Read African Books

Windows Into Zimbabwe

#Reviews

Franziska Kramer and Jürgen Kramer share part of their Introduction to the Weaver Press short story collection, Windows into Zimbabwe. 

Cameroonian Book Publishing as ‘Defiant Scholarship’

#Opinion

Stephanie Kitchen presented on ‘Book Publishing and Publishing Collectives in Africa’ at a British Academy Writing Workshop on ‘Defiant Scholarship in Africa’.

Centring Africana Voices in Contemporary Publishing

#Opinion

An opinion piece by Jude Fokwang, presented at the Workshop on Defiant Scholarship in Africa, Yaoundé, Cameroon, 18 – 20 June 2024.

Salimah Valiani

#Interviews

Sarah Lubala interviews Salimah Valiani on her new book, IGoli EGoli (Botsotso Publishing).

Report on the Publishing and Book Sector in Morocco, 2022-2023

#Resources

New report on the publishing and book sector in Morocco, which focuses on literature, the humanities, and social sciences (2022–2023).

David Mann

#Interviews

Interview with award-winning editor and arts writer, David Mann, on his new short story collection, Once Removed (Botsotso Publishing).

Books in African Languages Catalogue

#Featured on Homepage

Take a look at the African Books Collective Books in African Languages Catalogue

Wilfred Kanu Jr., Badson Publishing

#Publisher Profiles

Wilfred Kanu Jr., CEO of Badson Publishing, talks about the roots of his publishing venture and how he is working with African Books Collective. 

Zaheera Jina Asvat

#Interviews

Read African Books interviews short story writer, Zaheera Jina Asvat, about her new collection, The Tears of the Weaver (Modjaji Books).

Ashti Juggath

#Interviews

Read African Books interviews South African author Ashti Juggath about her new book, the award winning Peaches and Smeets (Modjaji Books).

Publishing & Book Culture in Africa: A Repository of Selected Resources

#Catalogues

In February 2024, Hans Zell published a new third updated and expanded edition of Publishing & Book Culture in Africa: A Repository of Selected Resources. The repository aims to provide quick access to key literature about the many aspects of book culture, and publishing and book development in sub-Saharan Africa. Zell presents the repository here along with some of the needs of African publishing in the future.

Outstanding African Studies Award

#Featured on Homepage

ABC was delighted to learn that the Publisher of Mkuki na Nyota Publishers  and founding Chair of the Council of Management of ABC, Walter Bgoya, and Mary Jay, earlier consultant, CEO and director of ABC, have been awarded the Outstanding African Studies Award by the African Studies Association of the UK. We congratulate both on this achievement and note their groundbreaking and longstanding contributions to ABC's collective efforts to publish and disseminate African books, literature and research globally.

ABC's Statement on Gaza

#Opinion

African Books Collective's Statement on Gaza

Henry Chakava 1946-2024: The Publisher Who Pricked the People into Consciousness

#Featured on Homepage

Hawthornden Foundation and ABC

#Featured on Homepage

Press release: Grant fund from the Hawthornden Foundation

Henry Chakava: In memoriam

#Featured on Homepage

ABC Spring Catalogue 2024

#Catalogues

Take a look at the African Books Collective Spring 2024 Catalogue!

Stephanie Kitchen

#Interviews

Stephanie Kitchen, African Books Collective Director, speaks to the Independent Publishers Guild podcast about all things ABC.

David Mills

#Interviews

Interview with David Mills, University of Oxford academic and now African Books Collective Director!

ABC Children and Teens Books 2023-24

#Catalogues

Take a look at the African Books Collective Children and Teens 2023-24 Catalogue!

ABC Fall Catalogue 2023

#Catalogues

Take a look at the African Books Collective's Fall 2023 Catalogue!

ABC Literature Catalogue 2023

#Catalogues

Take a look at the African Books Collective's 2023 Literature Catalogue!

ABC Catalogue 2022–2023

#Catalogues

Welcome to the African Books Collective Catalogue 2022-2023! Explore books from 30 independent publishers from across 12 African countries.

Nii Ayikwei Parkes

#Interviews

Interview with Nii Ayikwei Parkes, British-Ghanaian writer, editor, publisher, and now African Books Collective Director.

Decolonising Knowledge and its Challenges

#Conferences & Workshops

For Africa, knowledge is a contested site that acquires affirmations, claims, and delineations. İt has to operate through many layers. In fact, is Africa a discourse, or an idea or concept? These are the questions begging to be asked. Ahmet Sait Akcay reflects on the recent ASAA conference.

Transforming African Scholarly Writing

#Conferences & Workshops

African scholarship, like all scholarship, must be conducted rigorously, follow scientific methods, account for context, and stand up to critical appraisal. Why, however, refer specifically to “African scholarly writing?”

Mad Bob Republic

#Reviews

Tendai Mwanaka is a Zimbabwean writer, editor and publisher who has published 21 books and 23 curated anthologies. Perhaps his best-known anthologies are the Best New African Poets anthologies that have provided a forum for poets across the African continent.

Babingo, the Nobel Rebel

#Reviews

At the last count there were 48,400,000 fictional accounts on the theme of Colonialism globally.

Zeb Silhouette

#Reviews

It is amazing that in a year when an African novelist, Abdulrasaq Gurhni won the Nobel Prize in Literature for what the Norwegian Academy referred to as "his uncompromising and compassionate penetration of the effects of colonialism and the fate of the refugee in the gulf between cultures and continents," a phenomenal new book on ‘the cause of women, love and immigration’ would be published.

A good reading culture: Potential game changer in Africa

#Opinion

I made a deal with my eight-year-old son that for every book above 110 pages that he reads, I’ll pay him 15 rands, an equivalent of one United States Dollar (US$1).

Literature Catalogue 2021

#Literature and Writers

Welcome to the African Books Collective Literature Catalogue 2021, a double-issue which features titles published since March 2020. Inside are books from 30 independent publishers across 12 African countries.

The Disillusioned African

#Reviews

Published in 1995, The Disillusioned Africans consists of letters about the observations and experiences of a black student-academic living in London in the 1980s. The novel brings up many issues that determine the present and future of the continent, from the African discourse to the administrations in the postcolonies.

Henry Chakava

#Interviews

After graduating from the University of Nairobi in 1972, Henry Chakava was looking at postgraduate scholarship offers from local and international universities. While thinking through his options, his lecturer at the Department of Literature, Professor Andrew Gurr, arranged a temporary job at the Nairobi office of Heinemann Educational Books Limited (HEB). This temporary job instead became a life dedicated to books as he fell in love with publishing.

Vitabu kwa Swahili 2021

#Publishers and Publishing

Karibu ABC na karibu upitie katalogi ya Vitabu vya Kiswahili kutoka kwa wachapishaji wa vitabu kutoka Afrika ya Mashariki, na mmoja kutoka Afrika ya Kusini, jambo la kushangaza na kuvutia. Kiswahili kinaenea kote Mashariki na Kusini mwa Afrika.

Marginalisation and Exclusion of Women in Scholarly Publishing and Dissemination in Africa

#Opinion

I came across a discussion on Twitter a while back about how notable women, especially those in academia, were either missing from Wikipedia or had their entries written incorrectly or with insufficient information.

Editora Trinta Zero Nove: literature in translation in Mozambique

#Opinion

In Mozambique, women are underrepresented in print and male publishers tend to be biased toward publishing men, claiming that female voices lack quality, substance, and creativity. I try to counteract this by publishing feminist voices that might inspire a new generation of female writers and translators through creative writing and through translation workshops

African Books Collective - Timeline

#Publisher Profiles

African Books Collective is 30 years old! It’s been an eventful few decades, and so we felt it was time to share a flavour of how the vision of a few passionate publishers, on the continent and beyond, led to the phenomenon that is African Books Collective. Click through to in-depth articles and photos from some of the Collective’s members. Enjoy – and please do share your thoughts and memories through our social media.

Kyoto University Collaboration with Langaa

#Opinion

The African Potentials Series is a co-publication initiative between Langaa and the Center for African Area Studies (CAAS) at Kyoto University. The series showcases the research of the African Potentials network of African and Japanese scholars

What the Secret Agent Saw

#Reviews

The authors of this book paint a detailed and dispassionate yet wrenching picture of the painful and bloody transformation of Rhodesia into Zimbabwe in the period following the white leader Ian Smith’s unilateral declaration of independence from Britain in 1965. Their main gift to historians is the wealth of information they provide, much of it hitherto unknown outside secret service circles, about how Rhodesia’s Special Branch, of which the authors themselves were two of the wiliest spooks, helped to keep the forces of African liberation at bay for so long.

The myth of the ‘book famine’ in African publishing

#Opinion

Books and publishing in Africa are often described in terms of ‘scarcity’ and ‘famine’, evoking the need for a crisis response. But do these terms reflect the reality of how Africans produce and engage with books? Elizabeth le Roux argues that the famine analogy is perpetuated by a book aid industry that works counter to structural solutions based on local book development.