Allister Sparks’ First Drafts Launched at Boekehuis

November 23rd, 2009 by Claire

Kudos to the intrepid Jo’burgers who ventured out in the freak winter weather for the launch of Allister Sparks’ new book, First Drafts: South African History in the Making last Thursday. But then, this was a special event, featuring Jeremy Gordin, author of last year’s Zuma biography, in a Q&A session with Sparks.

Held at the Boekehuis with proprietor Corina van der Spoel playing host, the author’s delay in one of those special rain traffic jams on the M1 was easily forgotten with superb wine and piping hot pizza slices served while everyone waited.

First Drafts is a collection of Sparks’ writing covering the past ten years. Gordin introduced Sparks as “an incredibly focused man” and said that First Drafts is “a remarkable collection of articles” and “the work of a serious journalist… and ‘serious’ not in a po-faced way!”

Gordin then got straight to the point and began by inviting Sparks to explain the format of this book. Sparks spoke about starting out as a journalist in 1951, at the age of 18, with an interview with one Hendrik Verwoerd. He spoke about covering South Africa for 58 years and how he feels “it has been a remarkable period both at home and abroad”.

Sparks told how the idea of First Drafts arose from the late Washington Post publisherm Philip Graham’s idea that a journalist’s role is to “write a first rough draft of history”. He is fascinated with the concept of writing “contemporaneous history” – history as you experience – it versus “retrospective history” – history as written by historians. He said contemporaneous history gives one a unique view of “how something is while it is happening”.

The new book works to link “interrelated snapshots of contemporary history together”. He described this “extraordinary decade” from 1999 to 2009 – how it began in high hope with Mbeki as President and ended with his collapse; started with George W. Bush and the delivered us Obama; saw the heights of neo-liberal economics and its crash. Sparks called it a “decade of drama”.

Guests were treated to a lively to and fro between Gordin and Sparks, augmented by challenging commentary and questions from amongst their own ranks. Pippa Green questioned Sparks’ analysis of Mbeki’s hesitancy over his successor and how that opened the way for Zuma. Tula Dlamini raised the question of whether the world is moving into a “smart community vs not-so-smart community model” as opposed to the age old black/white paradigm. There was also lively debate around the Israeli-Palestinian issue and Sparks highlighted the significance of the coming 2011 municipal elections.

This launch provoked deep thinking and consideration about our recent history and the writing of it. Sparks said choosing which articles would make it into this new book was the toughest part of the job: he wanted to capture the essence of the question, “How did it look at that moment?”. Gordin described First Drafts as a book “you can go to every night and read another piece”.

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