3rd World Consciousness, 1st World Efficiency

The main hall at the 2012 Leipzig Book Fair

Last week, I was in Germany for its second biggest celebration of literature, the Leipzig Book Fair courtesy of the Goethe Institute’s Visitor’s programme.  It was an amazing 4-day experience meeting with other invitees from around the world and mingling with the 50,000 visitors. We shared ideas and experiences about all things books from our different locations.

I met Shahla Lahiji who runs a feminist press in Iran. She’s probably the bravest person I’ve ever met, publishing despite several arrests and near-constant surveillance by the country’s police. She keeps afloat by a subscription model. Now, we have been talking a lot here at CRP about moving to a subscription mode and somehow converting our over 25,000 data members to becoming subscribers. Meeting Shahla was an inspiration not only because of her personal story but because it made me realise that we need to revisit that conversation again.

I also met Dennis Loy Johnson of Melville House Press whose blog, Moby Lives, I have been following for quite a while. We talked about Amazon and it’s predatory tactics towards publishers and other creative content providers. The more I think about it, the more I think publishers on the continent are in a unique position – we don’t have to go the Amazon route. In fact, our books can get lost in the Amazon jungle.  We have the opportunity to build an e-commerce platform that is not mediated through Amazon’s cut-throat pricing scheme.

Much of the event – from the program to the lectures, discussions and talks – was in German. Fair director, Oliver Zillie explained that since 90% of the attendants to the fair were German-speaking, there had never been much need to cater to speakers of other languages. However, he noted that with the fair becoming a growing tourist attraction, there would be more of an effort to cater for foreign audiences going forward.

Still, there was so much to see. The venue was four huge halls, plus a conference centre and a glass-covered mezzanine linking everything together. Each hall was packed with publishers, bookshops, author’s stalls and all sorts of companies related to books. The fair even features an Antiquarian Book Market where buyers and sellers have been trading antique books and manuscripts for hundreds of years.

But what really caught my attention were the hordes of young Cosplayers everywhere. Cosplay is a phenomenon borrowed from Japan where fans of Japanese Anime (cartoons) and Manga (comics) get together and dress up as their favourite characters. They hold contests to judge the best costume as well as the best personification of the character.

The popularity of Anime and Manga has been steadily growing in Germany for the last 10 years, according to Sebastian Oehler of Reprodukt, a graphic novel publisher. There are even German artists producing comic books in the distinctive Anime style.

This event drew hundreds of young people and made me wonder if there wasn’t a similar vein waiting to be tapped in Nigeria. Would African youngsters respond to the wildly fantastic narratives, the bright colours and simplistic characters that characterize Japanese animation? It would be an interesting experiment.

I despair when I meet young people who tell me that they don’t read – and have no interest in books. Twenty percent of Germans don’t read at all, according to Christine Kranz, manager of a youth reading programme. While it was a source of concern for her, to me it meant that 80% of the German public do read. And attending the fair and seeing so many people who love books in all its forms was an amazing inspiration for me.

You can see my pictures at our Facebook page here.

A view of one of the four halls at the Leipzig Book Fair

As part of the Goethe Institut’s Visitors Program, Cassava Republic Press was able to visit this year’s 2012 Leipzig Book Fair.

With over 50,000 visitors, 2,600 events and 2,700 participants, the fair which lasted from the 15th to the 18th of March was a whirlwind of activity.

Unfortunately, most of the fair is targeted towards the German-speaking market, which meant that nearly all of the author readings, dicussions and lectures – as well as the books – were in the German language.

However, the program was still an exciting opportunity to explore the success of one of the world’s oldest celebrations of literature and reading.

For photos from the fair, go to our Facebook page at Facebook.com/cassavarepublic.

There is the implication that women’s writing is somehow trivial (or perhaps there is a tendency to trivialize writing by female authors). Thus, a lot of female writers bristle at the label “woman writer.” However, I feel that literature written by women should be singled out, not to place it in some literary ghetto, but because it is important that women write about their unique experiences, as men have done for millennia.

Women who write often have to overcome greater obstacles to their craft. Many times, they are juggling a greater burden of familial responsibility and sometimes, a greater lack of confidence about their ability. (It’s been my experience as an editor that I have to work harder to get a woman whose talent I admire to write more and believe in herself than it is to persuade a man.)

Also, there is a tendency for all of us – male and female – to privilege the male voice. Somehow, we think that the stories that men tell are “universal” while those told by women are “regional.” The truth is, women’s stories and men’s stories illuminate us, they deepen, enrich and enhance us. They are both universal and specific. The only difference is that male writing is considered so normative that we do not need to talk about male writers just like we do not need to talk about European writers; after all they are the symbolic that all must aspire to. There is power to being part of a recognised collective.  And I have no problem with being an African female writer.

For me, literature written by women has brought me a unique clarity and insight into the human experience. The first time I had an “ah-ha” moment reading a work of fiction by an African woman was when I first picked up Mariama Ba’s So Long a Letter at sixteen. It tells the story of a woman’s struggles after her husband takes a second wife and virtually abandons her. It resonated with me because it mirrored the story of my grandmother’s mother who had had similar problems with her husband.

I had a similar moment when I read Ama Ata Aidoo’s Changes last year and Buchi Emecheta’s Joys of Motherhood the year before. These books managed to put into concrete words what up until now had only been vague feelings of discontent– the feeling that something was wrong with my society, even though I was not quite sure what it was. It was as if some kind soul had touched me on the shoulder and said “no, dear, it’s not all in your head.”

So to celebrate International Women’s Day, go out and pick up a book by a female author. Or tell us which book by female writer impacted you the most. I know there’s been at least one.

As a recent article from the New York review of Books points out, the idea of what it means to be a writer has changed over time.

In ancient times, writers were much like other skilled artisans. But the romantic era introduced the idea of the writer as a personality whose talent gave him the right to question society, giving birth to the cult of the genius.

The west has largely embraced the romantic vision of the writer as a personality rather then the artisanal of the ancients.  It has even professionalised the writer’s career path with academic degrees. But in Nigeria, being a writer is still no different from being a skilled artisan – much like the griots or praise-singers along the West African coast.

In Nigeria, many of those who are able to sustain themselves solely through their craft can do so precisely because they seek out the patronage of the more powerful. They ghost-write hagiographies for the wealthy political and business class, or they write copy for advertisers, newspapers, NGOs and large corporate bodies. Because there isn’t much infrastructure to support them, these writers are forced to hustle for a living.

Granted, this is no different from any writer anywhere in the world. However, the reality of this different mindset shows up in the concept of royalties. For a lot of Nigerian writers, the idea of royalties is often an abstract one – with writers preferring to be paid up front for a manuscript. Craft is a cash-in-hand affair, and who can blame them in a climate where there is such low patronage for creative books?

Thus, those who can, will write, edit and self-publish their books so that they can sell them and pocket the dividends immediately. Others will look West, knowing that everything – from the advances to the fame – is bigger “over there” and where they acknowledged more than at home.

This has bred something of a conflict in the world of Nigerian letters. A previous generation of writers who came of age through education systems that mirrored those of the European colonisers, share the romantic idea that those who have the skill must write as part of their social duty and responsibility  – something one must do for the greater good. Thus, many of them used their words to help fight colonialism and encourage African nationalism. However, a new generation of writers, bred on the nepotistic paternalism that many African states fell into after independence see their ability to tell a story as a commercial skill for which they expect to be paid.

Those writers who publically endorse the view of writing being a commercial skill are vilified by those who view writing as a social duty as mercenary and lacking integrity. There is a sense that they will do anything for money. While those for whom it is a commercial skill view the other side as naive, disingenuous about their real motives and overly idealistic – unable to see the world as it really is.

Who is to say which side is right? Great writing has come from both camps and as long as good stories continue to be told, does it really matter why they were written in the first place?

Virginia Dike is the author of Birds of Our Land, our upcoming children’s guide book to West African birds that will be available in March.

The book, accompanied by beautiful paintings by illustrator Robin Gowen, explains the basic features of 25 birds representing the major species in the region and keys to observing them.

Listen as she sits down with us to talk about her book and why she wrote it in the first place.

Birds of Our Land is now available for pre-order.

For more information, email info@cassavarepublic.biz or contact: Lagos Office: Kofo – 0818 580 1657; Abuja Office: Silas – 0818 580 2634.

Good write-up here on the state of African publishing, with a nod to our recent collaboration with Kwani and Chimurenga to produce the Chimurenga Chronicle.

To get hold of your copy of the Chronicle, email info@cassavarepublic.biz

If you’re in Lagos this month, stop by our roaming stall at Cinnamon Café’s first seasonal bazaar. You can pick up copies of our books and get access to bargain goods and services from over 20 independent vendors just in time for Valentines Day. The event will be a festival of food, music, fashion, art and technology to be held on Saturday 11th and Sunday 12th February 2012 from 10am to 6pm at 94 Adetokunbo Ademola Street, opposite Ocean View, Victoria Island, Lagos. See you there!

There is no doubt the publishing industry is undergoing massive change. E-book readership has been growing steadily and many experts think that e-books will be the primary form for books in the digital future.

In the digital present, massive corporate bodies, including Amazon and Google, are in a race to digitize books and provide them cheaply or for free so that they can attract users to their sites and make money off advertising. Unfortunately, being on sites like Amazon may get publishers and writers a lot of eyes for their work (and who can scoff at that?), its cut-throat discounts means that writers and publishers don’t always get much money back.  Even if these sites draw in big sales, which is only really ever for a minority of writers or books, many readers feel that reading digitally should be free, an extension of other things they already read for free online..  Here’s a better rundown of the situation.

While I agree that good books should be affordable, selling creative content at a loss in order to boost sales of other products – such as when Amazon sold e-books at cut-rate prices to win customers for its Kindle e-reader – is ultimately destructive to the content producer.

Don’t get me wrong, there are some upsides to this digital phenomenon of widely available cheap or free e-books. It is returning out-of-print classics and overlooked backlists into the limelight. And it’s a way for new writers to air their material. But merely having their work seen by a lot of people, without an accompanying monetary reward, is not enough.

Of course, some writers may say in public that it is more important that they are read far and wide, that it was never really about money in the first place.  However, experience shows that is not in the case. The authors and editors and designers and printers who work to create a book have bills to pay and families to feed. What they do takes time and effort. These producers of content should be paid – and paid well – for their creativity.

If, in the changing landscape, creatives find it impossible to make a living from their work, many will stop making them. Left unchecked, we might find ourselves in a world where creative endeavors are undertaken entirely by enthusiastic amateurs for whom the vanity of publishing is enough. Or it might become something done by the idle rich who can afford to take time off. A world where the best voices find it too difficult to make their voices heard in a growing cacophony overloaded with too much dross.

And what will this mean for the quality of creative work? What will it mean for the art, and literature that make up our collective heritage? Only time will tell.

Doreen Baingana, award-winning Ugandan author of Tropical Fish: Stories from Entebbe, will be reading from her book at the next Infusion.

Doreen is the former managing editor of the Kenyan publisher, Storymoja, and has published two children’s books. Her work has appeared in journals including Callaloo, Agni, Chimurenga, Kwani? and Farafina.

This is the first Infusion event of the year and it promises to be massive fun. The event will feature great food, poetry readings from several guest poets and great live music. Also, stick around for the raffle draw and get a chance to win gourmet cupcakes from Abuja’s famous Cupcake Cuties.

We hope you had a lovely holiday season and that you spent many happy hours reading

To all our writers and readers: we thank you again for your amazing support throughout 2011.  We also thank you for buying, reading, attending our events and generally spreading the good word about African writing.

We have lots of exciting books coming up this year, including Christie Watson’s award-winning Tiny Sunbirds, Far Away and Max Siollun’s richly informative military history of Nigeria, Soldiers of Fortune.  We’re also thrilled to be releasing Virginia Dike’s Birds of Our Land, a beautifully illustrated children’s book on some of the wonderful birds of West Africa.

Here’s wishing you a wonderful year ahead.