Wits University Press is the oldest university press in South Africa. It was established in 1922, the same year in which the South African School of Mines and Technology in Johannesburg became the University of the Witwatersrand, to provide publishing opportunities for research conducted at the university. Today, it publishes scholarship from all over the southern African region to provide recognition for African research and to influence global debates about the south more broadly.
The press’s responsiveness to local issues has resulted in an important archive of African intellectual history. Publishing from the South: A Century of Wits University Press, edited by Sarah Nuttall and Isabel Hofmeyr, engages with this archive and documents the contribution the press has made to knowledge production. “As the press embraces its second century of scholarly publishing,” says publishing director Veronica Klipp, “we hope to continue influencing the geopolitics of knowledge by providing a platform for South/African academics and writers to engage with a broad range of local and international readers.”
Apart from its main subject areas of politics, history, archaeology, cultural studies, and literary studies, Wits is also known for its successful list of playscripts, which is regularly assigned in schools and universities. In the early years, the publishing focus was on anthropology and linguistics, disciplines in which the university excelled through its Department of Bantu / African Studies. From this emerged a series of Black writing in indigenous languages, the Bantu Treasury, that included some of the “Shakespeares of South African literature.” These influential titles provided an income stream for many years and are currently being digitized. Probably the press’s bestselling title is the English/isiZulu—isiZulu/English Dictionary edited by Clement Doke and Benedict Vilakazi, which was first published in 1948 and is now in its fourth edition.
In the last few years, there has been a renewed effort to provide publishing opportunities for early-career academics in support of the transformation objectives of the local academy. Forthcoming titles that embody this ethos include The Nightwatchman: Portraiture and the Black Male Figure in Colonial South Africa by Hlonipha Mokoena, Making a Life: Young Men on Johannesburg’s Urban Margins by Hannah Dawson, and No Last Place to Rest: Coal Mining and Dispossession in South Africa by Dineo Skosana.
Wits Press is an active member of the Publishers’ Association of South Africa and in 2017 became the first African member of the Association of University Presses (AUP). Many of its books support the AUP Press Week theme of #StepUP. While its mission of providing African content for global impact has resulted in many titles dealing with South African political and social issues, it also produces books that speak to current global issues, such as the recent Good Jew, Bad Jew: Racism, Anti-Semitism and the Assault on Meaning by political philosopher Steven Friedman. As stated in its mission statement, Wits Press hopes to continue “informing debate for the greater good of society.”
