TEN YEARS - DISA

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and had lost only one freedom, 'the right to write badly'. 'Comrades, let us
not fool ourselves: this is a very important right, and to take it away from
us is no small thing.' What makes Babel the authority on this subject, among
twentieth century writers, is not simply the wonderful succinctness of that statement,
or the fact that his speech was a prelude to arrest and death in a concentration
camp. What further qualifies him is his own work, those stories in the
Red Cavalry collection which demonstrate the possibility of writing from within
a revolutionary community without becoming a party hack. The challenge,
it seems, is to develop a relationship between writer and community such that
the writer's 'we' is authenticated by other processes than those deriving from
the political framework within which, nevertheless, the writer and the community
first recognise each other.
A more practical consideration — though one not without ideological implications
— governed the emphasis on community in the early Staffrider. My
only experience of publishing before 1978 had been gained on the campus of
the University of Natal in Durban. I was one of the editors of Bolt, a definitively
'little magazine' which Ian Glenn had started and Christopher Hope ran
for a time. When not in other hands the magazine routinely devolved on Tony
Morphet and me. Once the subscriber copies had been mailed, the prospect
of distributing the remaining copies was always a daunting one. Forced sales,
on the refuse-me-if-you-can principle, to colleagues in the Arts and Social
Sciences departments was the usual solution. But doors had started to bang
as I approached, and we can all take only so much humiliation. Then one day
we had a letter from Nkathazo Mnyayiza, some of whose early poems had
appeared in Bolt. He wanted fifty copies to sell in Mpumalanga, Hammarsdale,
where he lived. Fifty! What was more, a week or so later he sent us
a postal order for this first batch and ordered another fifty. One hundred copies
was twenty percent of our print run. This was the first indication I had
that something approaching a writing/reading revolution was under way,
Mpumalanga Arts wasn't the only writers' group in the country, I discovered.
Mothobi Mutloatse, the one person without whom there would have
been no Staffrider, was in touch with a good many more and there was every
indication that a network could not only be developed but very widely extended.
Informal selling through the groups, we decided, could provide a circulation
as effective as the centralised marketing operation of the CNA chain, which
at that time was beyond our reach. Bypassing the anonymity of the shops would
also provide organisational advantages, something summarised for me by the
sight of a Sowetan Staffrider seller whose street call was 'Knowledge!' The
rise and fall of this distribution system is a long story.