En attendant que le bus explose by Thomté Ryam (February 2009).

© Éditions du Rocher

Nowadays there are publishers in almost all African countries, although publishing activity varies enormously from one country to another. The views of ACP publishers played an important role at the Culture and Development colloquium: organised by the European Commission in Brussels (1-3 April 2009), publishers, writers, associations and book fair organisers from ACP and EU countries discussed in specific workshops how the cultural industry should respond to both the requirements of the ACP public and to the interests of the public of the North.

Recorded data on the economic strength of the publishing sector in ACP countries is scant. Schoolbooks are the publications with the biggest sales (between 55 per cent and 70 per cent of the total). They constitute the most profitable part of the sector, but are generally limited to a few specialist local and foreign publishers or their local branches. Everybody knows that   with the exception of South Africa, Nigeria and Egypt   the African book industry is weak; and because support funds are lacking, few publishers take financial risks. Thus, writers who seek to establish themselves on the global stage have to find a publisher from the North (in colonial languages: New York, London, Paris, Lisbon), where they can find income as well as distribution, promotion, prizes and festivals. Another problem is the simple lack of bookshops, hence a lost opportunity to sell books. For example, there are 13 only bookshops in Mali, 11 in Burkina Faso, 215 in Senegal   of which 200 are small* – while in a country such as Italy there are 2,000. There is also a shortage of reading centres and libraries: even many large cities don’t have a library.

At the Brussels Colloquium ACP, participants found that the biggest handicap to greater production and improved marketing of African books lies in the lack of public policies and the weight of customs duties which penalise the circulation of books and raw materials (paper, ink or printer materials). In fact, the Florence Agreement (1950) and the Nairobi protocol (1976) on the importation of educational scientific and cultural materials have been signed by many countries but are not respected.

Some publishing houses from the francophone parts of Africa are recognised on a global level for the strategic role they have played in literary development since independence: Le Centre d'édition et de diffusion africaine (CEDA, Côte d’Ivoire); Les éditions Clé (Cameroon), Les Nouvelles éditions africaines du Sénégal (Néas) and the Nouvelles éditions ivoiriennes (NEI), Afrique-Éditions, in Kinshasa. The new African publishers are more dynamic and open to creating networks as tools to foster the development of publishing across the continent. They take risks on the new generation promoting reading education through innovative projects and circulating publications by motorbike, by bus or by boat… Together with editors from the North they produce co-editions available at cheaper prices to the public in the South: for example the collection Terres solidaires (with Le Serpent à plumes and Actes Sud) that publishes African authors’ novels at the price of 2-3000 F CFA, or Global Issues, a ‘fair book’ project of Ecosociété, a publisher from Quebec.

Various networks are active in the publications sector such as the National Associations of publishing companies, bookshop networks, and authors associations. We can cite Afrilivres, an association of French-language African publishers based in Cotonou (Benin) which is trying to develop a more egalitarian relationship with the North by making its publications visible and available to northern markets; the African Book Collective, a non-profit Oxford-based distribution outlet with 116 independent African publishers from 19 countries; the network of the International Alliance of Independent Publishers, which groups the publishers of four linguistic networks in ACP and EU areas; and the African Publishers Network (APNET) an Accra-based (Ghana)- pan-African organisation, which brings together national publishers’ associations “to strengthen indigenous publishing throughout Africa”. International associations work towards facilitating the presence of ACP publications in book fairs in the North, but participation remains surprisingly low. When we flip through the catalogues of recent Italian book fairs: at the Children’s Book Fair of Bologna (23-26 March 2009), where 66 countries exhibited, it’s obvious that the African presence is very weak, represented by just South African, Tanzanian and Egyptian publishers.

* APNET – ADEA, Study project on Intra African Book Trade.

Suggested weblinks