This is the second in a series of blog posts concerning the Chinua Achebe Colloquium 2014, which I attended in early May at Brown University. In this post, I will discuss the challenges and conditions of publishing literature by Africans across the continent. This is a broad topic, but one which was addressed during a panel discussion at the colloquium called, "The Direction of African Writing and Publishing Since the African Writers Series."
2012 marked the 50th anniversary of the famed African Writers Series, founded by British publishing company, Heinemann, in 1962. The Series published and brought worldwide attention to dozens of notable African writers, from Achebe to Gordimer, during the post-independence period until the mid-1980s. All of the panelists were publishers of African writers, who added their comments regarding the evolution of the topic at hand.
Perhaps the most interesting part of the discussion came about regarding the topic of digital books. The publisher at African World Press noted that the dawn of digital publishing marked a "brave new world," a new age for authors and their writing on the continent and across the world. Now, anyone with a laptop and WiFi can become a writer. Gone are the days when a publisher needed to employ 20-30 editors and 20,000 feet of storage space in order to put out a book. Today, an author can print and sell a book as the market demands (hence the term, print-on-demand.)
Digital publishing allows authors to overcome the difficulties of distribution so prevalent on the continent. The bookstores, the roads, the mail and other delivery systems--the physical infrastructure--simply do not exist to get books into the hands of customers in many places on the continent. Accessing books via internet is a promising development for this reason.
One of the publishers on the panel noted that his press is looking into providing digital books for free to ISP addresses identified as coming from African countries. This would ameliorate the challenge of getting books to students across the continent, many of whom have never read the much beloved African writers whose books are now out of print and hard to find in many cases.
A panelist and audience member agreed that digital publishing could be important in countries like Nigeria, where the appetite for reading is so grand that photocopying bestselling books and selling them in street intersections is a profitable activity. The market for digital books is immense.
It is essential that African students have access to books by Ghanaians, Kenyans, South Africans, etc. in order for them to develop a sense of national and regional consciousness, as well as a sense of the literary canon and history. What Achebe accomplished that was so profound for his contemporaries and for forthcoming authors was he developed a piece of literature that was familiar. He created an awareness of the everyday in Nigeria, particularly for his ethnic group, the Igbos.
As one audience member, who happened to be an event organizer, a member of Achebe's family, and a fellow Igbo, added during the question and answer session, she "did not know that what [she] was saying everyday was prose." One panelist noted that while Achebe's most famous book has been translated into 70-some languages, it was never translated into the author's native language of Igbo. He went on to say that the book, in fact, is already written in Igbo--the author used the English language to tell stories in a way that only an Igbo would.
As for the future of African literature, there are a large number of competitions, even beyond the Noma Prize, the Caine Prize, and the Commonwealth Prize, created to identify new literary talent. Zimbabwae and Kenya are hubs of publishing activity. Publishers across the globe are even scouting authors on the internet and social media. Above all, publishers are beginning to recognize the growing market and the need for reading audiences "to see themselves in the stories they read."
Further, the panelist from Michigan State University Press noted that the role that traditional publishers play will always be relevant. Traditional publishers can identify the market for a given book and the potential impact a book can have on that market. However, if the desire to tell a story is as vast as it has proven to be for self-publishers on this side of the globe, traditional publishers will have a challenge in scouting and maintaining talent.
