KNOWLEDGE PRODUCTION AND PUBLISHING IN AFRICA

Abebe Zegeye

Paper presented at the Africa-Europe Group for Interdisciplinary Studies (AEGIS) conference SABDET panel at SOAS on the 2 July 2005 under the title "Getting Published, Getting Heard: Debate and Democracy in Africa". The author is the Director of UNISA Press.

Introduction

I do not intend to give definitive statements on the slippery relationship between knowledge production and publishing in Africa in this talk. Rather, the aim is to ask new questions, or for that matter, reformulate old ones that refuse to go away in a new and reflective way. It is now common knowledge in Africa that knowledge production has become an institution or a conglomeration of institutions with distinct sites at universities, in civil organisations, commissioned research and the education system in general as purveyors of the knowledge of economy.

In Africa, specific sites have taken over from the politics of the everyday in the production of knowledge. People are now salaried to produce certain types of knowledge and this is a process that inherently excludes the authorization of other forms of knowledge. Knowledge is now a commodity. A commodity bought and sold at the academic market place. It has entrenched itself as power. Knowledge production is now driven by the imperative of profit. It is copyrighted. It is budgeted for in publishing houses. It is selective knowledge because not all of what has been created as knowledge, or what is authorisable as knowledge sees the light of day. Where do all these facts and questions leave us in the publishing industry in Africa?

I suggest that the economics of knowledge production is the entire infrastructure. This infrastructure of publishing is owned too. In Africa, most of that publishing is in foreign hands. Publishing is an appendage of European publishing houses. Publishing in Africa is viewed as a special area which is not expected to produce knowledge but to be a conveyer belt of information developed as knowledge in other climates. Or in most cases if publishing is in African hands it first imagines its readers as European. It becomes African knowledge by virtue of marking its consumers as people living outside the borders of Africa.

In these constraining circumstances it is true that African publishing has done much – mostly as popularisers of other people’s knowledge in our society. In some cases African publishers working with lean budgets and exhausted staff have created a minute body of knowledge that Africans can call theirs. The further questions I ask are: What is African knowledge? Are we talking of European knowledge in Africa, or African knowledge in Europe? What are the other forms of knowledge economies existing in Africa that have been marginalised by powerful multi-national publishing houses working with their local agents? How and where can these knowledge forms on the edge be mainstreamed into the public domain as valid African knowledge through publishing in Africa? Lastly, what are the links created between knowledge production and publishing in Africa in the context of the equally daunting task of democratising the knowledge production infrastructure and the African societies themselves?

There are no easy answers to these questions. However, in the rest of the presentation I want to suggest tentative answers to some of them and propose what I believe could be democratising perspectives in producing and publishing knowledge in Africa.

Africa’s Publishing Economic Infrastructure

Africa has diverse cultural backgrounds and economies at different stages of development. Africa’s publishing industry tends to follow this pattern in which the most industrialized countries on the continent have tended to attract foreign investment in the publishing industry. Sometime this pattern is disrupted. A small country such as Zimbabwe for instance can have a more dynamic publishing industry than some African countries that do have the economic infrastructure to promote publishing. Publishing in Southern Africa (South Africa and Zimbabwe) is heavily dependent on foreign financial resources. The College Press of Zimbabwe is part of the British publishing empire with some satellite offices in Botswana.

In South Africa, foreign publishing houses also dominate although Afrikaner nationalists also made sure that some strategic publishing is in the hands of Afrikaner capital. Publishing houses, through small individual local publishers are to some extent responsible for the vibrancy of Zimbabwean publishing. For example, Irene Staunton, the former editor of Baobab publishing house in Zimbabwe (owned by a South African) is now running Weaver Press. Weaver press was started by Irene Staunton and her husband and a business partner, Marie McKetiny. This situation does differ in East Africa where Heinemann dominates. Individual publishers such as East African Educational Publishers also have a serious stake and their capital is local.

West Africa has traditionally been dominated by Western publishers. One of the reasons is that generally, West Africa possesses a reading public that creates a reading market for both local and international publishers. One could go on enumerating the regional differences in the kind of financial resources that go into publishing in Africa. The point is that Africa, whether South, East or West, is still dominated by Western publishers. They have been doing sterling work. But the fact that only a small section of locals have control over what is published has implications for the kind of material that is published.

Paradigmatic Shifts in Publications

The intellectual processes by which something becomes knowledge and hence warrants publishing is a critical debate in Africa. In some parts of Africa, colonialism brought with it, not only written forms of knowledge. It also brought a perspective. It imported ideologies. The well rehearsed ideology of colonialism is that African systems were archaic and had to be replaced by colonial notions of modernity and development. Colonialism brought the paradigm that was constructed on binary perceptions of reality. Its mission was to civilise and tame the African as it also sought to domesticate the environment. These mental frameworks kept Africans in servitude. Their legacy has continued in some people in post- independent Africa. Publishing houses as part of the colonising agenda are still perpetrating these colonialist perceptions. But since the Africa of the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s, African nationalism contributed to the generation of a paradigmatic shift in terms of Africans’ self- perception.

Both international and local publishing houses seized the moment and commissioned writings or publications that promoted a sense of nationhood among Africans. This certainly is the case in Zimbabwe were new publishing houses like Zimbabwe Publishing House, Baobab Books and Nehanda Books came into existence and promoted literature and written publications in the countries. In other countries, publishing houses actually operated as third spaces where ideas of democracy were published long before the countries became independent. This is the case for example in South Africa where until 1994 some private publishers were persecuted for publishing ideas that attacked the system of apartheid.
In yet other countries with a long history of publishing in Africa such as Ethiopia, publishing took very contradictory paths. A semi-feudal society under emperor Haile Selassie had its own forms of publication. Also, individuals created their own publishing houses.

Of course the fortunes of this diverse publishing picture has changed with changes in the power configurations during the last 50 years. The point is that different countries in Africa had space to experiment with different knowledge systems, depending on how they were located in relationship to the West and to themselves. It is noteworthy that the emergence of the educated elite who share Western and African sensibilities have been at the forefront of introducing ideas of neo-liberal democracy. Publishing houses have tended to promote these ideas as the most appropriate modes of democracy and governance. And yet, other intellectuals have created their own publishing houses in order to have their ideas disseminated.

Non-Governmental Organisations have also brought different mental frameworks to the publishing industry. Since these organizations have funds they have tended to concentrate on publishing information that has to do with human rights, good governance and democracy, which they distribute. In this respect, they have helped at the grassroots levels, to foster a culture of reading a respect for human rights. Sometimes, NGOs overstep their mandates and interfere with African governments in the sense that they publish material that creates a feeling among the people that their government is not delivering. To put it differently, the politics of knowledge production through publishing is not an innocent undertaking. It has never been. There are vested interests from government publishers as well as international and local publishers. It is possible to argue that instead of viewing this scenario negatively, this picture of conflicting paradigms that is publishing in Africa is what makes publishing worthwhile. It has helped keep debates on the need for good governance alive.

Africa’s Readers and Publishing in Africa

It is easy to generalize on African readers and conclude that little reading takes place in Africa. This would partly explain why some publishing houses have not been sustainable. But the picture is more complex. Countries such as Zimbabwe have a reading public of more that 80 percent even though the country does not have a sound economic infrastructure. On the other hand, figures for South Africa differ. Although South Africa had a better infrastructure the apartheid system discriminated in such ways that black people, who form the largest group, did not have sufficient opportunities to learn to read and write. It is ironic that with the arrival of democracy in 1994, not many new publishing houses have invested in the country. Those that operate focus on publishing for secondary schools. This system of education is not yet very standardised so that potential publishing houses could take advantage of the large population to publish. Issues of financial resources are crucial in any debate on reading patterns in Africa. Most populations are poor.

Africa’s Publishing and Marketing Strategy: Constraints and Prospects

Although the general picture that emerges in publishing in Africa is that countries have some kind publishing activity, publishing marketing strategies for most countries is badly co-ordinated. Local publishers sometimes create their own marketing outlets in the countries in which they operate. For example, Mambo Publishing House in Gweru, Zimbabwe, runs Mambo Book shops in Harare, Gweru and Bulawayo. The College Press in Harare sells its published books to book shops such as Kingstones and Mambo. Individual innovative publishers such as Irene Staunton of Weaver Press also sell their books to local book shops. Weaver Press is however advantaged in that it has created international marketing links with such organisations as the African Book Collective. Weaver Press also co-publishes with publishers in Europe and in other cases Weaver Press publishes and then enters into agreements with distribution networks in the West. But this picture cannot be generalised to other African countries where very little marketing of published books exists. Sometimes individual authors are forced to market their own books nationally and internationally.

New Modes of Knowledge

One of the legacies of colonialism in Africa is that it entrenched the significance of the written word in defining what knowledge is in Africa. This is especially evident when one considers that from primary school textbooks to university level, the book is at the centre. This testifies to the importance of publishing in Africa. One of the major successes of publishing in Africa has been the focus on school textbooks. This kind of knowledge, which is geared towards examinations, is prominent today. However, the emphasis on publication as publishing the written word has to some extent edged out the African modes of knowledge which have not been put in writing. Knowledge, I would argue, is not necessarily established by the fact that some thing is written down. It is the sum total of people’s beliefs and values as they engage with other people and with nature. And because not all people have access to written material it does not mean that those people do not have knowledge.

In other words, the primary carrier of knowledge in African societies where large sections of population have not had access to written material is not the published book. In these communities knowledge is generated and expressed through unwritten songs, folktales, proverbs, masks, carvings and other modes of expressing knowledge. The politics of the modes of knowledge is precisely that it is wrong to assume that those without access to written forms of expression have no knowledge. In some parts of Africa, this assumption is still prevalent and decisions about people’s lives are taken on the basis of whether or not they have book knowledge. This has tended to undermine unwritten forms that would otherwise contribute significantly to the debate of what knowledge is within African publishing.

The Politics of Knowledge Production In Africa’s Publishing Industry: A Conclusion
There is no culture within which there is no knowledge production. In Africa, knowledge is produced at what I might describe loosely as two sites. According to the discourse of South Africa, knowledge production takes place in the first economy. The first economy is the formal industry and it has huge financial resources to fund publishing. Publishing comes out of international investors as well as local publishers. These have done enormous work in publishing at universities, in publishing secondary school textbooks and other forms of knowledge. The other form of knowledge production relates to what happens in communities were there written word is not so dominant. Here, popular songs and other oral expressions are used to conceptualise and contain popular wisdom and knowledge.

The politics of knowledge production in Africa is defined by power relations. These determine who gets to publish, read and then distribute knowledge. It seems to me that Africa has not done completely badly. It is true that the continent is still dependent mainly on foreign publishers to finance Africa’s ideas. Sometimes there are conflicts because what Africans think should be published is not always in the interests of publishing houses who, apart from their obligation to knowledge production and dissemination, also work for profit. Local publishers work under even more extreme constraints such as weak budgets, poorly trained staff and shoe-string financial resources to fund big publishing projects. Nevertheless, they have been recording some successes. They need support that might come from governments. But then governments have more than their own priorities in spending money. Governments’ ideas about what knowledge must be generated, published and circulated for public consumption sometimes differ from international and local publishers’ expectations. In extreme cases this leads to governments instituting legislative restrictions that further threaten to destroy an already fragile publishing industry.

The politics of knowledge production can thus be defined by who has the funds and for what kind of publications. But again this might sound reductive. The reality is that in spite of the financial, manpower and market problems that the publishing industry is going through, there have been some successes. Africa, as I said in the beginning, has diverse publishing capabilities. It cannot be reduced to a tabula rasa or heart of darkness in terms of publishing. Certainly more needs to be done by publishers themselves to strengthen their bargaining powers so that they can create institutions that promote their business. This is a process that can take place in countries with stable political environments.

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