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We might wonder at the extent to which such support actually distorts the economics of the publishing
industry, and therefore the true worth of the books produced. The problem is further compounded by
the overtly political considerations about what constitutes authentic African writing. According to ABC,
‘regional and gender balance’ is an important criterion for inclusion in their list, a subset of this being
‘Creative Writing by African Women Writers’. So it is that a novel by a female writer from, say, Lesotho
would presumably score higher than Dulue Mbachu’s War Games, but having subsidised said female
writer from Lesotho, how does that then help the development of Lesotho literature? The answer is
that it doesn’t and might even do it a disservice by setting a bad precedent.
It should be stated at once that The New Gong’s only criterion is literary excellence and it is
inconceivable that there should be any other for chopping down trees. We aren’t looking for any
special favours merely because we happen to be publishing out of Africa. Our books are not meant to
be ‘manageable’ in the debilitating Nigerian parlance, nor are we looking for special subsidies in order
to coerce Northern consumers into ‘helping’ us. We want to stand on our own feet and take our
chances along with any other publisher, North or South. Judging by the responses from the
conference delegates, we have good reason to be optimistic that we are on the right path.
Those who found their way to the publisher’s hall – and there were many who didn’t, of which more
presently - were full of praise for the quality of our products and intrigued by our use of the internet to
eliminate all the ten per cent agents who currently stand between the publisher and the reader. And
yet in a way nothing had changed; or, rather, plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose: the more it
changes, the more it stays the same. Once upon a long time ago when London was the undisputed
centre of the English-speaking world the writer took their manuscript to the printer and discussed with
them one-on-one before buttonholing literary editors to give them favourable notices. In those days
there were no publishers as we know them now, no literary agents, no sales reps. In other words, the
internet has taken us back to the future and democratised the process in a way that was inconceivable
just a decade ago.
And so we set up our stall and started selling to our captive audience, the very people who taught
African literature in the lucrative US market, including not a few Nigerians who had fled our shores
when the Paris Club assured us that prosperity lay in opening up our markets – I almost said our
ynash – to every passing foreigner with dubious goods to sell. Our only concern was the $100 a day
levied by the organisers for the use of a stall, which also meant that few African publishers could afford
to participate, in effect undermining at least part of the purpose of the conference itself. Among the
hardy souls who did make it was Modupe Oduyoye of the Ibadan-based Sefer, which I had never
heard of before but was happy to hear of now. A retiring man of advancing years, it turned out that he
had been publishing what one might call pan-African books (we were, after all, in Kwame Nkrumah’s
country) since 1992, focussing on religion, politics and philosophy. His objectives, which were readily
gleaned from his numerous titles, were ‘the exegesis and exposition of the Hebrew Bible and the
Arabic Qu’ran, digging up the cultural history of Africa and the Middle East in the periods before
written records, and exploring Euro-Asiatic themes in religion and culture’. Among the titles he had
himself written – and no less abstruse than his colleague’s list from Bayreuth - were Historical
Linguistics and African Prehistory, Is Igbo Also Related to Hebrew?, and Comparative Philology:
Beyond Indo-European and Afro-Asiatic. He, too, did a brisk trade, especially among the American
delegates eager for authenticity. By the end of the second day he told me that, like us, he had
covered his costs, which also meant that the exercise had been a success in terms of what he wanted
to achieve. I doubt that this was the case with the more conventional publishers, for instance James
Currey and Heinemann Nigeria, but then their books were easily obtainable from university bookshops
in the US. The only other publisher of note was the Accra-based Sub-Saharan Publishers, one of only
two Ghanaian publishers who could afford to participate (the other was afram books) and whose
impressive list was divided between children’s books, adult fiction and the history of the Atlantic slave
trade, their evident hobby horse. Their books were well produced in Ghana, as I was pleased to
discover, but then Accra itself was better produced than Lagos: the city was as clean and as green as
I remembered from my previous visits over the last decade-and-a-half, and now to those were added
good roads and constant power. At one point, I even saw a traffic policeman writing a ticket for a
motorist who had parked illegally. A bribe was neither demanded nor offered. Evidently, both parties
respected themselves even as they respected their country: before our shared taxi from Lagos
entered Accra the driver stopped at a petrol station to have it washed in order to avoid a fine once he
entered the city. And it was true. We didn’t see a single dirty vehicle in the four days we spent there.
Busy as we were hawking our goods, we had little time for the actual conference proceedings, but a
look at the list of papers to be presented was hardly inspiring: Self Identity and Representation of the
Other; Ken Saro-Wiwa, Petro-Politics and the Logic of Martyrdom; New African Cinemas and the Death
of Nationalism; Exploration of Metaphorical Verbal Expressions. One sometimes wonders which planet
these academics inhabited, although we did receive reports that one session in which Ngugi wa Thiong’
o droned on in his squeaky voice for thirty minutes about the language question (again!) that had
already been canvassed by the Nigerian Obi Wali as far back as 1962 was eventually disrupted by the
Nigerian trio of Biodun Jeyifo, Odia Ofeimun and Niyi Osundare who advised him to remember who he
was lecturing.
Ngugi himself paid a brief visit to the publisher’s hall to promote his latest novel (in English!) and to
play the walk-on part of famous writer but at least he came, even if he didn’t buy any books, being
merely content to admire his own. Not so a number of notable Nigerian professors – some poets
among them! - who not only failed to come and see what was on offer but actually demanded that we
dash them our titles when we buttonholed them on the first day with our flyer. We were incredulous,
embarrassed and not a little ashamed. Here were people who had left the shores of Nigeria to pursue
the almighty dollar begging us for freebies before jetting back to the haven of the developed world
even as we prepared to enter public transport with the modest profit we had earned from our own
sweat. Why did they imagine that we would do that to ourselves? But perhaps their temerity wasn’t so
surprising. It is Africa’s very poverty, after all, that guarantees Northern incomes, hence the salaries
paid in Oxford to ‘help’ African publishers; hence, also, the $12bn recently dashed to a Paris Club
eager to ‘help’ the continent out of that same poverty: plus ça change… Of course, not being inclined
to open our ynash in the manner of the current Nigerian administration we refused point blank as we
reluctantly left the serenity of Accra – trees everywhere – for the harsh reality of dirty, overcrowded,
fume-filled Lagos where trees are regarded as enemies of progress.
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* Mary Jay and Ros Sherwin: ‘Marketing African Books Worldwide: The ABC Experience’, in: Hans M.
Zell: Book Marketing and Promotion: A Handbook of Good Practice, International Network for the
Availability of Scientific Publications, 2001. All subsequent quotes are taken from this book.