MEDIA24 2020 LITERARY AWARDS

Media24 Publishers 2020 literary awards are an all-white affair! So much so for South Africa's over two decades of freedom which were meant to bury apartheid roots and all.

                                          Guyo Bookshop, Makhado Town, Limpopo

But then Media24 publishers are not of the Archbishop Desmond Tutu's rainbow people of God. They are of the old South Africa of white domination in every aspects of society, including publishing and its subsidiary activities like like literary prizes.

The awards were rightly met by outrage by right thinking people in general and black people in particular.

As if the disregard of black writers and literary experts was not an insult enough, Media24 dismissed their crimes as a mere oversight which will be addressed by the inclusion of more black people in the judging panels. This amendment to the judging protocols falls far short to what is desirable for a free and democratic South Africa.

The problem is not in the judging panel, it is in the untransformed nature of Media24 Publishers. Media24 publishes minority languages and therefore primed the literary prizes to produce white winners even if you have an all-black judging panel.

Anything that doesn't touch the status quo will perpetuate the apartheid inequalities.

The onus is on black writers and their organisations like National Writers Association of South Africa to fight the apartheid-era inequalities in publishing and take over the publishing industry and make it representative of the demographics of the country - nothing less and nothing more.