Africa is a continent of 54 countries and some 1.4 billion people, speaking—and sometimes writing and publishing—in hundreds of languages. The book business on the continent is diverse and eclectic. We convened a group of several top practitioners to get a sample of the triumphs and challenges they face.
These include Sulaiman Adebowale, the founder and director of Amalion, an independent publishing house in Dakar, Senegal; Colleen Higgs, publisher of Modjaji Books, an independent feminist press from South Africa; Jessica Powers, publisher of U.S.-based Catalyst Press, which focuses on African titles; Sandra Tamele, publisher of Thirty Zero Nine, a press dedicated to publishing translations, based in Maputo, Mozambique; and Rachel Zadok, founder of Short Story Day Africa, an organization that creates a global platform for emerging and established African writers.
Can you tell us a little about your publishing house and its priorities?
Sandra Tamele (ST): Trinta Zero Nove was born out of an unmet need. In 2018, I had three volumes of short stories translated by the young women and men I challenged in the scope of our annual literary translation competition and no publisher was willing to invest in, despite my many pitches. So I decided to establish the first publisher dedicated to literature in translation, to celebrate 30/09 international translation day, first from English and French into Portuguese, and currently from any language into the main four Moz languages: Macua, Sena, Changana and Portuguese. We prioritize books that are representative or by females, debut authors or authors from the LGBT+ community, or people with disabilities. And making our books accessible and affordable for most.
Colleen Higgs (CH): Modjaji Books is a small independent publishing company, with a focus on publishing southern African women writers. We’ve been going since 2007 (15 years) and have published nearly 200 titles in that time. We have aimed to make a space for southern African women to get published, in particular voices that have not been “heard” by the mainstream, and about perspectives and experiences which have been marginalized. We publish novels, short stories, memoirs, poetry, and a few other titles that don’t fit neatly into those categories. We’ve experimented with multilingual texts, and books in Kaaps Afrikaans.
Sulaiman Adebowale (SA): Amalion was founded in 2009 in Dakar to publish works on Africa that straddle the thin line between ideas and stories that the history of the book trade had organically or deliberately separated and purposely presented as the viable option, except of course if you are a mega corporation and so big and can afford to have and own separate publishing houses and imprints to cater to specific areas of specialization. The advantage in that is great, with or without enormous resources at your disposal.
I felt and still feel the market here needed to be more open to not just the diversity of voices but also viewpoints, which can get lost in compartmentalization and categorization: academic, social sciences and humanities, literature, YA etc.; and get trapped in networks and spaces that rarely connect, despite their content encompassing, complementing and overlapping one another in the perspective of the reader. So Amalion publishes knowledge in all its forms, stories, narratives, biographies, poems, art books, monographs, etc.
Jessica Powers (JP): Catalyst Press is a North American based company with worldwide distribution and we focus exclusively on African writers and African-based books. We publish children’s and adult titles, but lately we’ve been gravitating towards more children’s titles in part because sales of children’s books are dramatically better and they are what’s keeping the publishing company afloat. We publish in all genres.
Rachel Zadok (RZ): It’s interesting that I was invited to participate in this roundtable because SSDA isn’t a publisher in the conventional sense. We’re more of a development project for African fiction writers and editors, with a publishing aspect. SSDA only publishes short story anthologies of the collected long-list from the Short Story Day Prize for African Short Fiction, and from the other projects that we run. And soon we won’t even be doing that. In the past, we’ve published in partnership with Catalyst Press (before them New Internationalist), and we’ve published in print locally and in ebook format on the continent, while Catalyst Press has published our anthologies in the US, UK, etc.
However, due to the funding pot for projects like ours becoming smaller and more controlled by political agendas, we’ve negotiated with another local indie publisher, Karavan Press, to publish our work locally going forward. Which makes us some kind of publisher hybrid, I suppose. We still keep total creative control of any books we publish, doing everything from editing to typesetting to cover design. It’s basically printing, distribution, and marketing that we leave to Catalyst Press and Karavan Press.
As for our priorities, we focus on developing emerging African writers and budding fiction editors, and creating platforms for fiction that is perhaps more experimental and unexpected. Our ethos is subvert, reclaim, reinvent. Subvert what it means to be an African writer, reclaim space for non-conformist African voices, and reinvent African short fiction so that writers can tell their stories without the pressure of writing to an idea of what an African story should be. What we want is for the writers we work for to get recognition and find a path for their writing once they leave us, and so far we’ve been pretty successful in achieving that. Many of the writers that first found a home with us have gone on to win big prizes, sign with agents and publishers, or win sought after residencies.
*
Tell us about two or three titles (no more) that have been successes for you domestically and/or internationally.
ST: We launched our first collection on 30/09/19 and were hit by the effects of the pandemic. Therefore for most of our existence we were unable to hold any book launches. The literary translation competition collection and its five books are my favorites. Volume V, Happy Naked People by Kateryna Babkina, was translated from Ukrainian into six Moz languages, a one of a kind edition. The second is the collection As sete por quatro, in celebration of 7 April, Mozambican Women’s Day, that features seven debut writers translated into the four main languages. It has been requested by several international libraries and many local readers.
CH: Do Not Go Gentle by Futhi Ntshingila has been the most successful. We sold Portuguese rights to Dublinense in Brazil, who sold onto Trinta Nova Zero (Sandra Tamele) in Mozambique. Also to Catalyst Press (Jessica Powers) in the US and French rights to Bellevue Editions, and they sold the translation to 10/18, a literary mass-market paperback publisher.
Futhi’s third book was published by PanMacmillan in SA and recently won an award at Sharjah as well as awards in SA. This points to an issue that we as small independents face. We put an author on the map, and then they move to a bigger, better-resourced publisher. Futhi has an agent and many rights have been sold for the new book.
