Let the book bloom in Nigeria again (II)
Again, like in the case of task forces whose recommendations never saw the light of day, other government efforts were half-hearted, futile and null. There was, as Ike also pointed out, the failed attempt by the Federal government to set up a government publishing company in the nineteen seventies, while ‘some government agencies, State Ministries […]
Again, like in the case of task forces whose recommendations never saw the light of day, other government efforts were half-hearted, futile and null. There was, as Ike also pointed out, the failed attempt by the Federal government to set up a government publishing company in the nineteen seventies, while ‘some government agencies, State Ministries of Education, and professional associations have played an active part in developing primary and secondary school textbooks, but they have generally done so in collaboration with book publishing houses.’ The overall result of all these is that the initiative of book publishing by indigenous entrepreneurs did not quite succeed for a very long time due to under-capitalization, astronomic rise in the cost of importation of raw materials, poor market due to the pervasive economic hardship in the country in the austerity years and beyond.
Yet, it was not always so that governments, especially at regional levels lacked both the foresight and political will to accelerate the production of reading materials and literature which the schools required. An example that really fascinated me was the northern Nigerian experience and the establishment of the Northern Regional Literature Agency which was popularly referred to as NORLA in 1953. It was set up to buttress the educational programme launched in the north then and called Yaki Da jahilci (War Against Ignorance). NORLA made tremendous achievements and exploits, as Ibrahim Yaro Yahaya recorded many years ago, in ‘the preparation and production of not only creative writings in all the three forms of poetry, prose and drama, but also in evolving provincial newspapers in Hausa… and books on various subjects such as religion, shari’a, law, history, science, health, geography and mathematics, crafts and agriculture. After NORLA was disbanded in 1959, an action which certainly did not take anything away from its pioneering educational and literacy-growing efforts, the Gaskiya Corporation, which replaced it, tried to build on its achievements by reactivating some of its services by reprinting some of the works it produced and publishing new titles. From 1960, after independence, the Northern Nigerian Publishing Company Limited (NNPC) was established and gave rise to what can be referred to as the booming era of the book in the north. There are similar efforts in other parts of the country and, quite obviously, with political will and proper focus on the knowledge project as a window to globalization, government can still intervene, fruitfully and functionally in the revamp of the book in the next few decades of our existence as a nation.
In addition, there are over five hundred publishing Houses in Nigeria—a fact which signals the exponential rise of indigenous publishing. But this group of cultural industrial entrepreneur is yet to be as aggressive as they could be to grow the knowledge industry. This is because, as Kole Omotoso once averred, the ‘type of atmosphere in which the indigenous publisher can conveniently fulfill this role does not yet exist in Nigeria as I have outlined above. Still, that is the direction to go and I agree completely with the proposed mandate by Omotoso for the indigenous publisher when he says that ‘ as a conscious member of the society, the indigenous publisher must help toward’ a society in which ‘books, like garri and plantain, will not only be made available but also made available as cheaply as possible’. Unfortunately, plantain and garri are not, nowadays, as cheaply available as when Omotoso wrote his piece in 1976.
(Concluded)