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Hot Reads, Pirate Copies, and the Unsustainability of the Book in Africa’s
Literary Future

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 Postcolonial Text, Vol X, No X (2019)

Hot Reads, Pirate Copies, and the Unsustainability of

the Book in Africa’s Literary Future
Ashleigh Harris
Uppsala University, Sweden

In June 2017 I bought a copy of A Family Portrait: A Collection of

Short Stories from the Breaking the Silence Project at the Artlife
Gallery shop at the National Gallery of Zimbabwe in Harare. The
book, published in 2014 by the local, Harare-based ICAPA publishing
house with the support of the Rosa Luxemburg Foundation, cost me 6
Zimbabwean Bond Dollars.1 After buying the book, I left the National
Gallery and headed towards the center of town. After walking a few
blocks I began to see numerous sidewalk-booksellers, selling a mix of
second-hand novels, drivers’ license instruction books, and textbooks
(see Figure 1).

Figure 1. Photograph: Nicklas Hållén

After spotting A Family Portrait at a number of these sidewalk

book-vendors’ displays, I stopped and asked for the price of the book:
2 Bond Dollars, came the reply. I thanked the book vendor, put the
book back on the pavement, and started to walk away, explaining to
the seller that I already owned the book. At this point, assuming I was
haggling, the vendor offered the text to me at a reduced price of 1
Bond Dollar. Feeling bad about offering him the promise of a sale and
then walking away, I paid him 2 dollars and took the book, aware that I
was probably buying a pirated or illegal copy. On closer inspection, it
turned out that the book was indeed a fake copy, but the material
differences in the quality of this pirated reproduction compared to the
original are extremely slight. Although A Family Portrait includes,
amongst others, the writing of one of Zimbabwe’s most famous
writers, Tsitsi Dangarembga, the production quality of the legal
original is so poor that I wondered, when comparing the two texts, why
readers would opt for the far more expensive original version. Later, I
discovered that these stories are available online on the ICAPA
website in both Epub and kindle formats, which again made me
wonder why readers would buy the bad quality print versions of these
texts at all.
I narrate this anecdote because I see it as a microcosm of the
condition of literary production in African cities today. The three
copies of the same text – one legal, printed copy which cost me 6
Bond Dollars; one illegal, photocopied version, which cost 2 Bond
Dollars (and which I could have bought for 1); and one online, legal
and free version – illustrate my central claim that the published book is
an unsustainable form for Africa’s literary future. The three encounters
by which I came across these different versions of the text all trace
different – though intersecting – economic, social, and technical
literary spaces. These varying literary geographies suggest, I will
argue, the movement away from the book-commodity as the dominant
form of literary production in Africa.
I use Sarah Brouillette’s argument that we need “to articulate a
world-literary criticism to an as yet extremely underdeveloped political
economy of literary production, which would consider how labour,
property and ownership work within the literary system, and how they
impinge on the writing that exists” (“World Literature and Market
Dynamics” 99) as a starting point. Brouillette is rightly demanding that
we consider the literary object as part of a larger economic and social
interchange, which I attempt to do here by focusing on three
formations of the literary in contemporary African cities: the legal
book, the illegal book and the internet.

The Legal Book

Irene Staunton, publisher at Weaver Press, laments the fact that in

Zimbabwe, “[b]ooks are not, in general, valued as items one might
want to possess” (50). The comment betrays her publisher’s
perspective on the book-as-commodity, with its focus on value and
possession. Indeed, Staunton further imagines the value of the owned
item as ritualized though the process of book-browsing and -buying in
a store. She bemoans the fact that pirated copies “[do] not encourage
the idea that books are bought and valued as personal possessions, nor
that browsing in a good bookshop can be a positive experience”
(Staunton 50). Instead, she writes, since “very few people can afford
books; it is no wonder that they are given low priority, except insofar
as they bring you closer to God, to money (self-help books are
popular) and to passing an examination. This is not a context in which
small general publishers thrive” (Staunton 50). What we see here is a

2 Postcolonial Text Vol X No X (2019)

move away from the book-object as having inherent, literary, value, or
even as a conveyer of cultural capital, to being instrumental towards a
larger religious or economic goal. Given the popularity of religious
and self-help books and books for financial success in Africa, we
might argue that while African literary fiction, as Eileen Julien has
noted, is often “extroverted” (667) and oriented towards a Western
readership, the genres that face inwards towards African social life
tend to be non-fictional, didactic and aimed at helping readers attain
wealth, happiness, and success.
Both the extroverted literary novel and the success manual are, of
course, inextricably woven into the global market economy. Staunton
contemplates this state of affairs and quite rightly concludes that this
may augur the end of the general publisher in Africa: “When parents
can barely afford school fees or uniforms, the decision to buy
photocopied books for a couple of dollars is not surprising, but those
who read them for exams are unlikely to become book buyers or
readers in the future. Does this matter? Do books really constitute a
building block for future development?” (52) The answer to this
question is, blatantly, “no.” Staunton herself admits that the publishing
industry is already not sustainable, admitting that “[w]ere we to rely on
book sales alone, we would not survive” (53).
But what if we reframe the question to consider literary spaces
that do not participate overtly in the global market? Before we
consider the illegal and alternative forms of distribution and writing
that break out of this economic catch-22, let us consider legal
distribution of books that have always stood outside of this market
logic: the sale of second-hand books and libraries.
In a report for News Day Zimbabwe entitled “Harare’s Vending
Time Bomb,” Tinotenda Samukange writes about what he calls the
“vending crisis” of the city. During the crash of the Zimbabwe dollar
in the early 2000s, Harare’s informal sector grew to unprecedented
proportions. This ultimately resulted in a notoriously violent
government crackdown on city vendors in 2005 known as Operation
Murambatsvina (which translates roughly from chiShona as
‘Operation Clean-up-the-filth’). Despite the ferocity of that clean-up
operation, the economic crisis in Zimbabwe has meant that street
vending remains a common activity in cities. As the photographs in
Samukange’s reportage reveal, vending can largely be divided into
three basic categories of goods: fresh produce, cheap and mostly
plastic products that are often illegally branded to mimic expensive
brands, and second-hand goods. The second-hand book is, for our
purposes, a commodity whose use-value is not reduced by being
already read. As such, even though books on the African street are
often sourced legally (Griffin Shea, for example, follows a street-
vendor in Johannesburg on his routine path of scrounging charity
shops for good deals), such recycling effectively unsettles the inflation
of the book-product in the consumer cycle. This is especially so if the
book-object is not valued as an item for possession, as Staunton points
out.

3 Postcolonial Text Vol X No X (2019)

 However, the second-hand book trade in no way allows for the
development of a literary infrastructure that can support local writing
or even meet the demands and tastes of street-buyers. As the
Johannesburg street-seller Mahle Mavimbela reports to Griffin Shea,
“he could sell new books, if he knew where to find them cheaply. He
gets requests for new titles from some of his customers, particularly for
black authors, but they’re hard to source at affordable prices”. As such,
street sellers resisting unlawful resale of stolen books are susceptible to
the vagaries of the second-hand book trade, a dynamic that cannot be
the basis of a sustainable book- and reading-culture.
The problem of sustainability also impacts libraries in sub-
Saharan Africa. In the Zimbabwean context, for example, public
libraries are burdened with the same economic problems that the book
trade suffers under. Staunton seconds this view by commenting that
while some, precarious, donor funding has helped the library sector to
some extent in Zimbabwe, “public libraries have been left to fend for
them themselves with few resources” (49-50). Brouillette also writes
of the book sector in Africa that IMF and World Bank structural
adjustment of the 1980s and 1990s made it
even harder to access financing, with up to 40% interest on bank loans and
overdrafts. Already impoverished populations had even less to spend on
nonessential items. Low literacy continued, especially in the non-indigenous
languages in which books were mainly published. Distribution systems were
further weakened; public libraries all but collapsed. Parastatal, university, and
independent indigenous publishing were basically all on their last legs. Only
foreign publishing houses, particularly British, which continued to supply books
to tertiary-level institutions and universities, still made some money despite the
crisis. (“The African Literary Hustle”)

In addressing the problem of building a viable African book

infrastructure in the aftermath of structural adjustment, numerous
NGOs have backed literary programs of varying size and success
across the region. Yet, donor support is also problematic for a variety
of reasons. Sarah Brouillette observes an instrumentalisation of
African literature by Western donors and NGOs in which “capital has
attempted to secure the accumulation of surplus” by “[t]urning to
culture as a potentially endless ‘immaterial’ resource” (UNESCO and
the World-Literary System in Crisis). She reads what she calls the
“NGOization of African Literature” (“The African Literary Hustle”) as
part of the crisis of Julien’s extroverted African literature. Brouillette
specifies: “[d]onor support was […] for outward facing, extroverted
literary production, rather than for the development of a local African
readership,” and she goes on to discuss the ways in which African
literary networks are themselves complicit in this extroverted literary
impulse (“The African Literary Hustle”). Brouillette’s assessment
certainly does not apply to all donor-funded initiatives in African
contexts, some of which have become strategic brokers between local
readers and the book industry. Yet, Brouillette’s critique certainly still
applies in the majority of cases. Further to this problem of donor-
funded literature being largely extroverted, African publishing houses,
as Walter Bgoya and Mary Jay point out, are wary of seeing any

4 Postcolonial Text Vol X No X (2019)

sustainable solution in donor support. As Brouillette writes of the
Zimbabwean situation:
while direct donor aid from non-government sources, usually international, has
stepped in to fill some gaps left in the wake of state-based support, it has been
relatively modest and precarious. It has also supported bringing African books to
international readers, instead of developing local markets, which is assumed to be
a lost cause given the population’s overall levels of wealth, English-language
literacy, and interest in literature (“The African Literary Hustle”).

In African Literary NGOs: Power, Politics, and Participation,

Doreen Strauhs notes the considerable increase of what she calls
“LINGO’s” (20), that is literary sites of production funded by non-
profit, usually non-African, organizations on the African literary scene.
Both Strauhs and Katherine Haines have investigated the significance
and sustainability of these LINGOs, such as Kwani Trust in Kenya,
Chimurenga Trust in South Africa, and FEMRITE in Uganda. They
conclude that LINGOs face the same challenges as traditional book
publishers in the African context. These are language and literacy rates
of local readers (Strauhs 83), national income levels (Strauhs 84),
infrastructure (Strauhs 84), and absence of reliable distribution
partners (Strauhs 85; Haines 146; Shercliff 55). Moreover, as Mary Jay
argues, it is impossible to build cultural industries and infrastructures
with donor support that is always intermittent and unpredictable (26-
27). One only needs to compare the African Small Publishers
Catalogues of 2010 (Higgs and Senne), 2013 (Higgs and Senne) and
2016 (Higgs), to see how quickly small-publishing concerns emerge
and disappear in the sub-Saharan region.
One version of book publishing that is on the rise in Africa is self-
publishing. If one looks at the Nielsen BookScan data for sales of
South African fiction between 2015 and 2017, the gravity of this point
becomes very clear.2 The first sign of a crisis in publishing in these
statistics is the markedly low rate of sales of fiction for publishers in
South Africa during these years. Three of the largest local publishing
houses, Jacana, Kwela Books and Picador Africa, sold on average
across the three years between 2253 (Picador Africa), 10 226 (Jacana),
and 11 386 (Kwela) fiction titles per year. While these numbers seem
respectable for the largest of these, Kwela Books, it is worth noting
that the publisher’s sales dropped by more than half between 2015
(15 369 books sold) and 2017 (6948 books sold). What is striking, is
the introduction of a newcomer on the book market in 2017, Hlomu
Publishing. In its first year, Hlomu Publishing sold 6556 copies, just
under the total sales for established publisher, Kwela. Moreover,
Hlomu Publishing took in a profit of around 1,5 million ZAR in 2017,
making it the second largest seller of fiction in South Africa in 2017.
Hlomu Publishing, however, is a one-author outfit, run by Dudu
Busani-Dube, who started the company to self-publish her trilogy of
romance novels, Hlomu: The Wife, Naledi: His Love, and Zandile: The
Resolute. That the sales of these massively popular three books could
outweigh all other fiction published in South Africa in 2017 is a
remarkable fact, and one that surely bodes ill for traditional publishing

5 Postcolonial Text Vol X No X (2019)

houses. Indeed, while other self-published authors are not quite so
successful, the head-buyer of Xarra Books in Midrand, South Africa,
informed me that their self-publishing stocks have increased to the
point at which they face numerous administrative problems in keeping
track of these self-publishers for restocking purposes. This is an
infrastructural problem that impacts even the successful Hlomu
Publishing; when I checked the online shop at South Africa’s largest
bookseller at the time of writing this article, all copies of Busani-
Dube’s book were out of stock.
Nevertheless, the success story of self-published novels like
Busani-Dube’s is prompting established publishers to try new
economic approaches. Jacana Press recently attempted to use equity
crowdfunding to raise capital for a fiction-based publishing house that
would work towards developing a sustainable publishing infrastructure
for South African writers to tell South African stories. The pitch was a
failure and the initiative only raised 83 400 of the 3 000 000 ZAR
required for success (“Storied”). This suggests, once more, the
unpredictability of the sector and the unsustainability of the book, even
when publishers do their best to address the specific needs of local
readers.

The Illegal Book

If we return to the scene of the street-seller that began this discussion,

it is not only the legal resale of second-hand books that keeps these
vendors afloat. Indeed, more often than not, the books sold on the
street are also stolen or pirated goods. South African Jacana Press
recently faced the problem of booksellers not reordering stocks
because of the high theft rates of certain titles. These titles are most
often those discovered in police raids on vendor sellers in the inner-
city. For Jacana Media, this constituted a problem: in the words of
their Sales Manager, Shay Heydenrych, “the upshot was that a book
was essentially made extinct by the bookstores’ anxieties over
theft.” She goes on,
So for these hot books – ‘hot’ as in happening and desirable and ‘hot’ as in steal-
able – we arranged for sample copies of the most-stolen titles to be supplied to
stores to keep merchandise on the shop floor. The sample copies were doctored,
though, to ensure that they wouldn’t be stolen … we stamped interior pages, cut-
out some sections too (leaving enough text – content pages, key chapters for a
reader to get a good sense of the book), placed a ‘hot reads’ bookmark in the
book and a ‘hot reads’ sticker on the cover to direct the reader to the counter to
ask for an unblemished copy should they wish to buy the book. (Heydenrych)

The presence of malformed books in the illegal book-trade comes up

in Griffin Shea’s interview with street-seller Mahle Mavimbela too.
Shea, who is accompanying Mavimbela to a charity store where he is
sourcing new stock, notices a shelf of what appear to be new books:
There’s Tell Me Sweet Something, the title of a local film, a romantic comedy
released in 2015, about a bookstore owner in Johannesburg. Flipping through it,

6 Postcolonial Text Vol X No X (2019)

 the chapters had unromantic titles like ‘What Fear Smells Like’ and ‘A Regime
on the Rampage’. It was Peter Godwin’s The Fear. “Don’t buy it,” Mavimbela
warns. He’d bought a copy that turned out to have Seeds of Destruction inside the
rom-com cover. “I sold that book to a lady, she was looking for a nice book by a
South African author. And she came back very angry about that.”

Print errors, remainders and other cast-offs from the formal book
industry not meant for resale find their ways into this illegal market.
The malformation of the book object in the interests of keeping its
commodity value in check becomes a powerful symbol of the precarity
of the book in vulnerable economies today.
Furthermore, as Heydenrych notes, “[t]itles most-stolen on our list
were local memoirs and politics, those that would have recognition and
a market further afield. There’s a wide market of potential book buyers
away from high-street shopping and regional shopping centres where
most of the traditional booksellers are located.” Two aspects of this
pattern of theft are of interest for my discussion. First, the novel is not
the content demanded on the street. Secondly, legal books are
unaffordable for most people, despite their interest in reading.
This is no new pattern in African book markets. Referencing a
2014 statistic published by the International Publishers Association,
Katherine Haines notes, “[o]ne of the biggest challenges facing book
publishers in Nigeria is piracy, with estimates suggesting that ‘illegal
sales account for 75% of the book market’” (146) Back in Zimbabwe,
an Anti-Piracy Group, which included various stake-holders from
publishers and booksellers to authors and the police, reported at the
Zimbabwe International Book Fair’s Indaba of 2013 on the growing
problem of book piracy in the country, a problem that has worsened
further since then (Phiri). Greater access to mobile technologies and
the ease with which texts can be digitally transferred has exacerbated
the problem.
The situation certainly looks very dire for African publishers, but
what does this mean for literary producers in these contexts? As
Staunton notes:
while reading for pleasure and to explore other worlds has never formed a part of
the curriculum, Zimbabwe is full of young people who passionately want to write
– the majority, in our experience, being young men between the ages of
seventeen and thirty – and publishers, ourselves included, receive three or four
manuscripts a week as a matter of course. The energy and hard work they put into
writing indicates a strong desire to be heard, but many have not read much more
than their set books and have little real appreciation of how good or bad their
novel (or poetry) is. The success of Zimbabwean writers who have gained an
international reputation has spurred them on. Fame and fortune beckon. And
misconceptions abound. (50)

These misconceptions emerge in the paradox of a non-reading culture

that is nevertheless enthralled by the novel or published poetry as the
ultimate form of self-expression. That “fame and fortune beckon”
indicates precisely the ways in which such self-expression is itself
associated with the idea of economic gain and success. We might
disagree with Staunton and argue that rather than seeing young
Zimbabweans’ perception of the novel as misconceived, we could

7 Postcolonial Text Vol X No X (2019)

postulate that in the purely economic sense, they are right: there is
money in successful, extroverted African novels. And irrespective of
whether a book sells or not, there remains a great deal of symbolic
capital in the very fact of having published a book. That the symbolic
capital of the printed book is not at all synonymous with its economic
value fuels the actual misconception, which is a failure to see that a
conception of the novel as a form of self-expression is most often
incommensurate with the publishing industry’s conception of the novel
as a commodity responding to reader demand.
Less naïve writers are already circumventing formal publishing
for a number of similar reasons. As Staunton notes of self-published
authors: “[n]ot only does the experience [of self-publishing] help
authors to appreciate some of the processes involved, but very often
they will do better in terms of sales than a publisher would, as they are
able to carry the book with them to informal selling points such as bars
and cafes” (51). This is much like the success story of Dudu Busani-
Dube discussed above, where the author not only distributes her texts
herself to bookstores, but also to reading circles in townships and other
spaces that are not usually on the formal book trade’s literary map. But
more than this, the self-published book circumvents the gate-keeping
standards of the formal book industry. This is no doubt a cause of great
anxiety for publishers and educators alike, but it does not augur the
end of literary quality and production per se in Africa. Instead, I argue
that it is a symptom of the declining relevance of the book-as-
commodity in vulnerable economies. What is emerging in its stead are
new literary forms and infrastructures that allow young literary talent
the space to test and improve their art outside of the market economy.
In some cases, this is the testing ground before publishing the work
formally as a book; but increasingly, these emergent infrastructures
and modes of literary production are not aimed at “fame and fortune”
at all. They are, rather, sites of performing literary, linguistic and
social community.

The Internet

Dudu Busani-Dube’s popular success began by her posting chapters of

her first novel on Facebook. The chapters went viral and Busani-Dube
realized the commodity value of her narrative. Her strategy was then to
publish online – and for free – a certain percentage of the book, and
then make the complete narrative available in book form. It is no
surprise that she did not turn to the formal book publishing industry for
a contract: the first chapters had gone viral without the intervention of
an editor or publishing house and she could bring the project to
completion much quicker through self-publishing (we should keep in
mind that her readers were already eagerly awaiting the next
installment). What is interesting from a scholarly perspective is the
way in which this material production of the narrative shaped the
literary form itself. The chapters of these novels follow a serialized
form – with a rise in action, cliff-hanger endings, and a sense of a

8 Postcolonial Text Vol X No X (2019)

completed action in each chapter. If we were to read the novel in
isolation without considering the online origins of the text, which later
became a marketing technique for all three books, we might miss the
ways in which social media impacts the form of the novels. Moreover,
if we contemplate those who first came across the first chapters of the
books on Facebook, we can imagine that they read those chapters on
mobile devices or computers, and that they did so at any point in the
day when they might have the time. This attitude differs from the
traditional attachment of leisure to reading a book, since the short
format and the fact that one need not have the book object to hand,
allows reading to happen in the interstices of the day, rather than as a
dedicated activity.
This notion, too, might explain the success of Busani-Dube’s
online success. The internet potentiates different sites of reading in
modern life much as the short story, published in magazines, suited
early commuters in Victorian London. Jonathan Cranfield argues that
environmental factors such as increased commuter travel on trains in
London in the 1800s impacted both the material and literary forms of
the fiction being written and consumed at the time. Thus, in most
Victorian periodicals “editorial decisions were designed to produce a
product whose shape, texture and content would in some way mirror
the newly reordered city as well as the changed social-economic
situation of the middle-class professional who could now effectively
style themselves as ‘commuters’” (Cranfield 223). The same
motivation is of course evident in the blockbuster commuter fictions of
the 2000s, such as the Harry Potter series. It should be no surprise,
then, that texts short enough to read on mobile devices fit the forms
and flows of contemporary city-life more appropriately than the book
does, especially in African cities where the dominant form of transport
is on informal minibuses or tuc-tuc taxis which are hardly conducive to
concentrated book-reading.
If we recall the low profits for fiction in the South African
publishing industry between 2013 and 2017 mentioned above, one
might at first glance see this as evidence of the lack of a reading
culture in that country. But, if one then looks at the FunDza Literary
Trust, a South African NGO that works to improve literacy among
South African youth, a different picture emerges. Unlike the LINGOs
discussed by Strauhs, where the literary quality of the product remains
a key feature, literacy NGOs like FunDza are more interested in
capitalizing on young people’s urge to self-express than with a
published product. That said, what is remarkable about FunDza’s work
is that they link “reading for pleasure” to “writing for expression” as a
two-pronged approach to teaching literacy. The results speak for
themselves: at the time of writing this article, FunDza has had 8,
806 211 “mobi readers” on their system (from April 2011), by which
they mean individual readers accessing text online through their site.
This is not an insignificant number given the strikingly low sales
figures of fictional books in the country during those same years. The
key here, as I see it, is the active participation enabled by online
platforms. Not only are writers reading and commenting on one

9 Postcolonial Text Vol X No X (2019)

another’s texts, which develops the literary quality of the work, but
this reading is an activity played out in a social space. FunDza recently
noted that “[e]very day the fundza.mobi platform receives more than a
hundred comments on its many stories, blogs, articles, poems, online
courses and Fanz writing” (“Tapping into our readers’ worlds”).
Another grassroots success story, enabled by an NGO online
platform, is the African Story Book. This NGO, funded by Comic
Relief UK, provides children’s stories online for free in numerous
African languages. They have their own free app reader, for ease-of-
use and to easily display the illustrations accompanying the stories.
But the most interesting aspect of African Story Book is its activation
of the reader. African Story Book uses four keywords to sum up this
reader-intervention approach: “Read. Create. Translate. Adapt”
(African Story Book). The idea is that readers can be as active or
passive as they wish in engaging this material. One can simply
download and read the material. One can use the platform to create
one’s own stories and illustrations. One can translate other authors’
stories into one’s own language. And, finally, one can adapt a story to
different levels of readership. This open access model of literary
transfer is not only extremely productive – at the time of writing,
African story book has 941 story books online in 150 languages and
boasts an unbelievable number of 4301 translations – it also shows the
extent to which African readers are prepared to engage in the work of
writing. In a time when traditional publishers are bemoaning the
impossibility of African language literary sustainability, this
commitment to keeping African languages alive by engaging the work
of translation is remarkable. This site alone illustrates a significant
number of African readers who are themselves literary producers, who
are active and prepared to invest their time and work in the creation of
African literary spaces.
That said, it is worth noting that similar online production
strategies have been used by mobile delivery service companies, such
as 9 Mobile in Nigeria, to capitalize on fact that emerging literary
talents are likely to use mobile phones to compose, distribute and read
fiction. The 9 Mobile (previously Etisalat) flash fiction award, at best,
develops young literary talent, but there is a more cynical aspect to this
developmental commitment too.3 Here we must agree with Sarah
Brouillette who points out that
it may be that the expansion of the cultural economy […] has in part to do with
the fact that someone needs to produce the content that helps to circulate other
kinds of goods, for instance personal electronic devices, by persuading us that
those devices are integral to our lives as our means of access to content we would
otherwise miss out on. (UNESCO and the World-Literary System in Crisis; my
emphasis)

What better way of selling mobile phones and contracts than getting
young literary talent to produce free content for those devices?
Other grassroots infrastructures standing at more oblique angles to
the consumption cycle, and without any NGO or funder support, offer
yet another vision of the spaces of the sustainable literary future. One

10 Postcolonial Text Vol X No X (2019)

example is Street Poetry Kenya, which, as we read on their Facebook
page (their only online presence), “is an event that gives wordists a
place to be heard, a place to express and a place to belong. The event
happens on the 4th Sunday monthly.” The event requires no formal
infrastructure or funding, since it is advertised only on Facebook and
by word-of-mouth and it takes place at the same time and place every
month (Uchumi Agha Khan Walk in Nairobi). The publicness of the
space of these events means that, apart from a developing audience of
performers and fans, the audience is mostly passers-by. This street
scale means that there is no need for other infrastructural costs, such as
audio equipment. Uchumi Agha Khan Walk also has a low wall
running along its pavement that functions as seating for the audience.
Other audience members stand or sit on the floor. The simplicity of the
organization of this event, involving no overhead costs and free
performances for an itinerant audience, is precisely what makes this
grassroots form sustainable, I argue. Furthermore, the circulation of
filmed performances on YouTube takes the significance of these
literary performances beyond the street.4 While there are numerous
such events or informal organizations in African cities, the problem of
course is that they are usually driven by individuals who cannot always
sustain the time and effort it takes to keep them running. As such they
emerge and disappear quickly. Yet, what is common is that such
events are part of a broader network of similar literary events in the
city, so the disappearance of a single event does not necessarily
destabilize the literary network as such. Street Poetry Kenya, for
example, works with more formal, partly-funded initiatives such as
“Poetry Spot Kenya.” With overhead-free initiatives, with free and
open access to audiences, emerging at various parts of the city, the
street becomes a sustained site on which youths sharpen their literary
skills.

The Literary Future

An obvious point that requires mention is that Africa’s street literatures

have provided an alternative to the publishing industry for a long time.
Ruth Bush and Claire Ducournau’s Awa Magazine online is just one
such initiative to ensure the longevity of what was, at first, a somewhat
ephemeral form: a popular women’s magazine, which was produced in
Senegal from 1964 to 1973. But what of the archive of the emerging
literature in the African city in the present? If scholarship is to enable
the longevity and sustainability of these initiatives, I would argue that
it must approach the present by developing new methodological
paradigms for the analysis of such African street literature. The first
methodological shift requires us to move away from the book as the
primary site of the literary. Many scholars of popular culture
(Stephanie Newell, Onookome Okome, Karin Barber, amongst others)
have been doing this since the cultural studies’ turn. But, as I and
Nicklas Hållén have argued elsewhere, the approach of these scholars
has remained largely directed to popular cultural studies, rather than to

11 Postcolonial Text Vol X No X (2019)

formal analysis on these works as literary texts (Harris and Hållén).
Indeed, literary scholarship, despite its nods to the ground-breaking
work of scholars like Karen Barber, continues to privilege the book-
commodity as its primary source of analysis. Furthermore, as Haines
points out, not only is it the book-as-commodity that is favored in
contemporary African literary studies, but more than that the book
published outside of Africa. Illustrating this point, Haines notes that
not one academic article in a “list of over 230 published essays
[compiled by Daria Tunca in 2016] about the work of Chimamanda
Ngozi Adichie … focused on Adichie’s relationship with her Nigerian
publisher” (42).
There is an obvious reason for this: ease of access. We all know
the difficulties of putting texts on a curriculum that we cannot then get
hold of for our students because of the resource problems experienced
by African publishers. So, short of relying on the print-on-demand
strategy of the African Book Collective, in collaboration with a wide
range of African Publishers, what are literary scholars to do? I would
argue that, like Bush and Ducournau, we should put our efforts into
creating new archives, or curating existing online material, to increase
ease of access for students and scholars of African literature. Initiatives
like Kwame Dawes’ Digital Portal and Badilisha Poetry X-change are
exemplary in this regard. The ‘African Street Literatures and the
Future of Literary Form’ project based at Uppsala University, Sweden,
is similarly working on new ways of compiling curricula of the
African Street in collaboration with the Nordic Africa Institute’s
librarians.5
Furthermore, scholars need to turn to the work of blogs like
“Brittle Paper,” “Africa in Words” and multiple others that are already
doing the work of mapping the field as it emerges. Interestingly, these
blogs are often created and organized by academics, suggesting that
these scholars experience a disconnect between traditional channels of
publishing and this body of emerging work, which seems to fit the
genre of critical blog more naturally. While these blogs often take up
multi-modal literature or work other than the novel, there remains a
problem in being able to map what is already out there on the internet
and it is this mapping that, I argue, could provide the basis of a
sustainable view of African literature from the perspective of the
academy.
In conclusion, and to return to the anecdote that began this
discussion, I ask myself: why would a writer consider publishing a
book in the current economic climate of the African city? Over and
above the misconceptions mentioned by Staunton about finding fame
and fortune, a serious literary producer has little to gain in trying to get
their work published and distributed through the formal African
publishing industry. A better investment of their time would be
polishing up a short story for entry into a major, established and
prestigious prize like the Caine Prize for African Writing and then
gambling on the possibility of breaking into the international book
market. But this market is so removed from the African street, that
literary practitioners are expressing their frustration with the

12 Postcolonial Text Vol X No X (2019)

compulsory form of the book in that global literary network.
Publishing in print means inevitable piracy, which leaves one
wondering why one would go through the hoops of the publishing
industry only to see one’s book photocopied and sold without gain to
the author on a street pavement. It seems to me that young literary
producers are more aware of this situation than the literary
establishment gives them credit for. What is emerging in the spaces
left by the irrelevance of the formal publishing industry in Africa, then,
is not, I argue, a vacuum, but rather new literary geographies encoding
new infrastructures and social protocol of literary production. While
the book will certainly continue to have a role in these emergent
literary spaces, its role will be fundamentally altered, and its
dominance certainly disrupted.

Notes
1. The Bond Dollar was the country’s response to the lack of US
dollars in circulation after the crash of the Zimbabwean currency in
2009; Bond Dollars were intended to be pegged at an inflation rate
fixed to the U.S. dollar.

2. I am grateful to Scott Morton at Nielsen Book Scan for

compiling and sending me this data.

3. Nicklas Hållén has recently discussed the 9 Mobile Flash Fiction

award and its impact on literary form in a forthcoming article
‘Okadabooks and the Poetics of Uplift’ in English Studies in Africa,
vol. 61, no. 2, 2018.

4. See for example, the poet Chira’s “H_art the band,” which at the
time of writing this article had received 121 682 views on YouTube. A
more modest, though nevertheless significant example from Street
Poetry Kenya is the poet Mamboleo’s performance, which has reached
4785 views. These numbers clearly expand the street audience
considerably.

5. For more information about this project, see “African street

literature enters the library,” The Nordic Africa Institute, 29 November
2017, nai.uu.se/news/articles/2017/11/29/112629/.

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