For decades, there was one path to becoming a successful African writer: Getting a book deal in the publishing meccas of New York, London or Paris. But a radical shift is underway, transforming the region’s literary landscape from within and opening up possibilities unimaginable to previous generations of writers.
It all started more than two decades ago, when the Kwani? literary magazine in Kenya began publishing and connecting African writers under the guidance of the writer and editor Binyavanga Wainaina. Then came publishers like Bibi Bakare-Yusuf, who started Cassava Republic Press in Nigeria and began publishing African fiction and nonfiction and promoting locally the African writers who had gained acclaim in the West.
Now, a robust publishing ecosystem has grown in the region: African writers and their agents are signing deals with African publishing houses. Those publishers are trading book rights and collaborating on everything from translation to the design of book covers. And those books are finding readers through new bookstores, literary magazines and literary festivals that are fostering transnational reading communities and launching regional best sellers.
The shift is growing the range of stories being told about Africa and greatly amplifying the work of African writers, according to interviews with over a dozen African writers, agents, publishers, festival directors and bookstore owners.
“The West is not discovering us. We are discovering us and then telling our stories and then saying to the West, ‘Well, this is us,’” said Zukiswa Wanner, a South African writer whose latest novel, “Love, Marry, Kill,” was published last year by publishers in Nigeria, South Africa and Kenya, and is being translated into Portuguese for publication in Brazil, too.
The wealth and the variety of new possibilities for African writers were on display last summer during the opening night of the Doek Literary Festival in Namibia’s capital, Windhoek. The biennial festival, founded in 2022, has become one of the most important literary gatherings in Africa. Over four days in August, young poets recited their works, seasoned authors discussed African crime novels, and literary figures from across the continent and the Black diaspora exchanged ideas.
The prolific Angolan writer and translator Ondjaki talked with Wanner and the Nigerian journalist and memoirist Chiké Frankie Edozien. Maaza Mengiste, the Ethiopian American writer, signed copies of her Booker-nominated book, “The Shadow King.” Half a dozen fans ringed Ishion Hutchinson, the Jamaican poet whose collections have been received with enthusiasm across the continent.
The festival is part of a network of new, African-led literary spaces connecting readers, writers and booksellers in the region and beyond, Rémy Ngamije, the founder and director of Doek, said.
“This is what we want: Our spaces, our way, in our time, in our places, with us all around,” he said.
The shift in publishing comes at a time when African fashion, music and film are also taking center stage globally.
In the book industry, a new generation of publishers and agents is getting around foreign publishers entirely to put out books by local writers for local audiences in local markets, revolutionizing the way books are marketed and distributed. They are also diversifying their catalogs by championing writers from different linguistic, social, economic, ethnic and sexual backgrounds.
Sibongile Machika, a commissioning editor at Jonathan Ball Publishers in South Africa, said technology was central to creating this new literary firmament.
Many young writers are self-publishing online, she said, releasing everything from comic books to romance and graphic novels. They also use digital platforms to talk among themselves and reach new readers. Audio platforms like Genti and AkooBooks are publicizing African radio dramas and spoken word and tapping into youngsters glued to their phones.
“The book economy has been turned upside down,” Machika said. “People are publishing left, right and center, and they are not waiting for validation from any gatekeepers.”
Even though he trained as a computer scientist in Nigeria, Othuke Anthony Ominiabohs always wanted to be a writer. In 2015, he self-published his first novel, “Odufa: A Lover’s Tale,” to good reviews. But he soon faced the challenges confronting many self-published authors: how to promote the book and make money from it. In time, he sold 2,000 copies, and, along the way, identified the gaps in the Nigerian and African publishing industry.
In 2018, he founded Masobe Books with the explicit aim of closing those gaps and amplifying diverse regional voices. (Masobe means “Let us read” in the Isoko language spoken in Nigeria.) To drive sales, he has been collaborating with a pharmacy chain and other businesses, engaging social media influencers, convening a book club and giving discounts to bookstores.
The strategy has paid off. Ominiabohs says he has published over 100 titles and sold over 100,000 book copies. Some titles, including “Nearly All the Men in Lagos Are Mad,” by Damilare Kuku, and “Broken: Not a Halal Love Story,” by Fatima Bala, have received a rapturous reception from readers in Kenya, Ghana and South Africa.
The publisher has also helped books find audiences elsewhere. The story collection “A Broken People’s Playlist,” by Chimeka Garricks, was published by Masobe, then acquired by HarperCollins in the United States. “When We Were Fireflies” and “Dreams and Assorted Nightmares,” both by the Nigerian writer Abubakar Adam Ibrahim, have been optioned for film rights. And “Sweet Sixteen,” a coming-of-age story by Bolaji Abdullahi, sold four million copies after it was selected for the Nigerian school curriculum, he said.
“There is a renaissance going on,” Ominiabohs said in a phone interview from Lagos. “We are on the cusp of a new era.”
Ominiabohs is also collaborating with publishers across the continent, including Jahazi Press, an indie publisher of literary fiction and nonfiction in Kenya. Jahazi was founded in 2020 by Ahmed Aidarus, who has long managed the Prestige Bookshop in the Kenyan capital, Nairobi. For years, he focused on buying the book rights of Kenyan authors — including Yvonne Adhiambo Owuor, Peter Kimani and Khadija Abdalla Bajaber — from their Western publishers.
But Aidarus also wanted to find and publish new Kenyan talent. In mid-2022, he solicited stories from writers across the country and co-organized a three-week workshop with a creative writing platform. The selected short stories were edited by the Kenyan writer Billy Kahora and published in 2024 in a collection titled “Let Us Conspire and Other Stories.”
The cover was designed by Masobe, whose colorful jacket art has become a favorite among readers.
“That’s another way I have learned to collaborate,” Aidarus said of the partnership. “You don’t have to do everything. You don’t have to reinvent the wheel.”
Publishers are also translating books for their local markets or selling translation rights to publishers in the West. Indigenous languages in which little was published before are also taking center stage, with some publishers hoping to preserve a cultural heritage but also to attract new buyers.
Over the past year, two notable novels — “Nervous Conditions,” by the Booker finalist Tsitsi Dangarembga, and “Animal Farm,” by George Orwell — were both translated into the Shona language in Zimbabwe. In 2019, Cassava Republic was awarded a $20,000 grant to translate and produce 10 children’s books into three Nigerian languages.
In Senegal, Sulaiman Adebowale of Amalion Publishing has translated literary nonfiction and fiction as well as textbooks from and to English and French. But he is now looking to translate into Wolof and Hausa, languages spoken by millions of people in several West African nations. There is a growing sense that it is worth investing in and building such audiences, he said.
“Books in local languages can be unifying and profitable if given the resources that English and French have been given in our countries,” he said.
One sector that most publishers in Africa say is rapidly growing is children’s books.
Lola Shoneyin, a novelist and the publisher of Ouida Books in Nigeria, is leading a project to train writers, agents, illustrators, editors and graphic designers on the publication of children’s books.
The project, known as BookStorm, was born from a trip she took in 2017 to Kaduna, in northern Nigeria. As she read to children there from picture books by Western authors, she noticed the children were fidgety, she said, and clearly unable to relate to the experiences in the books.
Shoneyin, who had written a children’s book before, decided to write a series in which each book would be set in each of the 19 states in northern Nigeria, where millions of children do not attend school and it is difficult to find high quality picture books. Through BookStorm, Shoneyin, who is also the founder of the annual Aké Arts and Book Festival, also plans to publish 100 children’s books by 2027.
“We are arriving, and we are cracking the book market for ourselves,” Shoneyin said.
Even as the industry grows, challenges persist. Inflation and growing taxes negatively impact the entire production process. Founders also lament not making enough from sales or getting enough subsidies or grants to pay editors or hold events. Piracy means books are easily shared for download on social media.
But the only way to solve these constraints, said Ngamije, of the Doek Festival, is for those working in the industry across Africa to be in solidarity with one another, and to face them together.
“We have to have boots on the ground. We can’t fix this struggle from somewhere else,” he said. “We are going to need each other, and we are going to have to carry and hold each other, and represent and hold space for each other.”
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