Cape Town 2025 book run

I bought twelve books at Clarke’s Bookshop. I liked the upstairs area the best, as it housed the language section, Africana, and the out-of-print and collectible books. Those latter two are housed in a locked room, so as soon as I entered the store I approached the cash desk to ask them to unlock the room for me. I was asking them under the presumption that the room still existed after eight years. Who knows, the store could have renovated its upstairs since the last time I was there.

While I was at the desk I saw three translations of Le Petit Prince, one in Afrikaans, one in Xhosa and the other in Zulu. For the life of me I couldn’t remember which of the two–Xhosa or Zulu–I already had. (I knew I already had one in Afrikaans.) I believed I had the Xhosa edition but I wasn’t 100% sure, so I asked the clerk if she could do a favour for me. I asked if she could check my website on the computer she was currently using, as I knew I had blogged about it. She said sure, but she just wanted to finish up a bit of work first. I patiently waited, then she surprised me by turning over her computer to me. I wasn’t expecting her to cede her workspace to me; I was thinking of just telling her my website address and having her type in the words “prince Xhosa” in the search field. I reached over to her keyboard, typed in those two very words, and my entry popped up. We both could see that I had already purchased the Xhosa edition twelve years ago, and she put aside a Zulu edition for me. I recall talking with someone else in the store then–and maybe also eight years ago–about the Zulu edition. It is not unusual for publishers to release a translation, then it will go out of print. That’s what happened with Le Petit Prince in Zulu; it just wasn’t in print on either of my prior South African visits.

I will write about the books dealing with language first:

Inkosana Encane, the Zulu edition of Le Petit Prince. Note that the Xhosa title is Inkosana Encinci, so the similarity of the titles made it confusing to recall which of the two I already had.

Languages in Botswana: Language Ecology in Southern Africa by Lars-Gunnar Andersson and Tore Janson covers over a dozen Bantu and Khoisan languages.

A Dictionary of South African English by Jean Branford with William Branford will inform you what South Africans mean when they talk about bakkies, dassies, robots and snoek, and it also includes terms I know from Scrabble such as assegai, mbaqanga, sjambok and vlei. Proper nouns were also included, such as ANC, Bophuthatswana and Cape Dutch. In spite of the depictions on the front cover, the dictionary was not illustrated.

I got three more books about the bantustans:

Divide & Rule: South Africa’s Bantustans by Barbara Rogers from 1976. From the back cover: “South Africa hopes to gain international acceptance of separate development through the policy of ‘Bantu Homelands’.” The author examines the realities of daily life, political control and economy in the bantustans.

Transkei’s Half Loaf: Race Separatism in South Africa by Newell M. Stultz was published in 1980, four years after the bantustan was declared independent of South Africa. Chapters look at the choice for independence, the first year as an independent state and the meaning and benefits of independence.

I rarely come across books about two of the independent bantustans, Ciskei and Venda, so I jumped at Ciskei at independence, published by the Ciskei government’s Department of Foreign Affairs and Information in 1981. It was full of smiling people across 173 pages, all with colour photos.

After reading a number of bicycle memoirs, I could not resist Around Africa on My Bicycle by Riaan Manser, where over two years the author covered 36 500 km and visited 34 countries as he circumnavigated the continent. I see from his route map that he avoided the horn of Africa, barely riding through Somalia. This is a thick brick of a book–705 pages–and filled with colour photos.

South West Africa by Ruth First is a pocketbook from 1963. Chapters cover colonialism under Germany, the rush for land and the retreat of the tribes, and the League of Nations and United Nations decisions on the territory.

Mozambique: A History by Thomas H. Henriksen was published in 1978, three years after the country gained independence from Portugal. Chapters covered early inhabitants and empires, Portuguese expansion and colonialism, nationalism and the war for liberation.

Malawi: A Geographical Study by J. G. Pike and G. T. Rimmington was published in 1965, one year after the country gained independence from Great Britain. Chapters covered the physical geography such as geology, climate and vegetation as well as the historical, social and economic geography with chapters on the population, settlement patterns, agrarian economy, natural resources and export trade.

The last two books were not found in the Africana or language sections, and were on the main floor on the table of new arrivals. Both must have come from the same source, as they had identical nameplates, stating Ex Libris: Michael Scott. I wonder if Mr. Scott is deceased, or perhaps he was just divesting his book collection:

Negroes in Britain: A Study of Racial Relations in English Society by K. L. Little was published in 1948. This book provides a perspective–prejudiced as one might expect–of how life in Great Britain must have been like for people of colour. The first part deals entirely with The Coloured Folk of Cardiff, its maritime setting, demography, sociology, life and labour. The second part is called The Historical and Cultural Context of Racial Relations in Britain, and has chapters entitled The Negroes in Britain–1600 A.D. to the Present Day; The Development of English Racial Attitudes; The Coloured Man Through English Eyes; and The Coloured Man’s Reaction to the English.

Society and the Homosexual by Gordon Westwood was published in 1952. I wonder if its previous owner, Michael Scott, was a poofter as well. Anyway, the front cover, both inside flaps and back cover are reproduced here in all their overwrought loquacity. Westwood seems sympathetic yet as this was the 1950’s, gay men–as the homosexual in the title, in this case, applies only to a study of men–are stricken with a “problem”, as the introduction states:

“This is not a medical treatise, but an attempt to evaluate the social implications of homosexuality. In order to understand the development of this abnormality, it has been necessary to draw upon the papers of practising psychiatrists. Every effort has been made to put their work into non-technical language, but where this would lead to ambiguity or misunderstandings, the psychological terms have been retained.”

I am going to have a good time reading this, with its antiquated psychobabble. Look at the title of the first section alone: The Extent of the Problem. !!! I am an old-school gay in regards to my opinions on the causes of homosexuality, and section two is abound with theories. The titles of the other sections are Treatments and Cures; The Effectiveness of the Law; The Attitude of Society; Levels of Homosexual Society; The Mind of the Homosexual; and What Can Be Done?

What can be done with all those homos, I do wonder.