories’. Sweet, can’t go wrong with that.