Let the book bloom in Nigeria again

While it is often difficult to exonerate governments from this criminal dearth of books, or publishing aridity foraging our land in a world which situates development around knowledge growth, it is possible to trace the history of governments’ perennially uncompleted series of efforts to bring self-sufficiency in book production to fulfill the yearnings, aspirations and […]

While it is often difficult to exonerate governments from this criminal dearth of books, or publishing aridity foraging our land in a world which situates development around knowledge growth, it is possible to trace the history of governments’ perennially uncompleted series of efforts to bring self-sufficiency in book production to fulfill the yearnings, aspirations and needs of the educational sector. This incompleteness of efforts, in spite of the various task forces, panels, with an avalanche of un-harnessed recommendations, lie in the fact those fifty one years after independence, the nation does not have a national book policy.

There have, however been numerous task forces, study groups, committees, workshops and conferences on book publishing set up by government. According to Professor Chukwuemeka Ike, between 1981 1nd 1994, there were ten task forces on the book, its publications and its distribution, to recommend how the book sector can fulfill the dire needs of the educational system. He recounted the task forces thus:

1983 Nigerian National Congress on Books, 1984 Task Force on the Scarcity of Books and Stationery, 1987 Panel on a Book Policy for Nigeria, 1989 ODA/ World Bank Books Sector Study, 1990 National Council on Education Committee Report on the Rationalization of Textbooks in Primary and Secondary Schools, 1990 British Council-sponsored Conference to debate the Books Sector Study, August-September 1990 Ministerial Committee on Provision of Books to Schools and Colleges, August 1993 Nigerian Educational Research & Development Council Review Workshop on Preferred Recommendations for solving the problems of the Nigerian Book Industry and Formation of Implementation Strategies, April 1994National Conference on Book Development organized by the Nigerian Book Foundation on the theme “Making Books Readily and Affordable,” et cetera.

Another noticeable effort is the attempt to indigenize book publishing in Nigeria. As we know, one of the major reasons why the Nigeria book culture—creative, scholarly, and so on, has been and is still legislated abroad—from both the ideological and aesthetic perspectives-is the fact that, from the beginning, the trans-national publishing institutions have seized the initiative of publishing our emerging authors since the fifties, and have also controlled the commercialization of publishing, including educational, bread-and –butter curricular reading and study instruments. Heinemann, Longmans, Macmillan, the University Press, Nelson, jumped at the first creative outings of emerging Nigerian writers in the late fifties and so on—Chinua Achebe, Wole Soyinka, J.P. Clark, were brought into the international literary arena through publishing their books. As I averred above, they also made economic and ideological capital out their initiative. The sociology and character of the authors and their books were scarcely their authentic concerns. It was their profit margin, and the cultural dominance of the West, through portraiture of euro-centric perspective of the African story, that was their mainstay. Indeed, Achebe was later to refer to these West publishing efforts of the African story as characterized by ‘questionable oddities.’ He cited the instance in which the New York Times’ review of the 1959 Heinemann Edition of Things Fall Apart, which referred to him as “Miss Achebe.” In a similar display of ignorance of the author’s cultural roots, the blurb of the African Writers Series Edition of the same debut novel referred to Achebe as coming from the “Obi tribe’ ( instead of Igbo). You will wonder whether they in fact cared to read the book or even tried to understand the sociology and culture of the author whom they sought, so valiantly, to celebrate.

And when, in the late seventies and eighties, based on the crass mismanagement of our economy and its consequent downturn, the international, monopoly publishers withdrew substantially from publishing in Nigeria, the book market thinned out, our publishing industry shrank, and the reading culture became more famished. Government then attempted to legislate the indigenization of publishing. The 1978 Nigerian Enterprises Promotion Decree was erected with the provision that at least 60% equity participation in book publishing industry should be by Nigerians. By the token of that decree, at least on paper, book publishing in Nigeria became indigenous; a national enterprise. It thus became unnecessary to tag some publishing sectors as foreign while others are local. A critical fall-out of this decree is that the dominant and hegemonic multi-national publishing houses on the Nigerian publishing arena, such as Oxford University Press, Longman, Macmillan, Heinemann, Evans, etc., drastically cut back their foreign equity participation to not more than 40%, with some of them effecting nomenclatural change. That was when Oxford University Press transformed into University Press Plc.

(Concluded next week)