GingerGoat’s colourful coat
BANDILE Sikwane is a communications manager for The Council for Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR) who writes children’s books and has started his own publishing company, GingerGoat publishing. Bandile is deeply aware of the need to encourage tolerance and acceptance of differences as an antidote to racism and he encourages bilingualism by writing his stories in English and Setswana. Heather Robertson interviewed him.
website. I started the company in 2012 to address the need for accessible multicultural children’s and young adult content. I wanted to come up with an innovative offering that would be disruptive to the current publishing industry. nowhere in particular”.
The Malume/Malome series is my multicultural take on the Mr Men series by Roger Hargreaves. The only way for us to have a vibrant reading culture in South Africa is if content is relevant, inclusive and multicultural. Everyone’s culture needs to be represented in literature. People love stories that include them. It follows then that some of these stories must be written in other languages. Brian is a very talented illustrator and multimedia designer. We worked together on the first two titles. How I work with illustrators is that I write the stories and provide them with a brief on how I imagine the characters. But illustrators bring their own magic touch. Potter series was a turning point. I’ve always known I’d be a writer, but what and how she did it, stayed with me. I also loved the The Chrysalids by John Wyndham. It’s a really old book. It got me enjoying dystopian sci-fi. I loved Ender’s Game by Orson Scott Card. I also loved the Foundation series by Isaac Asimov. Douglas Hill is one of my favourite authors – I loved his space action books growing up. And Michael Crichton’s techno thrillers were my staple diet – the Jurassic Park series, Timeline, Andromeda Strain. It’s rather difficult doing everything at the same time. I write as and when inspiration hits I guess. It helps being an insomniac.