AFRICA ASSERTS ITS IDENTITY Part I: The Frankfurt Book Fair by Barbara Harrel I-Bond he 1980 Frankfurt Book Fa17focused on :mks "punten and published in Africa " :lacy participants got t3eir first exposure to ?t? richness and divers~tyof Afr~can terature. desp~tethe problems - largely ,-r-3. n,ornic - that ~nhibitAfrica's pubiishing ?,^!ustry The American Universities Field INSTITUTIONAL MEMBERS Staff, Inc.,founded in 1951, is a non- University of Alabama American profit, membership corporation of Brown University Americ/an educational institutions. It California State Universities- employs a full-time staff of foreign area specialists who write from University/Fullerton abroad and make periodic visits to California State Field Staff member institutions. AUFS serves UniversityINorthridge the public through its seminar pro- Dartmouth College grams, films, and wide-ranging pub- Indiana University lications on significant develop- Institute for Shipboard ments in foreign societies. Education University of Kansas Michigan State University University of Pittsburgh Ramapo College of New Jersey Utah State University University of Wisconsin System AUFS Reports are a continuing Associates of the Field Staff are series on international affairs and chosen for their ability to cut across major global issues of our time. the boundaries of the academic dis- Reports have for almost three ciplines in order to study societies in decades reached a group of their totality, and for their skill in col- readers-both academic and non- lecting, reporting, and evaluating academic-who find them a useful data. They combine long residence source of firsthand observation of abroad with scholarly studies relat- political, economic, and social trends ing to their geographic areas of in foreign countries. Reports in the interest. Each Field Staff Associate series are prepared by writers who returns to the United States periodi- are full-time Associates of the cally to lecture on the campuses of American Universities Field Staff the consortium's member institu- and occasionally by persons on leave tions. from the organizations and univer- sities that are the Field Staff's spon- sors. THE AUTHOR BARBARA E. HARRELL-BOND is a the Afrika-Studiecentrum, Leiden. Ap- social anthropologist who has conducted pointed a Senior Research Fellow at the research in England and in West Africa. School of Law, University of Warwick, in Her special interests are family, urban 1976, Dr. Harrell-Bond joined the Field problems, law, and the history of the im- Staff in 1978 to report on West Africa. position of alien law in colonial Africa. She received a B. Litt. and D. Phil. in anthropology from the University of Oxford. Her publications include Modern Marriage in Sierra Leone: A Study of the Professional Group and Community Leadership and the Transformation of Freetown (1801-19761, the latter being co-researched and written with two historians, Dr. Allan Howard and Dr. David Skinner. She has also published widely in academic journals, lectured in a number of universities including the Uni- versity of Illinois (Urbana), the University of Helsinki, and the University of 1981,American Universities Warsaw, and was a Visiting Scholar at Staff, Hanover, NH 19811No. 9 by Barbara Harrell-Bond AFRICA ASSERTS ITS Africa [BHB-1-'811 IDENTITY Part I: The Frankfurt Book Fair In a discussion on the politics of in- North to South on which de theme ''Africa-a Continent Asserts formation, Mario de Andrade, Com- Andrade commented. As he put it, its Identity." missar of Information in Guinea- "How can there be real communica- Such book fairs have much more Bissau, observed that the interna- tion so long as the world is divided than commercial significance. The tional dissemination of information by a frontier between countries average reader may not realize that has a one-way, vertical structure which are the producers and decisions made by the publishing which is monopolized by the West exporters of information and coun- houses ultimately determine the and which excludes all "real com- tries which are the consumers and kind of reading material available to munication." "Be it audio-visual or importers of this information?" him. To believe that such commer- the written word," he continued, "it cial enterprises merely reflect the is, in the final analysis, the monopoly Nor has this imbalance been limited tastes of their customers is naive; who decides and selects which sub- to North-South dimensions. Said the publishers are also active agents jects are in their opinion to be dif- Mzee, the East African publisher in determining what the public fused. The result is that it is the who organized the Halle 7 exhibit, monopoly which determines the im- "Printed and Published in Africa," chooses to buy and thus play an im- portance of information which, in noted that, "despite the progress portant role in shaping the con- turn, provides the basis for an image Africa has made in book production, sciousness of society. This is par- of the world reality and conse- the industry remains something of ticularly true as far as the image of quently its impact."l Indeed, the an enigma, not least to the Africans Africa is concerned. Al lmfeld of the image of Africa as the "Dark Conti- themselves. Probably no one knows Evangelical Press Service in Ger- nent" still prevailing today (which for certain how many publishing many put it this way: houses exist on the continent. had its origins in the theories of It is the publishing industry itself racial superiority developed to jus- Africans in the west do not know what is published in the east and that perpetuates the European ori- tify the slave trade and imperialism) entation in literature and it is here was created mainly in Europe by vice versa, and the linguistic barriers that divided the continent into that our European preoccupation non-African authors. with ourselves stands out most. In Anglophone, Francophone, and the northern hemisphere, from Twenty years ago there was virtually Lusophone stood in the way of Japan to the Soviet Union, from no publishing industry in Africa any meaningful interaction between worth mentioning and only a hand- them."3 Europe to North America, nearly a ful of African writers were pub- million titles by us or about us are lishing outside the continent. With It was an awareness of the commer- published or reprinted every year. the establishment of the East cial obstacles to redressing the Other cultures and continents tend African Publishing House in Kenya, balance of information transmission to go under in the deluge of paper Tanzania, and Uganda and Editions that led to the decision to focus the and ink. The greatest victim of our ethnocentrism is the Third World. CLE in Cameroun, and with the pro- 1980 Frankfurt Book Fair (Messe)on Books supported by no lobby, little liferation of state and private enter- Africa. The fair, which dates back to advertising, and only meager profits prise houses in Nigeria and else- the Middle Ages, attracts publishers have only an outside chance in the where in Africa, a quiet publishing from all over the world to exhibit tough literary marketplace.4 revolution has nevertheless begun. and sell their books and, above all, Outside specialist circles, however, to buy and sell international rights Five years ago Peter Weidhaas few people in the West know that and negotiate co-publishing agree- assumed the directorship of the today it is possible to purchase liter- ments. It is the single most impor- Frankfurt Book Fair. He observed ature written by African authors and tant international book trade gather- that, while an increasing number of published by indigenous companies. ing; this year more than 5,100 pub- publishers from the so-called Third Fewer still have read such books lishers from 92 countries exhibited World were participating in the fair, because the publishing industry in some 280,500 books, 84,000 of only a small group of insiders had Africa continues to suffer from the which were new publications. The any conception of book production one-sided flow of information from 1980 fair (October 8-13) had as its in Africa, Latin America, Asia, or the The fair marked a great step forward in the dialogue between Africa and the West, and among the African states themselves. But anyone who is in doubt about its meaning in that context need only be reminded that a British governor of Rhodesia in the 7950s defined the partnership between black and white in his territory as the partnership of the horse and its rider. He went on to acknowledge that the expression of this colonial ideal in such "stark and crude" terms might startle reasonable white people into "indignant unrecognition." Al- though this sentiment might now be more politely formulated, he insisted "it was and is the fundamental atti- tude of Europe to Africa." He con- tiliued: Arab world and only a few publish- from Africa were able to attend who Even the enunciation of the meta- ing companies from those parts of otherwise could not have afforded phor in human/animal terms is the world, most of them state- to come. Approximately 180 pub- neither new nor accidental. Let owned, could afford to rent exhibit lishing houses from 29 African there be no mistake about it. In con- space. Recognizing the significance countries participated. The facilities fronting the black man, the white of books as a means of transcending made available, together with the man has a simple choice: either to national and cultural boundaries and enthusiasm of German journalists, accept the black man's humanity appreciating the commercial impor- academics, and members of activist and equality or to reject him and see tance of the fair in that process, he groups, provided, as lmfeld put it, a him as a beast of burden.