EHF speaks to Stephanie Kitchen of the African Books Collective – who sells, promotes and distributes our titles. Stephanie talks about the history of the African Books Collective and how they are making books from across Africa available around the world. She also discusses the visibility of African writers and explores additional measures to amplify African voices on the global stage.
Stephanie, can you please introduce yourself to our readers – maybe talk about how you became involved in the African Books Collective?
Stephanie Kitchen: I serve as the (part time) executive director of African Books Collective (ABC), a role I’ve held since 2022. But I have a longer history with the organisation, working for it from 2001-07. I had completed a Modern Languages degree in the year 2000 and subsequently spent three months in West Africa – Burkina Faso and Mali. I got interested in the literature from that region – memorably reading Mariama Bâ’s Une si longue lettre, for example, in an edition published by Les nouvelles editions africaines, printed in Abidjan in 1996. I still have the book. It is faded, the pages are falling out. But I was blown away by what I later learnt was an early francophone African literary text to be translated across the globe. I returned to Oxford and applied for publishing jobs. I decided against working at Oxford University Press and instead accepted a job at ABC. I have had no regrets!
Book publishing and distribution has suffered terribly since the 1980s – there are obviously many reasons for this, but one must be the impact of structural adjustment, and the deep and long-running economic collapse in many parts of the continent. How do you see these developments? I don’t want to paint a ‘golden age’ but there was a time when pan-African book publishing on the continent was more than a pipedream?
Structural adjustment in the mid-1980s devastated a nascent publishing scene, particularly at the continent’s universities. There was steep decline in academic production. One study shows that sub-Saharan Africa lost around a third of its share of global output in the 1990s. [1] Thandika Mkandawire referred to ‘book hunger’ induced by SAPs. The historian Michael Crowder excoriated and campaigned for remedies to deal with what he termed a ‘book famine’. The publishers Hans Zell and Henry Chakava warned against the continent becoming a ‘bookless society’.
It is easy to quibble with such alarmist language today. Things have undoubtedly changed. But only a very small number of countries (including Botswana and South Africa – under apartheid) were not directly impacted by SAPs. Publishing, particularly university press publishing, did collapse. Among the founder publishers of ABC in 1990, there were seven university presses, another two joining shortly after. Today, none of these university presses are actively publishing books.
As for a ‘golden age’, you are right; of course, that never really existed. The British multinational publishers that had dominated in the colonial period actually expanded their operations in countries like Kenya, Tanzania and Nigeria in the first decade after independence. A few publishers, most notably Henry Chakava in Kenya, and Walter Bgoya in Tanzania, valiantly challenged this situation, indigenising a great deal of East African publishing and literary output. But then aid donors, stepping into the breach left by SAPs, brought a new set of problems. The World Bank opted to provide ‘aid’ and ‘access’ (textbooks for kids, free access to journals) instead of supporting endogenous publishing. In the case of research journals at universities, the focus was on providing access, through the internet, to globally published resources and promoting open access – rather than supporting endogenous research production and publication. This is a simplification, but in broad terms it’s how I see these developments.
How does ABC fit into this picture? It provides an extremely impressive, one-stop-platform for African publishers to sell their books and promote and distribute African books around the world.
ABC was founded in 1990 after a period of gestation in the 1980s. It grew from the work of Henry Chakava and Walter Bgoya, also CODESRIA, that had flourished in the 1980s, as a self-help initiative to support endogenous publishing. It came out of the crisis induced by SAPs and subsequent meetings held in London organised by Crowder, Zell, African publishers and donors, although Zell in particular had been involved in earlier work in the 1970s through his Hans Zell Publishers imprint and wider work. The Swedish Sida was a significant donor. ABC was dependent on core funding until around 2007 – when donor priorities again changed. Nowadays, it is largely a self-financing non-profit organisation, distributing print and ebooks from African publishers, and remitting 50% of all proceeds back to the publishers themselves.
There is a significant element of ABC which addresses the decolonial agenda – so books from a broad array of publishers in every part of the continent, can be advertised, promoted and sold on the ABC platform. Can you talk us through this process?
In the 1990s-2000s, the focus was on promoting and supporting indigenous and independent publishing. Well before today’s ‘decolonial agenda’, ABC was connected to the continent’s liberation movements and literatures.
ABC works digitally with publishers across the continent to take their titles into its catalogue and to make print and ebooks available to libraries, bookshops and individuals wherever they may be. Our major markets are in North America and Western Europe (the USA, the UK and Germany are particularly important). At present, we are expanding our list of Swahili titles and are endeavouring to work with more publishers from francophone and lusophone Africa, where particular challenges exist and postcolonial legacies remain.
However, because of certain issues of distribution on the continent, ABC is located in the north, in the UK specifically. Does this create any tensions in the work of ABC as a trans-African publishing platform?
ABC was established in Oxford in 1990, a centre of international publishing, to bring its publishers’ books into the global literary and academic marketplace. ABC has even been read as a direct retort to the British multinationals’ presence in Africa (‘if they are in Africa, we can be in Oxford…’) [2] But it was also a pre-digital time. To ‘distribute’ books in 1990 meant shipping, warehousing and physical distribution thousands of books. At one time, ABC even had an outlet in the USA through Michigan State University Press.
These circumstances have materially changed. ABC is now predominantly a virtual operation with a very small warehouse in West Oxfordshire. But the distributional challenges in the continent itself are stubbornly unchanged. Ebooks may be overcoming some barriers, but despite some notably initiatives, they have not yet taken off in the continent. Nor has digital print on demand taken root, which has been a vital technology for ABC and other smaller independent publishers in the global North.
I think it is fair to say there have always been and still are ‘tensions’ in these arrangements. Notably in the earlier period (1990-2005) there were conflicts with donors about ABC’s operations, location and staffing.[3] The publishers themselves, that work closely with ABC, tend to appreciate its endeavours and support its Oxford location as being close to major publishing markets. The question of re-locating, or more realistically co-locating, ABC in the African continent is a live one, worthy of discussion. The challenges of doing this are well documented: of distribution within the continent itself, the logic of ABC remaining close to its major markets, funding – always a problem – and the somewhat awkward question of ‘where’ in Africa ABC might be based. There are other examples of individual Nigerian literature and journal publishers that have succeeded by straddling Nigerian and UK based locations; there are some Cameroonian publishers with a foothold in the US. But nothing else on the scale of ABC’s operation.
Editor House Facility has – with ABC’s invaluable help – recently made our books available – current titles, and all forthcoming ones – as eBooks. This immediately makes our books affordable on the continent. Can you talk to us about the development and uptake of eBooks across Africa, and how this helps to confront issues of physical distribution and costs of potentially unaffordable hardcopies?
The digital turn, or revolution, in publishing brought about by the internet meant that ABC could make its publishers books available anywhere in the world, provided there was an adequate postal service. ABC continues to benefit from harnessing distributed printing in all continents of the world (latterly possible in South Africa). Africa still remains a small market for the company, specifically because we don’t encroach on the publishers’ own domestic markets, more generally because of lacking resources, in university libraries, for books. Ebooks have the potential to overcome some of these barriers, but perhaps not all. Many publishers are embracing the production and distribution of ebooks. Some are less convinced by the economies or are cautious about the impact on print sales – of core textbooks, for example. There are some ebook suppliers in the continent that ABC works with including NENA, Youscribe and Snapplify. Some of the private universities are licensing content through global aggregators, such as Clarivate. ABC makes available over 2,500 ebooks through these channels, but most of our sales, with the exception of South African universities, tend to be to the global North. There is every reason to hope this will change. Individuals can access ebooks, appropriately priced, through their devices. Here, in some contexts, publishers fear piracy, a longstanding issue linked to pricing and availability. Jude Fokwang, the publisher of the Cameroonian Spears Media, writes ‘We actually think that we can capture the African market. One of the ways in which we envisage doing that is through digital publishing platforms, so we want to see more of our ebooks in Africa. But not plagiarized!’[4]
Please tell us what you envisage for ABC in the coming years, where is publishing on the continent going, and what is the impact of AI, and how do you plan to equip the company for the challenges ahead?
In the last couple of years, ABC has consolidated and grown its ebook production and distribution. It has done vital and long overdue IT upgrades to its systems and websites (a new phase is being finalised). This is difficult and expensive work for a small, largely self-financing collective that ringfences 50% of sales income for African publishers. But keeping up with publishing information technologies, particularly the distribution of metadata, ONIX etc. is critical to our operations. We are diversifying our catalogue, adding more books in Swahili and other African languages, and taking on francophone and lusophone publishers. We are particularly keen to work with new or revived university presses where ABC has its roots. We launched the African Journals Initiative in partnership with Pluto Journals to provide publishing and distribution services for a small number of the continent’s academic journals.
Looking back at almost 25 years with ABC, and your own working life, what have been the greatest professional achievements in the company?
This is of course difficult to answer. Publishing is in many ways a humbling activity – all one can really do is ‘put stuff out there’ – books, journals, blogs … . We never really know what impact it has, though anyone for whom books and ideas are central to their lives intuitively understands its importance. Every few months, I will feel that an individual author’s book I have been involved in editing, or publishing, or distributing, ‘actually matters’, or ‘makes a real difference’, standing out from other works that contribute in aggregate. ABC is trying to challenge a structural imbalance in global publishing – that might sounds grand, but in practice it is quite simple. Just last week, for example, we were approached by a literary and academic publisher in N’Djamena, Chad, seeking a global outlet for their books. ABC has no publishers from Chad (or from Angola…). Such things, that happen all the time, remind me of how worthwhile this work is. As for ‘greatest professional achievements in the company’, perhaps these are not really about awards, but about ‘steadying the storms’ – that do occasionally brew.
What would you say to new writers and publishers on the continent, about how to remain relevant, and to get their work read and distributed?
There is every reason for writers from the continent from a younger generation to be optimistic; the literary scene is buoyant, as we discussed at a recent London Book Fair event. For academic writers, it is clear that much needs to be done: to finance, strengthen and promote high quality academic publishing. ABC does what it can to engage in programmes that address that – including working with Editor House Facility in Uganda. Of course, there are many conflicting short-term priorities for individual academic authors. But the long-game has to be to support the continent’s own publishing infrastructures – as ABC and its member publishers have endeavoured to do for over 30 years.
Stephanie Kitchen is Executive Director of the African Books Collective.
[1] Arvanitis, R., J. Mouton and A. Neron (2022) ‘Funding research in Africa: landscapes of re-institutionalisation’, Science, Technology and Society 27 (3): 351–67.
[2] Hill, A. (1992) ‘British publishers’ constructive contribution to African literature’, Logos 3 (1): 45–52.
[3] Ail, A., M. Jay and S. Kitchen (2024). ‘The African Books Collective: a conversation across three generations’, Logos 35 (2–3), 83–90.
[4] Jude Fokwang, 2024, ‘Spears Media Press, Cameroon’, Logos 35 (2–3): 24–32.
Note: This article was previously published by Editor House Facility and is republished here.