This article explores the difficult, entangled, high risk and yet, hopeful journey of publishing on the continent, a journey exemplified by Somali scholar, Jama Musse Jama’s vision of literature and the arts as a site of reconstruction and liberation.
Dr. Jama Musse Jama – An Ethno-Mathematical Blueprint
Author and ethno-mathematician, Jama Musse Jama is also a renowned cultural activist and a “New African Publisher” at Ponte Invisibile, Hargeysa, Somaliland. In our 2021 interview, he asserts the multiple “social tsunamis” Africa has experienced as the single most revealing context for understanding Africa’s development and her struggles – including the struggles around cultural production and the armed conflicts that make the arts essential.
He cites slavery as Africa’s first tsunami. Colonialism, the second, was “a mechanism that impoverished entire societies in terms of resources, destroyed their systems of governance and knowledge production, denigrated their art, culture and indigenous languages, and finally, created senseless and harmful borders and frontiers among nations.”
The third, he says, is neo-colonial injustice by global superpowers that continues to impoverish African countries. The fourth, cultural imperialism, seeks “to maintain the exploitative system under different guises and to sustain unequal relations between developed societies and the developing world.”
The fifth tsunami is the ongoing cycle of war and terrorism in the Horn of Africa: the violence that tore Somalia apart and led to Somaliland’s secession in 1991.
The result of persistent armed conflict, the colossal damage to human life and to material property, provoked in Jama a passion to help rebuild Somaliland. The nation had seceded from Somalia in 1991 shortly after the fall of President Siad Barre.
In 2008, he committed to the cause, leaving Italy where he lived, to return to Hargeysa. His goal was to reposition literacy, indigenous languages and the arts as the healing centre of life in the post-war state. He established the Hargeysa Cultural Centre (HCC) and its publishing arm, Ponte Invisibile. It specializes in translations into Somali of the works of important writers from across the world and translations into English of the most prominent Somali poets and thinkers. The crown of his interventions is arguably the renowned Hargeysa International Book Fair (HIBF). While he encountered resistance at first, he was eventually able to inspire his people with his vision of the arts not as commercial commodities but as a tool to expand the Somali frame of reference, an instrument of cultural development. Thanks to HCC’s efforts, panel discussions on crucial issues, documentary filmmaking, painting, photography, creative writing, dancing and theatrical performances, are now embedded in the nation’s cultural repertoire. For this scholar, “infusing humanity into nation-building”, the arts which may even “limit extremism” are a pathway to empowerment, liberation, self-definition in a fully sovereign Somaliland.
Hargeysa, Kigali, Nairobi, Cape Town, Abuja and Lagos. These are just some of the African cities witnessing the rise of a new publishing cohort. Like Jama Musse Jama, these “New Africian Publishers” are leading the charge in their countries, and like him, they recognize that cultural sovereignty is not a luxury but a cornerstone of nation building. Many of them are women brilliantly reimagining the infrastructure of African storytelling, production and distribution.
Women Publishers: Carrying the Flame
Imprint Africa: Conversations with African Women Publishers offers an unprecedented opportunity to meet them all in one place. Published by a triumvirate of African publishers, Huza Press (Rwanda), Paivapo Publishers, (Kenya) and Modjaji Books (South Africa), edited by Stanford University’s Joel Cabrita and a collective of her students, the anthology gathers interviews with nine interlocutors. They are: Ellah Wakatama, Editor-at-large at Canongate Books and Chair of the Caine Prize; Bibi Bakare-Yusuf (Cassava Republic Press, Nigeria/UK); Zukiswa Wanner (Paivapo Publishers,) ; Ainehi Edoro (Brittle Paper, Nigeria); Louise Umutoni (Huza Press); Lola Shoneyin (Ouida Books, Nigeria); Colleen Higgs (Modjaji Books); Goretti Kyomuhendo (FEMRITE, Uganda) and Thabiso Mahlape (Blackbird Books, South Africa).
If the women’s stories are riveting, their reality is stark: life as an African publisher is a daily assault course riddled with financial hurdles and weak infrastructure. That they are able to produce world-class books is a testament to their passion and doggedness, responding with grit to the truth Margaret Busby, the pioneering publisher, articulates in her Foreword: “…whoever controls publishing controls the narrative’’. The urgent desire to wrest from the Global North its hegemonic control of African narratives, is a pillar sustaining the creative and logistical labour behind their respected presses.
Imprint Africa is home to compelling narratives about their vast lived experience. The conversations deserve a wide African audience of general readers, policy makers, book industry practitioners and a global readership of people with an interest in African literature and a democratic conscience. Colonial legacies, distribution woes, debts of race, the one-time chasm between writers in Africa and her diaspora, language parity, gendering our interaction with digital culture, the voices of ordinary women transfigured by the power of publishing – this is a mere sliver of the topics they broach.
The final part of my article considers the structural challenges inherited from the colonial era – those the women feel most acutely as they strive for both cultural and commercial success. Alongside their presentation of environmental deficits and obstacles to progress, it is necessary that I provide brief historical commentary, because to understand their struggles is to confront the unfinished architecture of colonialism, not as memory – but as system.
Troubling Colonial Inheritances: Toward a New Literary Silk Road
When Louise Umutoni laments the distributional barriers obstructing the reach of her Huza Press’s books, it is important to examine their historical roots in colonial boundaries that fractured Africa’s natural cultural and linguistic regions. These boundaries replaced organic trade routes with restrictive national borders. The continent’s publishing markets therefore developed in isolation from one another. The continuing effect is that a book printed in Kigali or Lagos faces insurmountable logistical and bureaucratic customs barriers before reaching Accra or Nairobi. This makes intra-African circulation harder than export to Europe. The colonial blueprint for external, not internal circulation still governs the movement of African books. (Imprint Africa. Conversations with African Women Publishers, p.119 -121)
Ainehi Edoro is the founder of Brittle Paper – likely the most important curatorial site in contemporary African literature. When she mentions the “tonnes of book lists (Brittle Paper creates) throughout the year (including) the anticipated list of the year and the notable books list at the end of the year,” we are reminded that the paper’s efforts to floodlight African books, helps retrieve books published in Africa from the shadows. Africa-based writers owe a debt of gratitude to BP – its annual lists help scale the hurdle of the exclusion of Africa- published literature from international markets. (Imprint Africa. Conversations with African Women Publishers, p.101)
In our 2021 interview, Jama Musse Jama and I discussed the crisis of book distribution on the continent. His recommendations and contextualizing make compelling reading. Inter alia, he references local bottlenecks, “further militated by international intervention with its powerful potentialities coupled with heinous machinations”
When Goretti Kyomuhendo talks about the absence of writers based on the continent from international festivals because of travel and visa restrictions, I think of Jama’s warning which illuminates the larger structural asymmetries the women navigate daily. (Imprint Africa. Conversations with African Women Publishers, p.172)
Lola Shoneyin’s investments of time and energy into professionalizing printing in Nigeria raise the spectre of colonial-era extractiveness. In that extractive economic model, intellectual and cultural production flowed outward to the metropole, a phenomenon that not only persists today but has gained new momentum with the global appetite for African creativity. Her efforts to strengthen local value chains in publishing speak directly to the struggle for cultural sovereignty and to the vision of decent work and inclusive growth at the heart of SDG 8.
Printing, publishing finance, and book design industries were never indigenized. The result is that today, African publishers still rely heavily on imported paper, printing services (often from Europe, India or the UAE), and foreign capital – all of which raise costs, slow production and limit autonomy. (Imprint Africa. Conversations with African Women Publishers, p.139)
Ellah Wakatama lives and works in the UK. When she insists that, “…the centre of my world is going to be where I say it is, not where the Western canon has already said it is”, she is echoing the spirit of Nii Ayikwei Parkes’s Tale of the Blue Bird which she published. In that novel, the author italicizes only, “the things that were being said or thought in English, the rest of it we had to assume was either Twi or Ga, both of which are Ghanaian languages”.
When, today, Wakatama refuses to italicize indigenous languages in English texts, we are fired up, aligning ourselves with her spirit of ‘iconoclasm’.
Mainstream our mother tongues or at least include ‘vernacular’ registers in intellectual discourse and texts. What would sovereignty look like in this context?
Sovereignty would look like the “royal” status of colonial languages dismantled, their pretensions to supremacy superseded by the parity of mother tongues.
With his groundbreaking collection of essays, Decolonising the Mind: The Politics of Language (1986), Ngugi wa Thiong’o ushered us not only into a decolonial moment but into memory. The essays remind us that the imposition of European languages was not merely a means of communication but a deliberate strategy of control, what he calls “the colonization of the mind.” By privileging English, French, and Portuguese in schools and administration, colonial powers alienated Africans from our own cultures and ways of knowing. They taught us to view our mother tongues as obstacles to “true” progress. The theme of the book is the function of indigenous languages in our development. Reclaiming them is essential to reclaiming cultural identity and restoring self-worth, since “language, any language, has a dual character: it is both a means of communication and a carrier of culture.”
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Confronting Racism, Asserting Pan-Africanism & Reclaiming Global Space
Let us visit South Africa. Colleen Higgs of Modjaji Books is a white South African woman whosecurrent focusis “toredress the way in which women, particularly Black women, have been silenced.” (Imprint Africa. Conversations with African Women Publishers, p. 156)
Even her industry peers need Higgs’s interventions. Founder of Blackbird Books, Thabiso Mahlape, was once blanked at an industry event by a white CEO of a leading retailer who talked to everyone else. As an independent black distributer, getting through doors is difficult – the result of her African name. What a contrast with her experience at white-led Jacana Media – where she began her publishing career. There, reality was wide-open doors. (Imprint Africa. Conversations with African Women Publishers, p.186 -187)
Their stories remind us that racism is stitched into the fabric of the Rainbow Nation.
From South Africa but based in Nairobi, Kenya, Zukiswa Wanner is the founder of online festival Afrolit Sans Frontières. Her publishing zeal is pan-African: “I have made a very deliberate choice as a publisher to speak to the continent”. (Imprint Africa. Conversations with African Women Publishers, p.86 – 87)
This pride finds its twin in Bibi Bakare-Yusuf’s flint-eyed reversal of the imperial trend: the colonial subject setting up shop – Cassava Republic Press – in the metropole. It is a strategic infiltration of the centre and an inspiring act of intellectual insurgency. What she is doing is reclaiming symbolic space in an inequitable global system. (Imprint Africa. Conversations with African Women Publishers, p.70)
Both Wanner and Bakare-Yusuf remind us to fight back, to draw the borders which define our ethos, to grow a defiant, purpose-driven spirit.
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From the North to the South: Towards a New Silk Road
It hurts to hear Lola Shoneyin complain about African publishers having to grovel to acquire the rights to publish books written by African authors:
“…The discrimination we endure from publishers is horrid. UK publishers who happily sell the rights of books to other English-speaking markets like America will suddenly get jittery when those same rights are sought for an English-speaking market in Africa…We’ve …sold the Arabic rights (of An Abundance of Scorpions by Hadiza Isma el-Rufai) to Rewayat in the United Arab Emirates. It’s almost like creating a new literary Silk Road, because the current one has become oppressive. I was on a panel at the Sharjah International Book Fair in the UAE, and I mentioned that denying African publishers the opportunity to acquire the rights of books (authored by Africans) would eventually leave Western publishers with egg on their faces” (Imprint Africa. Conversations with African Women Publishers, p.141)
I invite those who wish to reflect further on Shoneyin’s vision of a new Silk Road crafted by the Sharjah Book Authority, to read my review of the 2019 Africa Rising conference in Nairobi, sponsored by the SBA and my 2025 interview with Bodour Al Qasimi, then Chair of the SBA, in which we discuss the inaugural Sharjah Festival of African Literature (January 2025).
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The “new literary Silk Road” is a striking metaphor. It provides a natural pivot from the publishers’ local quests for sovereignty to the transcontinental currents now shaping the future of publishing. Chief among them is Sharjah’s exponential rise on the African literary horizon. It signals a reconfiguration of global publishing geographies: a movement of literary power southward and eastward.
While Shoneyin’s co-publishing experience with Rewayat (an imprint of Kalimat Group, Sharjah) is clearly a positive one, it must be emphasized that many independent publishers across Africa do not share the international exposure that strengthens her position as a book trader. These small presses face a distinct set of challenges – chief among them, the absence of strong international networks and the crippling lack of rights-trading expertise. [Through the establishment of the Africa Rights Forum (TARF) at the Ake Arts and Book Festival, Shoneyin is making a laudable effort to change this.] And to cap it all, as the Imprint Africa interviews underline, there is the chronic problem of under-capitalization.
With Al Qasimi’s forecast of the torrent of co-publications and translations to come, my hope is that Lola Shoneyin’s experience has established a precedent for healthy collaborations between Africa’s small presses and their far better-supported and savvier Arab counterparts.
There remains the risk that such partnerships could reproduce old asymmetries with African publishers functioning mainly as distributors rather than equal partners in African markets made so appetizing by the opportunities of the African Continental Free Trade Area. (AfCFTA)
As Kadija Sesay reminds us in her Afterword to Imprint Africa, “our advances in publishing will be more productive once we have undertaken thorough research regarding what has taken place before and what we can learn from it.” Her words recall the necessity of historical consciousness and understanding as African publishers navigate the shifting terrain of postcolonial and transcontinental book production.
It continues to be a joy to witness and participate in African publishing’s reach for sovereignty. But as we journey towards our Promised Land, only time will tell whether the speculative new Silk Road – Africa-to-the-world-via-Sharjah – will be less oppressive and more fruitful than the prevailing ‘Euro-American publishing industrial complex’.
*First published at www.bordersliteratureonline.net.
Olatoun Gabi-Williams is a Nigerian journalist, social advocate and convener of public campaigns centered on literature, child welfare, sustainable development and Alzheimer’s disease awareness.
