/ 17 March 2005

African publishers reach out to the West

Twenty years after a group of publishers gathered to discuss how to get African ideas on the West's agenda, a gathering at the British Parliament offered a measure of how much the publishers have accomplished. This week in London, journalists, lawmakers and African hands came together for the launch of the latest offering of the African Books Collective.

Twenty years after a group of publishers gathered to discuss how to get African ideas on the West’s agenda, a gathering at the British Parliament offered a measure of how much the publishers have accomplished.

The reception this week on the sidelines of the London Book Fair brought British journalists, lawmakers and African hands together for the launch of African Voices on Development and Social Justice, the latest offering of the African Books Collective.

”We’re saying, listen to Africa,” said Mary Jay, who runs the day-to-day business of the Oxford-based collective on behalf of the African publishers who own it.

The essays in African Voices address many of the issues facing the world’s poorest continent — debt, disease, a dearth of democracy. British Prime Minister Tony Blair has made improving Africa’s plight a priority in 2005, vowing to put it high on the agenda of this summer’s Group of Eight summit of top industrialised powers, which Britain will host.

The scholarly papers contained in African Voices offer a high-profile basis for discussion as the world turns its attention to Africa.

”We wanted to have our work recognised and known outside our own countries,” said Walter Bgoya, a writer, collective founder and the publisher of the book.

He and the 16 other publishers who gathered in 1985 had been trying to sell their books in the West with the help of well-meaning contacts with an interest in Africa but no experience in book publishing or distribution.

Deadlines weren’t met and bills weren’t paid, leaving all sides frustrated. In the end, Bgoya said, the publishers decided to do it themselves.

Four years after their initial meeting, Jay, who had worked for a British publisher specialising in African studies, opened their non-profit venture, which at first was active only in Europe. In 2003, Michigan State University began distributing the collective’s list, opening the North American market.

Distribution of funds

A committee of the 17 founders elected from among themselves makes policy, while all the publisher members — now 102 — have a chance to sell books abroad. Over the past 20 years, the collective has distributed more than £1,5-million (R17,7-million) to its members, Jay said.

That may translate to just a few hundred pounds for an individual publisher, but that has been enough to allow small operations to buy their first computers or increase staff.

Bgoya said the remittances were particularly important in the early days, when hard currency was hard to come by in some African countries. Currency regulations have eased, he said, but earnings from the collective are still important when it comes, for instance, to paying royalties to foreign-based writers.

Bgoya said the publishers found that their expectations that entry into Western markets would mean huge sales turned out to be overambitious. Instead, they found a core of Westerners, many at universities, interested in African politics, social issues or literature who closely follow the collective’s growing list — to which about 150 new titles are added every year. Sales of 200 copies are considered strong.

The list offers a vibrant portrait of Africa — children’s books, scholarly tomes, whodunnits, poetry collections, bilingual dictionaries and literary novels.

Jay said Western readers are most interested in books on African art, linguistics and gender studies. Publishers have to balance their desire to reach that audience with what they see as their responsibility to African readers, who have wider interests.

One publisher, she said, started a gender series just to meet Western demand.

”His view is, he makes money selling those gender books in the North, but he uses it to invest in books he wants to publish at home,” Jay said.

The collective keeps about half the net sales, but that’s not enough to run the Oxford office and pay for author tours and publishers’ workshops. Norwegian, Swedish and Dutch foundations make up the difference, but Jay says observers shouldn’t be misled.

The collective is ”not an NGO doing good for Africans”, she said. ”It is a self-help organisation by the publishers themselves.”

The founding members each contributed £1 000 to start the collective, for many of them an enormous sum.

In 1998, the collective produced its first print-on-demand book and now all of its members can take advantage of that state-of-the-art technology. Bgoya and Jay said transferring such technology to Africa and improving the production quality of African books is a goal the collective is meeting.

Elusive goals

Other goals, though, have proven more elusive. The collective had hoped to strengthen African publishers to the point where they could compete with Western multinationals in Africa, but most African schools still turn to the Western giants for textbooks.

While sales to the West have increased, Africans still sell few books to each other, in part because of trade barriers and infrastructure lacunae on the continent.

”It still is easier to get books from Kenya to Nigeria via the United Kingdom than [directly] from Kenya to Nigeria,” Bgoya said. He said the collective will looks for new ways to address such problems.

”We exchange ideas, we exchange experiences,” he said.

Jay said the collective is contributing to an important dialogue between the rich countries of the North and the poor countries of the South.

She cited the African concept of ubuntu: people are people through other people. Put another way: we are at our most human when we try to understand one another.

Reading is a way of ”enriching one’s understanding of the human condition”, Jay said. ”It’s to be a better human being. It’s ubuntu, absolutely.” — Sapa-AP

On the net:

Africanbookscollective.com