Africa Writes Back: The African Writers Series and the Launch of African Literature

By James Currey

June 17, 2008, is the fiftieth anniversary of the publication of Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart by Heinemann. This publication provided the impetus for the foundation of the African Writers Series in 1962 with Chinua Achebe as the editorial adviser.

Africa Writes Back: The African Writers Series and the Launch of African Literature captures the energy of literary publishing in a new and undefined field. Portraits of the leading characters and the many consultants and readers providing reports and advice to new and established writers make Africa Writes Back a stand-out book. James Currey’s voice and insights are an added bonus.

CONTENTS
Publishing and selling the African Writers Series
The African Writers Series Portfolio & George Hallett’s covers
Main dates for the African Writers Series

INTRODUCTION: The establishment of African Literature
Publishing Chinua Achebe

1. WRITERS FROM WEST AFRICA
Nigeria: The country where so much started
Negritude from Senegal to Cameroun
Magic & realism from Ghana, The Gambia & Sierra Leone

2. WRITERS FROM EASTERN AFRICA
Towards the oral & the popular in Kenya, Uganda & Tanzania
Publishing Ngugi

3. WRITERS FROM THE HORN & NORTH-EASTERN AFRICA
Emperors in Ethiopia
Publishing Nuruddin Farah
Arab authors in Egypt & Sudan

4. WRITERS FROM SOUTH AFRICA
Resistance in South Africa
Publishing Alex la Guma
Publishing Dennis Brutus
Publishing Bessie Head
Publishing Masizi Kunene

5. WRITERS FROM SOUTHERN AFRICAN
Guns & Guerrillas in Mozambique &Angola
Zambia Shall be Free
Death & detention in Malawi
The struggle to become Zimbabwe
Publishing Dambudzo Marechera

CONCLUSION: Is there still a role for the African Writers Series?

• Language: English
• Publisher: Ohio University Press
• Release date: Oct 31, 2022
• ISBN: 9780821447925

James Currey

James Currey was the editorial director at Heinemann Educational Books in charge of the African Writers Series from 1967 to 1984. He is the recipient of the African Literary Association’s 2008 Lifetime Achievement Award.

Book preview

Photograph by George Hallett (p.xxviii) for the cover of the collection of short stories Wives, Talismans and the Dead by I.N.C. Aniebo (p. 56)

Photograph by George Hallett for the cover of Climbié by Bernard B. Dadié (p.7)

Africa Writes Back

The African Writers Series & the Launch of African Literature

Dedicated to the writers without whom there would have been no African Writers Series

James Currey Ltd

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Wits University Press

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Ohio University Press

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East African Educational

Publishers Ltd

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Mkuki na Nyota

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Copyright © James Currey 2008

Copyright © George Hallett all photographs unless otherwise attributed

First published 2008

1 2 3 4 5 12 11 10 09 08

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

Currey, James

Africa writes back : the African writers series & the launch of African literature

1. Heinemann Educational Books 2. African writers series - History 3. African literature - Publishing - History - 20th century 4. African literature - 20th century - History and criticism 5. African literature (English) - Publishing - History - 20th century 6. African literature (English) - 20th century - History and criticism 7. Africa - Intellectual life - 20th century

I. Title

070.5’096

ISBN 978-1-84701-503-7 (James Currey cloth)

ISBN 978-1-84701-502-0 (James Currey paper)

ISBN 978-1-80010-656-7 (James Currey ePub)

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data available upon request

ISBN 10: 0-8214-1842-4 (Ohio University Press cloth)

ISBN 13: 978-0-8214-1842-0 (Ohio University Press cloth)

ISBN 10: 0-8214-1843-2 (Ohio University Press paper)

ISBN 13: 978-0-8214-1843-7 (Ohio University Press paper)

ISBN: 978-0-8214-4792-5 (Ohio University Press eBook)

ISBN 978-1-77922-075-2 (Weaver Press paper)

ISBN 978-1-86814-472-3 (Wits University Press paper)

ISBN 978-978081-202-7 (HEBN paper)

Preparation for typesetting

Penny Butler

Typesetting

Kate Kirkwood

Cover & Jacket preparation

Glenda Pattenden

Proofreading

Lynn Taylor & Clare Currey

Indexing

Margaret Cornell

This edition published 2020

Contents

Acknowledgements

Foreword

Publishing and selling the African Writers Series

The African Writers Series Portfolio and George Hallett’s covers

Main dates for the African Writers Series

INTRODUCTION

The establishment of African literature

The starting line

First-time publication of new fiction

The team comes together

Sex, religion & politics

An international triangle of choice

William Heinemann & Heinemann Educational Books

The excitement about paperbacks

The dual mandate

Were there rivals?

Broadcasting as a patron of writers

Plays for playing

The challenge of politics

A long tradition of writing by Africans

A range of standards?

Conspirators in the launch of African literature

PUBLISHING Chinua Achebe

The mythology over Things Fall Apart

The novel which forecast a coup

Divided loyalties

Poetry & other portable publishing

International recognition

Part 1 Writers from WEST AFRICA

1 Nigeria The country where so much started

West Africa the major target

Mbari, the pioneers

What is West African English?

Themes & periods in Nigerian writing as reflected in the African Writers Series

Cyprian Ekwensi The question of popular literature

Elechi Amadi Life before the Europeans

John Munonye Making the ordinary extraordinary

Kole Omotoso & T. Obinkaram Echewa Contrasting novels from the 40s generation

Christopher Okigbo & Gabriel Okara Casualties of the Biafran war

S.O. Mezu, I.N.C. Aniebo & Eddie Iroh The sun rises after the war

Olusegun Obasanjo Military command

2 Negritude from Senegal to Cameroun

The dominating trio

Ferdinand Oyono The boy & the madam

Mongo Beti An affront to the church

Sembene Novelist & film-maker

Negritude & an elegant tradition

Francophone writers after independence

3 Magic & realism from Ghana, The Gambia & Sierra Leone

A literate tradition

Ayi Kwei Armah Beautyful novels not yet published

Kofi Awoonor Prisoner & ambassador

B. Kojo Laing Magic realism v. marvellous realism v. fantastic realism

A tradition of verse & drama

Lenrie Peters A scalpel probing

Writers from Sierra Leone

African Literature Today

Part 2 Writers from EAST AFRICA

4 Towards the oral & the popular in Kenya, Uganda & Tanzania

The effort to work with East African Publishing House

Peter Palangyo, Bonnie Lubega, Robert Serumaga & John Nagenda High-flying young men

Ali A. Mazrui The novel as political science

Poetry unknown outside East Africa

The appointment of a publishing editor in East Africa

The potential in oral culture – Okot p’Bitek Songs of charm

Taban lo Liyong Delight in royalties

Mwangi Ruheni & Samuel Kahiga A popular book market develops

Rebeka Njau A woman’s madness

Meja Mwangi Mau Mau & tough towns

PUBLISHING Ngũgĩ

Part 3 Writers from THE HORN & NORTH-EASTERN AFRICA

5 Emperors in Ethiopia

Sahle Sellassie Emperors of the past & present

Daniachew Worku Pilgrims & the cleansing of a stagnant society

From King Solomon & the Queen of Sheba

Landing in a revolution

PUBLISHING Nuruddin Farah

6 Arab authors in Egypt & Sudan

Avoiding the African label

The art of seamless translation

Yusuf Idris The language of the Cairo streets

Ghassan Kanafani A letter from Gaza

Tayeb Salih ‘An Arabian Nights in reverse’

Naguib Mahfouz ‘Earthier than Coronation Street’

Attempted assassination

Chattering about revolution

‘Arabic is a controversial language’

Part 4 Writers from SOUTH AFRICA

7 Resistance in South Africa

A South African publishing apprenticeship

The search for black writers

Apartheid sends writers to prison

What is an African writer?

Cultural boycott & censorship

D.M. Zwelonke Robben Island

Modikwe Dikobe The Marabi yards of Johannesburg

R.L. Peteni Faction fights in the Ciskei

Publishers of resistance within South Africa

Johannesburg v. Cape Town

PUBLISHING Alex la Guma

PUBLISHING Dennis Brutus

PUBLISHING Bessie Head

PUBLISHING Mazisi Kunene

Part 5 Writers from SOUTHERN AFRICA

8 Guns & guerrillas in Mozambique & Angola

Luis Bernardo Honwana A sharp eye on a mixed Mozambique

The history of resistance

Agostinho Neto Angolan poets including a future president

J. Luandino Vieira Speaking to ordinary Angolans

Pepetela What will liberation hold?

9 Zambia Shall be Free

Dominic Mulaisho ‘The richest man in the world’

Operation full bar with toasties

A political thriller

10 Death & detention in Malawi

In the footsteps of John Brown

Banda’s detainees

Jack Mapanje ‘Who will start another fire?’

11 The struggle to become Zimbabwe

Stanlake Samkange ‘African with a cast of European’

Lawrence Vambe The landless

Charles Mungoshi Cold comfort

Stanley Nyamfukudza The struggle for Zimbabwe

Heady years in Zimbabwe

PUBLISHING Dambudzo Marechera

CONCLUSION

Is there still a role for the African Writers Series?

AFRICAN WRITERS SERIES BY YEAR OF PUBLICATION

Index

Foreword

The African Writers Series files are now held in the University of Reading library (RUL MS 8221). The archivist Mike Bott persuaded several of the leading British publishers to lodge their archives with him, creating a key resource on British twentieth-century writing and publishing.

I started by examining the publishing correspondence with some of the most outstanding authors who appeared in the Series; they were also the writers of vivid letters. I have focused in particular on eight writers who have gained international recognition. The correspondence with Bessie Head, Nuruddin Farah and Dambudzo Marechera is singularly rich. The files show something of the way in which Ngũgĩ and Henry Chakava developed publishing in the languages of East Africa as well as in English. The correspondence with Mazisi Kunene, Alex la Guma and Dennis Brutus is interlocked with the liberation struggle in South Africa. Letters, reports and three-line notes from Chinua Achebe are scattered through the files of the many other writers who are part of the extraordinary Series of which he was the Founding Editor.

The intention of the book is to provide a narrative of how the African Writers Series came together. The shape emerged from the writers and the adventurousness of their writing. It is a study of the publishing process working in unprecedented conditions. The book provides evidence of the ways in which estimation by a publisher of the work of writers grows and, sadly on occasion, diminishes. The book gives examples of how the views of publishers and their advisers emerge as they consider a new manuscript, and then coalesce and change as they assess further work by the same author. The initial discussion is literary but then reflects practical and political realities. Decisions can then be affected by the economics of the firm and the publishing industry at the time. Selective quotations are used to reveal what has emerged from the files rather than what the ‘conspirators’ (p. 24) think they remember. Needless to say, memories do play a lively part.

Acknowledgements

I should like above all to acknowledge the help of Mike Bott, who was the Librarian in charge of the Archive in the University of Reading who built up their renowned publishing collection. The African Writers Series files were the first to be catalogued after Heinemann Educational Books lodged their collection. His help and enthusiasm helped me start on this project. On my visits to Reading Verity Andrews handled my requests with the most helpful and warming good cheer. I am grateful to Robert Sulley, who, when International Director of Heinemann Educational Books, gave authorisation to Mike Bott to allow me access to this historic collection.

It was in 2000 at the conference at Bard College celebrating Chinua Achebe’s seventieth birthday that I realised that many people there had little idea of the importance of the vital role he played in pushing Heinemann to the limits in their selection of work for the African Writers Series.

I have shown the detailed sections on Publishing Chinua Achebe, Ngũgĩ, Nuruddin Farah and Dennis Brutus to those authors as I draw heavily on their lively letters and other writing in the Archive. I have had the enthusiastic support of the Bessie Head Foundation in Botswana. Sadly Mazisi Kunene, honoured as the first poet laureate of South Africa, died during work on this book and before I was able to send him a draft of the section on publishing the translations of his work in Zulu. This pioneering generation is passing; Cyprian Ekwensi, Mongo Beti and Sembene Ousmane are among those who have died during the writing of this book. We are all indebted to Flora Veit-Wild for her remarkable work on Dambudzo Marechera.

The section on publishing and selling the African Writers Series (pp. xiii–xxvii) shows the commitment of so many of my colleagues at Heinemann to the co-operative success of the African Writers Series. Keith Sambrook, Aig Higo, Henry Chakava, John Watson and Tom Seavey gave time and exceptional attention to the manuscript as it developed. Working with Penny Butler on the preparation of the manuscript for press has brought back many of the memories of the years when we worked together. For all of us Alan Hill is an enthusiastic presence. The contributions of many other colleagues are recorded in the preliminary section on Publishing and Selling the African Writers Series.

I have known what it is to have understanding publishers in the detailed work by Gill Berchowitz of Ohio University Press, whose publishing apprenticeship was with Oxford University Press and Ravan in South Africa. Veronica Klipp of Wits University Press, and formerly of KwaZulu-Natal University Press has backed this book because she feels that it will show many South Africans what they were missing when cut apart from Africa to their north. My colleague Douglas Johnson used long train journeys to pencil my draft heavily and, with his knowledge of Sudan and North Africa, it was of particular interest to discuss with him the problems of translation which we faced in running Arab Authors. The detailed work Lynn Taylor and I did together on The Companion to African Literatures has been of constant value in the preparation of this book. Valuable reports and detailed corrections have come from Clive Wake, Bernth Lindfors, Christopher Heywood and Mike Kirkwood. David and Marie Philip not only gave us repeated hospitality but also had early drafts inflicted on them.

Kate Kirkwood, in typesetting this book, has worked co-operatively with me as I have developed and changed the design of this book in a self-indulgent manner.

The mixed experiences of Clare Currey and our children probably are most vividly revealed in the chapter on Dambudzo Marechera. Airmail letters kept between her and me have been an atmospheric resource in writing this book, especially as she is good at using dates. Much of the demanding labour of preparation and checking of this manuscript and proofs has depended on her ever reliable support.

The Companion to African Literatures

Opinions from G.D. Killam’s and Ruth Rowe’s The Companion to African Literatures ( James Currey and Indiana University Press 2000) have been used to give some impression of the way in which the writers selected for the Series have come to be regarded at the turn of the century. The collection and editing of The Companion involved many of the people who had been integral to the growth of the Series and to the establishment of African literature. Quite a few of the contributors had been, as publishers’ advisers, among the first people to consider the work of those then unknown authors.

The references to The Companion in this book will be taken usually from the relevant alphabetical entry by author or book title. A page reference shows that the quotation comes from general entries on ‘Topics and Themes’.

Ngũgĩ on a rainy day in 1979 outside Heinemann’s three publishing houses in Bedford Square, where the Publishers’ Association and many publishers were neighbours. The editorial offices of the African Writers Series were on the second floor

The dining room in the Heinemann basement which was much used to entertain visiting authors from Africa and to have meetings with other publishers such as André Deutsch (p.15). Kole Omotoso (right) from Nigeria in discussion with Meja Mwangi from Kenya. (Bottom) From left to right; Meja Mwangi, Cosmo Pieterse, James Currey, Marguerite Omotoso, unrecognised, Christie Archer

Publishing & Selling the African Writers Series

In references initials are used for Keith Sambrook (KS), Aig Higo (AH), James Currey ( JC) and Henry Chakava (HC).

Alan Hill’s name is used in full because he shares the same initials with Aig Higo.

When the work of a particular author is discussed in detail initials are used e.g. Chinua Achebe (CA).

Alan Hill

Alan Hill was as proud of setting up the African Writers Series as anything else he did in an outstanding publishing career in which he built up Heinemann Educational Books to be the largest educational publisher in the Commonwealth.

Chinua Achebe said in an interview in the Paris Review (p. 28), ‘Other publishers thought it was mad, that this was crazy. But that was how the African Writers Series came into existence. In the end, Alan Hill was made a Commander of the British Empire for bringing into existence a body of literature they said was among the biggest developments in British literature of this century.’

Alan Hill was born in 1912 at Barwell in Leicestershire. His father was a schoolteacher who later worked for the National Union of Teachers. He was educated at Wyggeston Grammar School and read English at Jesus College, Cambridge. He joined the nascent education department at William Heinemann in 1936. During the second world war he served as a Squadron Leader in the RAF. After the war he built up the Heinemann education list. In 1959 he was sent by the Publishers’ Association on a tour of South Africa and West African countries. West Africa became one of his first overseas targets. In 1960 Heinemann Educational Books was established as a separate company within the Heinemann Group of Publishers. He was later to become managing director of the whole group; he retired in 1979.

He lived in the Hampstead Garden Suburb which was much favoured by the professional left who made the welfare state a reality in Britain. Keith Sambrook not only shared his Leicestershire and Cambridge origins but lived round the corner in ‘the Suburb’. Whenever necessary Keith Sambrook would ask Alan Hill for a lift into the office in the morning; over the years Alan Hill’s support for quite a few new writers was obtained while waiting in the traffic jams of North London.

Chinua Achebe’s ‘conspirators’ in the launch of African literature. (Top) Keith Sambrook, Alan Hill and James Currey with Cyprian Ekwensi, in Ibadan early 1980s. (Photo Aig Higo) (Middle) Aig Higo at Bob Markham’s house on his first morning in East Africa, with James Currey (left) and Bob Markham, February 1973. (Photo Clare Currey) (Bottom) Henry Chakava in James Currey’s office during his training period at 48 Charles Street in 1973; the posters are for the South African meeting at the Africa Centre (p.88). (Photo Satoru Tsuchiya, the translator of work by Mazisi Kunene and Amos Tutuola into Japanese)

Alan Hill asked Chinua Achebe to write the preface to his autobiography In Pursuit of Publishing (John Murray 1988, p. ix). Chinua Achebe said: ‘What makes Alan Hill’s counsel so indispensable … is that he actually believes that publishing can be high-minded, adventurous and profitable. And has proved it.’

Keith Sambrook

Keith Sambrook found the final manuscript of Ngũgĩ’s Weep Not, Child on his desk when, on 1 January 1963, he started work with Alan Hill at Heinemann Educational Books. A month earlier Chinua Achebe had been appointed as Editorial Adviser to the African Writers Series. The first 30 titles they selected were to shape the development of African literature. Keith Sambrook and Chinua Achebe shared two ambitions; they wanted students in African schools and universities to be able to read imaginative work by Africans; and they were determined to introduce African writers to an international literary audience.

Keith Sambrook established companies in Nigeria and East Africa; they contributed to the effective marketing which made the Series profitable enough to experiment with new writing. At the same time he built up companies in Hong Kong, Singapore, Malaysia, India, the Caribbean and the US. HEB Inc, the company he established with John Watson in New Hampshire was, with imaginative marketing by Tom Seavey, to be crucial for new publishing in the Series when the sales within Africa disappeared during the ‘African book famine’ of the late 1980s and early 1990s. Keith Sambrook took on the first titles in the growth area of English-language teaching; by the time the list was sold it had an annual turnover of over £30 million.

Keith Sambrook was educated at Loughborough Grammar School in Leicestershire. A credit in Higher Certificate Mathematics equipped him to work constructively with generations of corporate accountants as Heinemann Educational Books expanded.

While in the Royal Navy from 1943 to 1947, he was on one of the northern convoys to Russia and also spent 18 months in the Mediterranean. He read English at Jesus College, Cambridge from 1947 to 1950. His first appointment in publishing was with Manchester University Press, where from 1950 he worked on the list of academic titles in the social sciences. The pioneering sociological and anthropological publications of the Rhodes-Livingstone Institute in Northern Rhodesia were among his responsibilities.

In 1954 he joined the renowned Edinburgh publishing and printing company of Thomas Nelson. In the period of high colonialism, before, during and after the second world war, the firm had worked with enterprising educational officers to produce textbooks which were relevant to the needs of the Caribbean and Africa. He worked on all levels of school and student textbooks for use in overseas markets. He spent the year of 1956/7 on the campus at Legon establishing the University College of the Gold Coast Press at the time of the Suez crisis and Ghanaian independence. At that time Nelson published several books by President Nkrumah. The following year Keith Sambrook moved to Lagos where he set up a local publishing office in Nelson’s Nigerian branch. He then worked for Nelson back in Britain.

Aig Higo

It was thanks to the team of Aigboje Higo and Chinua Achebe that writing from West Africa dominated the first decade of the series. They captured, against several longer-established publishing rivals, many of the outstanding authors.

Aig Higo was born in 1932 in the mid-west of Nigeria and educated at St Andrew’s College, Oyo. He trained as a teacher and then, after starting his career, won a scholarship to go to University College, Ibadan. A poet himself, he was a fellow student of writers such as Chinua Achebe, J.P. Clark, Christopher Okigbo, John Munonye and Elechi Amadi. His poetry was selected for the first two substantial verse anthologies: Penguin Modern Poetry from Africa and John Reed and Clive Wake’s A Book of African Verse in the African Writers Series. While teaching at St Andrew’s, Oyo, he took an active part with Chinua Achebe and others in the pioneering Mbari Club. He went to the University of Leeds to do postgraduate work in literature under the enterprising Professor A. Norman Jeffares. He then became headmaster of the Anglican Grammar School at Otuo in the mid-west. It was Derry Jeffares who, describing him as one of the best of his recent MA students, suggested to Keith Sambrook that Aig Higo might well be interested in becoming a publisher.

Aig Higo became manager and publisher of Heinemann Educational Books (Nigeria) in January 1965. Keith Sambrook’s story of his appointment is in the Nigeria chapter (p. 4). In the Heinemann tradition, although an arts graduate, he proved to be an enterprising science publisher with the publication of the Nigerian Integrated Science Project. By 1972 the business had grown so much that he determined that it was essential to make the heavy investment needed to build a warehouse. He took close personal control of the design of the most elegant warehouse in the publishers’ enclave in Jericho, Ibadan, alongside Oxford University Press and Evans Brothers. He handled the opportunities of the Nigerian Indigenisation Decree with an imaginative offer of shares to authors, educationists, religious organisations, and university staff. This expansion was just in time to take advantage of the growth of Nigeria’s oil industry which enabled the government to spend 25 per cent of Nigeria’s GDP on education. There was investment in Universal Primary Education (UPE) and a phenomenal expansion of secondary schools and universities. He brought in Akin Thomas from Cambridge University Press and appointed him as editorial director. Akin Thomas took up a position at the Nigerian apex of the editorial triangle; a great many of the most trenchant reports came from Aig Higo himself.

Aig Higo was chairman of the Nigerian Publishers Association when rivalry between book companies was at its most fierce. This fiercely competitive period of expansion led to over-spending and the closure of the Nigerian foreign exchanges in April 1982. This had the advantage that Heinemann Educational Books (Nigeria) had to print and publish more of its own books in the country, which resulted in the active encouragement of poets, playwrights and novelists. He retired and became chairman in 1994.

Aig Higo gave a job to one particular young man just out of school, let him go off to do a science degree at the University of Ife, and then rehired him. This was Ayo Ojeniyi, who succeeded Aig Higo as managing director. He organised the publication of Issues in Book Publishing in Nigeria in 2005 on the occasion of Chief Aig Higo’s seventieth birthday. In it he lists among Aig Higo’s honours: Honorary Fellow of the Nigerian Academy of Letters, Honorary Life Member of Science Teachers Association of Nigeria, Fellow of the Nigerian Institute of Management and of the Nigerian Institute of Publishers, Knight of St Christopher of the Anglican Church (Nigerian Communion) and Afimoseso of Ibadanland.

James Currey

James Currey’s publishing apprenticeship proved to be relevant to the running of the African Writers Series from 1967 to 1984. He worked from 1959 to 1964 for Oxford University Press in Cape Town in the period from the Sharpeville massacre to the Rivonia trial. Through his additional work designing the radical monthly The New African, he came to first know writers of resistance such as Dennis Brutus, Bessie Head and Alex la Guma. In 1961 he drove all the office equipment for the liberal newspaper Contact to safety in Swaziland. The more frustrated he became by South Africa the more excited he became by the writing to the north. In July 1964 he enabled the editor of The New African to escape from South Africa by leaving him on a Norwegian sugar ship to Canada and leaping over the side (p. 187). After his own escape, he ran the Three Crowns series and the African academic list for Oxford University Press in London from 1965 to 1967.

James Currey was born in England in 1936. He was educated at Kingswood School, Bath and Wadham College, Oxford. His family connections made him curious about the realities of the regime in South Africa. His poet father and writer mother were both born in South Africa. A forebear, who went to Natal in 1849, started a newspaper and wrote cantankerous articles in The Natal Witness about the colonial government’s treatment of the Zulus.

He went to work with Keith Sambrook and Alan Hill on 1 April 1967 when the African Writers Series already had a flying start. He was also responsible for the school and university textbook list. Among much other publishing, Keith Sambrook and he also started the Caribbean Writers Series and Arab Authors. Indebtedness, following the closure of the Nigerian foreign exchanges in April 1982, led the new owners of Heinemann to decimate publishing on Africa.

In 1985 James and Clare Currey set up their own imprint. James Currey Publishers has established itself as a leading publisher of academic work on Africa. He has probably published more books on the history of the Africans themselves than existed when he read history at Oxford; these include the eight-volume UNESCO General History of Africa. The work he has published on African writing includes The Companion to African Literatures which has been endlessly valuable in providing detail for this book. The African Studies Associations of both Canada and the US have recognised the contribution of the firm to the publication of African studies. The same recognition was given in 2008 by the African Literature Association in the US. He is a vice-president of the Royal African Society and has been seconded as the publishing specialist to the Council of the African Studies Association of the United Kingdom.

Henry Chakava

Henry Chakava’s contribution to the African Writers Series also appears throughout the book with his reports on, objections to, and support for books from all over Africa. The East African chapter (p. 85) shows how Henry Chakava turned it into the Series of first choice in East Africa, as it already was in West Africa. His bravery in the period of the autocratic rule of Moi, in both political and commercial terms, is recorded in the section on Ngũgĩ (p. 113). In particular he made us all engage with the problems of how to use published writing to record the continent’s oral literature.

Henry Chakava was born in 1946 in western Kenya. He was educated at the Friends’ School, Kamusinga, and went on to the renowned Literature department of the University of Nairobi which was run with great inspiration by Ngũgĩ and Taban lo Liyong. He was awarded a first-class degree in Literature and Philosophy. He had begun postgraduate work when, in 1972, Bob Markham offered him a job as an editor at Heinemann Educational Books in Nairobi. He spent the winter of 1973 in London working with Keith Sambrook and James Currey at the Heinemann Educational Books offices in Mayfair. He lodged with the South African exile publisher Ros de Lanerolle (p.xvii), went to a course at the London College of Printing and learnt the skills of the publisher’s party.

At the age of only 30 he took over as managing director from Bob Markham. In 1985, in the period when the Heinemann Group had four owners in five years, he started a process which led in 1992 to the formation of East African Educational Publishers (EAEP) as a company totally owned by Kenyans. It is now one of the largest indigenous publishers on the continent.

He has founded and worked for regional and international book trade organisations to get African governments to appreciate the strategic value of publishing. He was, for ten years between 1982 and 1992, chairman of the Kenya Publishers Association. He led the successful campaign which ended the state monopoly in textbook publishing in Kenya and East Africa.

He has contributed to or written some thirty books. A Decade of Publishing in Kenya: One Man’s Experience 1977–1987 (ABPR Oxford 1988) has been of particular value in the writing of this book. Among many awards is an honorary doctorate from Oxford Brookes University, which runs the internationally renowned publishing course.

The advisers

In this book it rapidly becomes apparent how the publishers depended on an army of advisers and readers to present formal reports and flesh out the potential in hopeful manuscripts. Many of the advisers also acted as editors in rewriting, editing and preparing manuscripts for typesetting,

Keith Sambrook and I came to depend in particular upon a consistency of voice and a steadying nerve from the South African exile publisher Ros Ainslie, who usually used her married name Ros de Lanerolle to sign reports and letters. She worked in Cape Town at the turn of the 1950s and 1960s on Africa South, founded and edited by Ronald Segal who in exile ran the Modern African Library for Penguin; she edited some of the titles in that collection which was a non-fiction parallel to the African Writers Series. She worked for the ANC in London and, as she approached fiction from a political stance, this meant that she favoured work of social consciousness. She became, before her early death, managing director of The Women’s Press.

We used the skills of two novelists working in Britain. Richard Lister was a metallurgist who had turned to the writing of travel books and novels and had had stories published in The New Yorker, Punch and Atlantic Monthly. He could almost always quietly win the confidence of a writer because he showed professional respect for what that writer was trying to achieve. He proved himself the ‘chum’ whom Bessie Head needed to work on the final draft for The Question of Power. John Wyllie was a Canadian who had been in the RAF during the second world war; Doubleday published a sequence of his detective stories in which, unusually for those days, the detective Dr Quarshie was black. I knew I could always call on his skills as a ‘plotsmith’; I would ask him to suggest possibilities to the author of a promising manuscript where he could see a story struggling to get out. His part in the Dambudzo Marechera saga is an example of heroic failure.

Consideration of the work from certain countries in Africa came to depend strongly on the advice of key individuals. The academic Robert Fraser, now at the Open University, is author of several books including West African Poetry (Cambridge University Press 1986) and The Novels of Ayi Kwei Armah (Heine-mann 1980). His reports show a firmness of insight which was of importance in handling writers of poetic originality from Ghana, Sierra Leone and The Gambia. Akin Thomas, as editorial director in Ibadan, commissioned and forwarded a flow of distinguished advice from academics in the rapidly expanding Nigerian university system. When one reads reports by Molara Ogundipe-Leslie, Michael Echeruo and many others, one is again and again delighted by the way that their opinions lifted our understanding of new work, as much from other parts of Africa as from Nigeria itself.

Henry Chakava in Nairobi, in sending London and Ibadan a flow of his own reports and assessments, depended very heavily on the skilled advice of the writers Laban Erapu and Richard Ntiru. However, it was the reports from Simon Gikandi which immediately stood out from the time when he first went to work with Henry Chakava as a student; I continued to call on him for opinions while he was working on his doctorate at Edinburgh. After several other North American appointments, he is now a professor at Princeton.

We depended on advisers to help us choose and translate representative work in French, Arabic and Portuguese. The chapter on the writing of negritude in French shows the creative role of Clive Wake, a South African, and of Abiola Irele, a Nigerian, both with doctorates from the Sorbonne. Advice, suggestions and translations also came from John Reed, who taught in Rhodesia and Zambia, and Gerald Moore, who was at both Ibadan and Makerere universities in their formative years. These four were the main translators of work from French in the first ten years. Later Adrian Adams who lived in Senegal worked on Sembene’s Le dernier de l’Empire. Denys Johnson-Davies got us to appreciate the reasons for developing the Arab Authors series out of the Egyptian and Sudanese titles in the African Writers Series. He is renowned as a translator of singular literary skill and he gave us advice on the cultural, as well as linguistic, ability of other translators from Arabic in portraying work through the medium of English. Michael Wolfers was central to our translation of work from Angola; we also benefited from the enthusiasm of historians of Portuguese Africa and in particular from the knowledge of Tamara Bender.

A network of South African writers, journalists and academics, mostly in Britain, gave opinions on manuscripts and edited scripts from across the whole of Africa. Certain names make repeated appearances in the consideration of manuscripts throughout this book. Randolph Vigne, editor of The New African, put us in touch with Bessie Head. Cosmo Pieterse introduced us to numerous playwrights, artists, poets and journalists from all over the continent. Hilary Mutch was a young South African working in the BBC Africa Service, who reliably produced sharp and constructive reports on novels whether about Robben Island or Biafra. Several South African writers – among them C.J. ‘Jonty’ Driver, Myrna Blumberg and Mary Benson – went out of their way to make sure that the literary editors of the London dailies, Sundays and weeklies reviewed the work coming from the continent. Doris Lessing was central to our work on the publication of Zimbabwean writers. Academics in South Africa such as Guy Butler, Colin Gardner, Stephen Gray and Tim Couzens fed us with ideas. Arthur Ravenscroft was among the teachers in the new Commonwealth literature course at the University of Leeds at which Ngũgĩ, Wole Soyinka and Aig Higo did postgraduate work.

Our connections were very strong with the African literature courses at the new plate-glass universities. Among the academics who helped us were Alastair Niven at Stirling and Lan White at York. At the University of Kent at Canterbury Clive Wake, Lyn Innes and Louis James were enthusiastic builders of this newly popular subject.

Bob Windsor, who taught in a Ugandan school, was commissioned to edit the Heinemann Secondary Readers from shorter scripts originally submitted for the African Writers Series. We got this wrong in design and marketing. Our colleagues in Africa advised us against any reference to the Series itself and after I left a new series was successfully launched as the Junior African Writers Series (JAWS).

The editors

The names of many of Keith Sambrook’s and my colleagues who edited and produced books appear in quotations from the correspondence with individual authors throughout the book.

Ann Scorgie joined us in the late 1960s as an editor from William Heinemann and was very well regarded by authors such as Dennis Brutus. She decided that she ought to have a university degree and Clive Wake found her a place at the University of Kent as a mature student. He told me that her interventions lifted the class and she amazed the students just out of school by arguing with her teachers and correcting them about the latest developments in African writing. She had come to university with more up-to-date information on the fast-moving subject of African literature than her teachers.

Penny Butler, as my deputy in the hyperactive period of the late 1970s and early 1980s, made the African and Caribbean department the one in which people sought jobs. She managed the flow of the textbooks, which were technically far more complicated than books in the African Writers Series. As the Zimbabwean chapter (p. 275 shows, she became deeply involved with Zimbabwe Publishing House’s plans as well as with textbook publishing for Botswana, Lesotho and Swaziland. I thought so well of Ingrid Crewdson’s handling of authors and of her book design that I got her to join us when we started James Currey Publishers. Susie Home kept enormous numbers of new books and covers flowing through the printers and in recent years has joined Keith Sambrook in teaching the history of the book at the University of London. John Myers worked with us until he was head-hunted by Zimbabwe Publishing House and has since worked in Geneva on publishing work for various UN agencies in Geneva.

Our correspondence with the authors was typed, carefully ordered and despatched at one time or another by several secretaries; it was their work which has made the department’s files such an asset at the University of Reading archives. The most famous secretary was Lisa Coleman who, over a period of six years, came to be as familiar to the authors as the editors. Visiting authors first turned to her for all sorts of help. The rest of the firm went quiet over the academic and school break of July and August. However that was the season when even more of our authors arrived on the doorstep from all over Africa and America with requests for advances on royalties and problems to be solved over travel, accommodation and shopping. There were many unexpected requests. Penny Butler remembers taking Professor Adu Boahen to a ship’s chandlers to buy hurricane lanterns because Ghana had no power. One Monday morning Akin Thomas from Ibadan told us he needed a million packets of crayons for a state order for colouring books.

Vicky Unwin was selected by the directors of Heinemann Educational Books as a trainee. Unlike the rest of us she had passed many of her formative years in Africa where both her parents had lived and worked. She demanded, to the annoyance of Heinemann’s top management, that she join the African and Caribbean department, which she took over when I left the firm at the end of 1984. She worked, as I did, for Heinemann Educational Books for 17 years. To her great credit in the era of debt she managed, with the support of John Watson and Tom Seavey at Heinemann Inc in the US, to keep new work and new translations appearing in the Series in spite of frequent changes of policy by the management of Heinemann Educational Books.

Selling the African Writers Series

The William Heinemann bookshop representatives were responsible for taking orders in the British general bookshops for the hardback novels by African writers and for the African Writers Series paperbacks. We did our best to respond to their requests to spend more on jacket artwork and to increase discounts. An elaborate form of torture was when I had to present the new titles in the Series at the sales conference on a heavy afternoon after the reps had had their final lunch following three days of hearing about Martin Gilbert’s latest Churchill volume, the delights of some celebrity biography, or the sweaty Africa in the latest novel by Wilbur Smith. At Heinemann Educational Books, with the arrogance of upstarts, we looked down on the middlebrow books which they were so successful at selling to the conservative bookshops which were their best customers.

In the late 1970s we realised that the bookshop market in Britain for Heine-mann academic books had steadily become different and more promising and that was where lay the interest in the African Writers Series. The appointment of Paul Richardson, as marketing director at Heinemann Educational Books in the late seventies, transformed the marketing of African books within Britain. As an editorial director he had built up the leading sociology list and so he knew, and I knew, that our books were being undersold in the British market.

Keith Sambrook and I, with Alan Hill’s support and Paul Richardson’s advice, had built up a list of academic books on Africa from the new universities in the continent which we were determined would rival the outstanding Longman list. In the 1960s the new generation of plate-glass universities in Britain had joined the ancient and redbrick foundations. Campus bookshops had sprung up and academic books needed different marketing. By this time we had the Caribbean Writers Series and Arab Authors to sell alongside the African Writers Series.

Helen Johns, the enthusiastic marketing manager, arranged window displays and exhibitions in bookshops from the University of Sussex to James Thin’s in Edinburgh. For a month nobody could walk downstairs in the elegant new Heffers bookshop, opposite Trinity College in Cambridge, without going through the mezzanine display of enlarged photographs of African authors amid generous numbers of their books. There were racks of multiple copies of all three series downstairs in the Norrington Room at Blackwells in Oxford, from which the buyers drew copies to supply libraries across the English-speaking world and in the oil-rich libraries of the Gulf. Dillons at the top of Gower Street was strategically placed near University College in the University of London and round the corner from the School of Oriental and African Studies and the Institute of Commonwealth Studies. Birkbeck College across the street was providing further education to many newcomers from the Commonwealth. Dillons found it valuable to have the African Writers Series stocked from floor to ceiling along with the critical series, Studies in African Literature. A whole new generation of radical and alternative bookshops were springing up in cities like Manchester, Bradford and Leicester as well as in parts of London like Balham and Brixton which had never been visited by the William Heinemann reps. The New Beacon bookshop in Finsbury Park, a pioneer of the 1960s, came into its own. The Africa Book Centre Bookshop in Covent Garden was just starting. A new injection of money and enthusiasm had been put into the education system with the appointment of multicultural advisers, especially in the big cities of the north and in the counties round London. The Inner London Educational Authority (ILEA) under Ken Livingstone stood out. Vicky Unwin worked with their advisers to provide help for the start of the Association of the Commonwealth Teachers of English (ATCALS) which mounted a campaign which eventually succeeded in getting books from the new Commonwealth on to British exam syllabuses. All the experience she built up at this time was to be vital in the years of the African book famine in the late 1980s when sales outside Africa in Britain, Europe, the Commonwealth and the US became vitally important to the survival of the Series.

Corinne Gotch in the publicity department of the Bedford Square offices gave a new impetus to publicity in the British market and promotion in the press which was needed to back the efforts of the sales department. The seasonal needs were relentless for catalogues, leaflets and publicity material to promote the African and Caribbean Series in the British, African and world markets; she had to extract copy from all the members of my department against fierce deadlines. (She was later to make such a success of promoting the activities of the Booksellers’ Association that her smiling face appeared almost weekly in The Bookseller.)

Mailing of this publicity material was the lifeblood of the list. The Series could not have survived without bookshop representation in Britain and Europe. The educational representatives in Nigeria and Kenya first and foremost visited schools. Keith Sambrook and our colleagues used to keep in touch when possible with the main bookshops on African visits. Much the most effective means of keeping in touch was the mailing of Advance Information Sheets (AISs), leaflets and catalogues. Mailing depended on the steady day-to-day additions and changes to mailing lists of accurate details for booksellers, government education departments, secondary schools and university departments in Britain, throughout the Commonwealth and mainland Europe. This was all handled at the Kings-wood warehouse by the promotions manager, David Allen. In the days before computers were affordable the mechanics were the much more laborious punched-card systems. There were a lot of countries in Africa which could not be visited regularly. Malawi had in the 1980s almost dropped off the list. I arrived in Lilongwe, the new South African-built capital, and visited the glass-clad education ministry. One of the inspectors asked solicitously about Mr Allen, with whom he conducted a regular correspondence over inspection copies of new textbooks and