‘Gatekeeping is to make other realities available, not to keep out’

Ellah, you’ve been editing books for ages. You’ve been in this business for 20 years. How did you get into it? What inspired the passion?To me it was something that started quite late. I graduated with my masters degree and moved back to London where my husband is from and our daughter was two when […]

Ellah, you’ve been editing books for ages. You’ve been in this business for 20 years. How did you get into it? What inspired the passion?
To me it was something that started quite late. I graduated with my masters degree and moved back to London where my husband is from and our daughter was two when we moved back to London. I did several jobs for about five years and I was unhappy in each and every job. And the last one I had, I worked in the city, which is the financial district as an administrator. I’m a very good administrator (Laughs) I was very unhappy and my husband and daughter, she was six at the time, said, you are so unhappy, we want you to quit your job. My husband had a good job at the time and could afford to run the family so I could stay at home and think about what I really wanted to do. I remember at the time he said to me that perhaps I should consider working in publishing.
In my life outside publishing, I read a book a day. That was what I did. I had done it for years and years. And he said, your time and money is all spent on books, you need to find a way of making that a part of your life. Even though I am the daughter of a writer, editor and publisher, it never occurred to me that I could make my life in books and it was really with my husband Richard’s encouragement. So what I then did was that I had a friend, Peter Godwin, who is a Zimbabwean writer, he writes memoirs and is the author of Mukiwa, at the time his book had just come out and he introduced me to his editor who agreed to have a stint with me. She advised that I register with a temp agency, that agency where if you are an administrator and someone is sick you go and cover for the person. The other thing was that I typed 80 words per minute and was attractive as an administrator. So I went to a temp agency and told them I can organise anybody and I can type 80 words in a minute and I would only love to work in a publishing house.
My first was one was Readers Digest and it was so awful I left after the second day. I hated it. And then I got a temp assignment at Penguin and I remember that by lunch time on the first day, I thought I had found my tribe of people. It was like walking into a village and everybody had prepared a room for you. It was magical. I temped for Penguin for a year. I would call them every Friday and say, do you have another assignment for me? It was frustrating because I wanted a full time job but it was also good because I learnt sales and then marketing. I worked in publicity. I worked at Fedrick Wames, they published Peter Rabbit, Beatrix Potter’s book. And then finally they had a classics editor who was coming from the academia and had never worked in publishing and I said I know the whole company because I’ve been working here for a year. Then they gave me a job and that was how I started.
It was really hard because at this point I had a young child and I ran a house and had two degrees and felt quite experienced and so starting from the bottom was really difficult and there wasn’t another black person in the whole building.

Interesting. So why editing? Why not marketing or distribution?
You know, I’m a really bad sales person. I can’t count. Truly, I’m innumeral so that wouldn’t have been much good. I am not interested in advertising or persuading people in that way.  And I knew that it always started with the process of writing. I remember my father was a masters student I remember being a young child in America, he wrote his masters’ thesis while I was lying on his stomach and we would all have to be quiet around him. He couldn’t go to the library because he had four children so he had to stay home with my mum and help with the kids. So to me writing has always been something sacred and something that was really important because his master’s thesis has been published as a book. And I’ve always been fascinated by that and the idea that I could become involved in that process was really quite a magical one and you know, editing can really be hard to get into. I really wouldn’t say it was all luck because I worked really hard but landing in an editorial department where there was room for growth was lucky. I love writers. I love what they do. I don’t think it is something I could do myself. And I also realise what a difficult task it is and I am very confident in my ability as a reader and that is what an editor has to be first and foremost.

You’ve been holding workshop all over Africa for editors. What do you think are the challenges editors here are facing?
It is really difficult because I described to you my year of apprenticeship and there isn’t . . . you can do a course in publishing but to becoming a senior commissioning editor you have to work for other editors and watch what they are doing. When I was a young editor, the manuscript would arrive, I would photocopy it, take it home and read it and make my own marks and see what my boss had done. At some stage I would talk to him about what he had done and he would give me an introduction to edit or some piece or something else to edit and then go through my work. That’s how I learnt to do what I do. Until I reached the point where I had my own writers. If you don’t have that apprenticeship, if you don’t have that chance to work in an environment where you are learning, it’s very, very difficult and I meet young editors, for example, I met a young woman in Uganda who said she copy edits the  street signs, the adverts they have, and I said I do the same thing. If you put a comma in the wrong place it doesn’t mean the right thing. So there are definitely people who have the same genetic makeup as I do to be an editor but the publishing infrastructure is not strong enough to provide for the training. So my teaching in those workshops is based on the desire to find people like me and to give them some of the opportunities that I have had because I think that if we train our editors and build a strong network for them, it will strengthen our publishing industry and make it more competitive because I think it’s impossible to doubt the writing talent across Africa. There are very few examples of places where you would be published and be sure that you would get the care in the production of your work that you would get in places where there are more established publishing houses. There are a few shining examples of really good practice but not nearly enough and that is not to do with ability or infrastructure but training. That’s something we have to fix and I am really aware that I have had opportunities that I could make the best of, you know, working at Penguin and Random House, there are no two better publishers in the whole world, and it would really be a shame if it just stayed with me. It doesn’t make much sense.

You work with writers who mostly are considered eccentric
… I love that, yes.

Have you had to work on a manuscript that made you think, perhaps I shouldn’t be doing this?
In my early publishing career. But I think now I’m mostly known for the African writers I have worked with and also you should know that I’m also a history book publisher. I have published a book on the Napoleonic wars and the History of Scotland, The French Revolution, so I have a whole lot of life that is not really talked about. And there have been some books where there were difficulties for me especially as a non-fiction publisher and editor. I love those books because they are the sort of books that I learn from. An impossible manuscript is only impossible until I find the key to unlock it because as an editor, if your writer is in trouble, it’s your job to step back, look and think what’s she trying to do, what is the intention and to talk to them about that intention and to help them fulfil it. So I don’t think there is any book where I thought that perhaps I shouldn’t be doing this. I am lucky enough now that I get to choose the writers I work with, which is an usual situation and a huge privilege.

Now you have the opportunity of choosing the writers you work with and you had the opportunity of working with the Africa39 writers. Do you feel now that you are a sort of gatekeeper for African literature as has been suggested?
I think it’s really frightening to acknowledge but I do have to acknowledge that. I realise now that there are things I can do, there are some calls I can make and letters I can write for some people and I love doing it. I love the fact that if I meet somebody whose work I really like, and that’s the only criteria for me, I mean, I’ve recommended writers I don’t like personally (laughs), but the fact that I have that level of access and you know, building that kind of address book and those contacts is because of years of work and really hard work. It does mean that I can make a change in somebody’s life with very little effort on my part. Having said that, it’s because of lots of efforts on their part because they would have to produce a really good work and I think it would be disingenuous to deny it and say no, I can’t do that because it’s true I can do that. I think it’s something that you have to treat as a privilege and realise that not everyone can do that. It also means that I never recommend anybody unless I personally think they are good. I have turned down a lot of writers who are quite wonderful human beings but I don’t think their works are good enough. But I have tried really hard to be honest about it because I think that the acceptance of my phone call is based on the assurance that anything I recommend is going to be good. If I wasn’t careful then people would very soon stop taking those phone calls.

How long did you have to think before you said yes to the Africa39 Project?
I said yes immediately. It was absolutely a no brainer. I didn’t know who would be on the list and I think one of the nicest thing for me is that, I judge lots of competitions and I wasn’t a judge on this one, so I had to accept everybody who was on the list and for me that was exciting. A lot of the writers I knew already. Some of them were writers I had published their debut novels, in some cases more than one. Some I knew from the work I do and a couple I have never heard of before and that is truly exciting. It didn’t take me a minute to say yes.

What was the reason behind that?
The thought that there would be 39 writers from across the continent who I could spend time with, and by that I mean the time that we spent on each story together just me and the writer, it meant that I had 39 working relationships that I knew would become quite important. In some cases it was a repetition of a working relationship, somebody I had edited before and I wanted to go back and work with them again, the decision was made before I knew who you guys were, but really it was based on the selfish desire to be able to claim relationship with writers I was promised would be 39 of the brightest and best.

You’ve lived mostly away from Africa, you left Zimbabwe when you were five for the US and have been living in London for long now, how grounded do you think you are to be a gate keeper of stories coming out of the continent?
Well, you know, I’m not the only one. It’s not like I stand and say, you shall not pass or something like that. I try to read as much as I can. I try to talk as many writers as I can. I ask for advice from friends on who should I be reading, writers they’ve been excited about reading. I am not an English person, I’m not an American. Regardless of the fact that I have lived 23 years in England I am still a Zimbabwean. I think those early experiences in my identity is still very much based on the continent and has been the driving force behind my now working independently and taking as much time as I can working with editors and writers on the continent. But you know, I never pretend to be anything other  than I am. I’m a Zimbabwean who is educated in the US and lives in England, who has a passion for writers from her continent. My life as a furious reader began with Doris Lessing’s The Grass was Singing and the realisation that the ground beneath my feet could produce stories. That has informed my reading and professional life ever since. These are the stories that I want.
I have worked in classics. Penguin Modern Classics was my first job as a junior editor and it was a wonderful list but  there were very few African writers and my father’s library of classics was not on that Penguin list of classics which was when I then phoned up Heinemann and said can we do a deal because we don’t have Achebe, we don’t have Ngugi, we don’t have Mariama Ba, we don’t have Tayeb Salih? Can we do a deal so we can publish these books? And if you look at that classics’ list, it’s got really good Chinese writers, wonderful German writers. At each stage an editor has come in with a passion and I think what I left behind was the passion to see that the library that made me a thinking person reflected there. And even though I was quite junior, I had great support from my boss at the time and most of them became Penguin Classics. Of course, they should have been long ago but it takes that editor, the power of gatekeeping to make realities which you know are true more widely available rather than keeping out. So in terms of … the desire, nobody has to think I am legitimate at all. I am quite confident in my ability to search and my ability to read. But like I said, I’m not the only one.

How relevant do you think your experience of travelling and living in other countries havebeen to your professional life?
Hugely relevant. It means that I know what I don’t know, which is my current favourite phrase. I’ve been playing with it in my family a lot, because I’ve been struck of late by how often, especially in a kind of western sensibility, you assume that your place of being and your world view, your cosmology it is the reality when in fact it’s not, it’s an experience and especially when you have more than one language in your head, when you are raised in some places where you’ve had to find a way to move as a person in those different places, you know that there are lots of things that you don’t know that you have to find the answers to. I’m now 48 but I am constantly aware that I need to ask questions, I need to look carefully, I need to research and that makes me a good editor because it means I am trying to find the truth in those different answers and that’s helpful for my writers I think.

Zimbabweans have interesting names and yours has some interesting story to it. Can you tell us about your name?
Ellah was my grandmother’s name, I was named after her and it’s a really important name. She was a cantankerous and difficult old woman who didn’t like very many people but she liked me (laughs) so I carry her name with great pride. She was also a woman who was a market leader and had enough imagination and ambition to imagine her children beyond their situation and for that I am deeply grateful because she educated my father and supported them and I am grateful for that imagination because I wouldn’t have my life if she hadn’t imagined things beyond her market stall. I am so proud of her.
My middle name is Pedesai which means “it’s now time you finished”. Because my father married a wife whose bride price he couldn’t quite afford but he was also quite charming so he negotiated. I am the second born and my maternal grandmother wanted to remind him that he now had two children and had not yet finished paying his bride price so Pedesai is the name she gave me (laughs). It’s a funny legacy.
Wakatama is my family name and it is from the story of my great grandfather and his brother who ran from some family feud and landed in the village that we now call our home village. So a nickname was given to the brothers who moved, Wakatama, means the brothers who moved. I like my family name. And Allfrey is the very English name of the very English, English man who I married. I have been asked why I have that surname but I also carry it with great pride. It’s the name my children have and I like to have the same name as my children. It’s a good thing being an A after being a W, being at the head of the alphabets, and as my father would say, he paid his cows so . . .(laughs).

So clearly you’ve lived up to the Wakatama name seeing how much you move around a lot.
Yes, this itinerant life I love is very much in my blood. I also hope I live up to my grandmother Ellah’s ambition because I have great ambition for the writers that I work with because all kinds of things are possible and that knowledge that you have to work really hard is something I got from her. It’s not an easy world, and for the writers, it’s not an easy path that they have chosen and sometimes you could be very good and have no recognition, but then again nobody owes you recognition and you have to work hard.