Ike’s bookstore: A man with integrity looking to leave a legacy

Ike’s Bookstore and Collectibles has won the title of SA’s best independent bookstore. After reading this influential story behind the store’s amazing start up, you won’t be able to help but visit this historical place!
Joseph David (Ike) Mayet’s bookstore was established in 1988 in a beautiful old building in Durban, during the heat of Apartheid. Ike was the first person of colour to open an Africana bookstore in South Africa. He was a man of principle who made a life changing decision to stick to his roots.
Ike, being an avid reader from a young age, read any book that he could afford to buy, manage to borrow and get his hands on. He opened Ike’s Bookstore on the eighth day of the eighth month in 1988 on Chapel Street. South Africa was in the time where race determined your identity, who you could love and what bench you could sit on.
Ike’s maternal grandmother, being a part of an Irish-Scottish alliance and his paternal grandfather being a native in the Surat district of western India, gave Ike the opportunity to choose his race, either white or Indian. He made a heavy personal and political choice to stay true to his Indian roots while many of his family members proceeded to reinstate themselves as white and receive all the “added benefits” of being white in South Africa. He chose the more difficult path, the one less trodden by those with the same opportunity. For the next 40 years of Ike’s life, he walked on the “wrong” side of the racial roads.
The first batch of books that entered Ike’s book store were from his own personal collection and slowly but surely expanded.
The bookstore was relocated from the the heart of the olden day Indian district, Overport, to the new venue, 48A Florida Road in 2001, where it was opened by South African professor J.M Coetzee, who was later awarded a Nobel Prize for literature. Ike passed a year after the new release in 2002.
The bookstore has been described as a home away from home and a quiet place to escape to – the polar opposite of the soulless shopping malls of South Africa. The bookstore now hosts monthly social events, book launches, hosts as a platform for authors to read from their work and engage with the audience.
A place that celebrates books and knowledge in a unique environment.
For more information view their Facebook page, Instagram page or website. Alternatively, contact them on 031 303 9214