The crowd was mainly white expatriates. Few African expatriates were there. I
do not know if it is because they were not informed or not interested. But I
think that even if they were informed, not many would have pitched up.


This is the story of Africa. It is possible that because we are basically an
oral tradition, we are still making the transition between acquiring knowledge
and obtaining entertainment from oral and visual rather than written sources.
But it is taking a long time.


Books are not a priority. I wonder why. I belong to an online forum where
there was a recent argument about the fact that Africans neither read nor write.
There are as many reasons for this as there are Africans, perhaps. But amongst
the most common is this: they do not read because they are too busy
surviving. They do not write because there is no time or motivation to write.

African writers cannot live on their writing. They do not have enough readers, when they do manage to get published at all. They do not have access to grants that many Western authors. They do not have the huge and fairly literate population of India, say, to write for. There is also the problem of thieving outfits reprinting copies of books and selling them for a profit that the writer and publisher will never see. This is very common in Nigeria, whence I have seen badly printed, badly bound copies of Robert Ludlum's novels that fritter away in your hands as you turn the pages.

Nigeria: House

Western publishing houses hesitate to take on writers of African fiction
because they do not have a huge market for Africans who write about Africans.
How many Europeans want to read about life in an African village or urban poverty
from an African perspective? The success of The No. 1 Ladies' Detective Agency
(and its sequel novels) is a notable exception, but it must be pointed out
that this is a book by a British professor of law, who lived in Africa for some
time. It is an excellent book, and I shall review it for this web log in due
course, but it suffers from the strange affliction of much of writing about
Africa: it is written by a non-African.


After independence, the African Writers Series (AWS), a Heinemann imprint,
published the works of many Africans, famously including Chinua Achebe and
others. Though one lauds the initiative, one must say that some of the books
that were published at that time left a lot to be desired. It seems difficult now to
imagine why Joseph Ngongwikuo of Cameroon and Flora Nwapa of Nigeria to name
only two were published. Their books certainly leave a lot to be desired in
terms of literary merit. I suppose it was important to encourage new talent
then. But AWS has fallen on hard times, and their website is a journey into the
past, a twilight zone reminiscent of the heady days of early post-independence
exuberance.


So what can we do about this? We can write, but who will publish us? We can
publish, but who will buy our books? Our books might be bought, but who will
read them? We have many rich business people, but the publishing concerns that
have sprung up are often a labour of love by people, who have something to say,
who have a place for other people to say what they wish to say. They are
generally not business people. What the African publishing industry needs is a
combination of love of the written word and business acumen to bring these words
to the reader, and make him want to read them.

In the meantime, my magnum opus shall moulder quietly in my desk drawer.
 

***************************************************

Dibussi:

This is a well-written article.  I have no doubt everybody understands what
you are talking about and what you have written is an universal observation,
though you omitted one important aspect of why Africans hardly support their own
writers  - the crab mentality of our people.  We are jealous of the success
of our own people.  Then again, there is the problem of ethnicity.

To solve some of these problems, some of us as writers, have come to
understand that to be successful you have to write a book with universal appeal. 

The success of my book, "Capitalist Nigger: The Road to Success," is due to
its universal appeal, attaining the No.1 bestseller list in South Africa for
four months.  Moreover, it is an extremely well-produced book  (even if you
don't want to buy it, just look at it and see its beauty comparable to any
main-stream published book).  You remember the computer language, gigo, garbage
in
garbage out, what you put in is what you get back.

Hopefully, with this kind of chastising, maybe our people can spend $100 a
year to patronize African writers.  That is not too much to ask.

Chika Onyeani
ps: Timbuktu Publishers is our publishing house.  I am proud of our work.