Cameroonian Book Publishing as ‘Defiant Scholarship’

Stephanie Kitchen presented at the British Academy Writing Workshop on ‘Defiant Scholarship in Africa’, July 2024, discussing ‘Book Publishing and Publishing Collectives in Africa’, with two publishers from Cameroon. 

I was invited to present on the topic of ‘Book Publishing and Publishing Collectives in Africa’, alongside two African Books Collective (ABC) publishers from Cameroon, Spears Media Press and Langaa RPCIG, at a British Academy Writing Workshop on ‘Defiant Scholarship in Africa’. An example of this work is Amber Murrey and Patricia Daley’s Learning Disobedience: Decolonizing Development Studies (Pluto, 2023). What are ABC and Cameroonian publishing contributing to ‘defiant scholarship’?

ABC was established in 1989 in Oxford, UK, by independent African publishers to distribute and represent their books beyond the continent. CODESRIA was a founder publisher, with whom leading scholars and publishers of Cameroonian descent have been associated: Achille Mbembe, Francis Nyamnjoh, and Divine Fuh. Francis Nyamnjoh and Divine Fuh worked together on the establishment of Langaa RPCIG in Cameroon in the 2000s. A subsequent publisher in ABC from Cameroon is the anthropologist Jude Fokwang, who founded Spears Media Press in 2014.  

ABC’s founding ethos was closely linked to histories of liberation from colonialism, and the subsequent postcolonial dominance of African publishing by multinational publishing houses, particularly in educational or textbook markets. ABC supports the freedom of academics to publish where they like, including options to publish regionally within Africa and the vision of a vibrant African publishing industry. 

Cameroonian book publishers are well on the way to achieving this.

Cameroonian Book Publishers: A Success Story

The representation of Cameroonian publishers and books in ABC is a success story, perhaps owing to regional conditions: the educational systems and universities; the multilingualism that drives diversity and productivity; and the research and activism of notable scholars beyond Cameroon in the diaspora, including in Europe and North America, and through international networks, such as in Japan. Cameroon is making an outsized contribution to publishing in the continent, building on its intellectual history.

Cameroonian book publishing has fitted well with the ABC model. The individuals noted and their networks have driven various publishing projects. The Cameroonian book publishers discussed here have to greater and lesser extents depended on ABC to survive and thrive; but they have equally advanced their own publishing capabilities. The ease with which these publishers work with digital production and dissemination tools, including online platforms and social media for communication and distribution and publicity of books, is notable and commendable. The larger Cameroonian publishers on the ABC list (Spears Media Press and Langaa) are the most technologically adept publishers we work with in West Africa and stand out across our list.

Cameroonian Publishers in ABC

Bakwa Books, Yaounde (5 titles in ABC)

Bakwa Books publishes literary magazines, story stories, and short novels.

Peacock Writers Series, Douala (5 titles in ABC)

Peacock Writers Series is a series of novellas, stories, and plays for children.

Muntu Institute Press, Yaounde (5 titles in ABC)

Muntu Institute Press publishes scholarly work in the social sciences in French. ABC has five titles so far, including work by leading scholars such as Parfait Akana, Jean-Loup Amselle, and Emmanuelle Minko.

Spears Media Press, Bamenda (50+ titles in ABC)

Spears Media Press has over 50 titles with ABC in print and e-book, published since 2015. They are publishing leading literary work from West Africa: Cameroon, Nigeria, and the diaspora; and academic work in history, anthropology, gender and cultural studies, politics and economy, education, Cameroonian studies, African languages and linguistics.

The Press, established in 2014 in Bamenda, working with ABC from the outset, describes itself as a “platform for alternative voices”. It sees itself as an artistic venture to challenge the ‘inferior status’ of African voices; further, as a “response to capitalist orthodoxy” and to resist “unfree markets and restricted publishing”. The ethos is not simply to reject weak proposals but to support junior scholars to produce the best work they can. Spears Media Press seeks to provide an alternative to self-publishing/DIY publishing, and publishing as simply printing, to challenge the profit logic by promoting professionalism and expertise.

Spears pays attention to dimensions of gender, class, and ethnicity. The vision is to ‘decolonise publishing’. It practises peer review, but also ‘defiant scholarship’: granting authors the autonomy to ‘write what they like’, within legal limits. They have published first-time and prize-winning authors. They publish in print and e-book formats and aim to contribute to affordable and available books and publishing in the African continent. Pricing and affordability are constant challenges; the Press estimates that it costs them around $7,000 to publish a fiction title and $10,000 to publish an academic title.

Langaa Research and Publishing Common Initiative Group, Bamenda (750+ titles in ABC)

Langaa is currently the biggest publisher in ABC, in terms of both titles and sales. ABC has released around 750 titles published by Langaa since 2008, representing around 20% of our list, and correspondingly of our sales turnover. Indeed, the work of Langaa has been central to the success of ABC over the past 15 years. Langaa publishes a range of academic and literary work, some trade books, books in English and French and on African languages. The Press, established as a quasi-NGO, is supported by grants and volunteers from different parts of the world. It has published authors from Burkina Faso, Ghana, Kenya, Malawi, Nigeria, Sudan, Zimbabwe, South Africa, and beyond.

Langaa’s ethos is described as being a “screaming voice for the voiceless”. Taking on the challenge of Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s apt “danger of a single story”, Langaa instead allows Africans to “tell our own stories” and supports younger voices to grow. Further, it challenges the ‘capitalism’ and ‘colonialism’ of contemporary global knowledge production and existing North-South epistemologies, through engaging in conversations with the global North. Langaa tries to function “as a university that’s the opposite of a university” and to “produce works where they cannot be colonised”.

The publishing impact of Langaa has provided visibility and dignity, “publishing not perishing”, for African authors. Langaa has seemingly taken the view that the most important thing is to get credible manuscripts out into the world. ABC data attest that Langaa has published and sold books at scale over a 16-year period. Spears Media Press has published more slowly, with an emphasis on quality and high-end literature.

Both approaches have added extraordinary value to Cameroonian and African publishing, and to ABC. Langaa and Spears have put Cameroonian academic and literary work on the map in and beyond Cameroon.

I would contend that Cameroon and its wider academic diaspora is contributing strongly and disproportionately to academic and literary book publishing from the continent, with over 800 titles in ABC. This is being achieved despite – or because of – ongoing recent crises in the country, exiled academics, and all the well-known barriers to publishing in the African continent.

Behind the five presses discussed above lies a great deal of personal commitment to literature and writing for all generations and audiences, as well as academics, most notably social scientists, historians, anthropologists, and literary scholars, dedicating part of their own time, essentially unremunerated or additional to their own research and teaching, to publishing the work of others. In an interview, Jude Fokwang, Publisher of Spears Media Press, said the following about how he managed to combine his roles as a researcher and a publisher:

“How do I juggle being a full time academic? I’m currently the chair of my department. I’m extremely busy. I put in most hours on the publishing over the summer break so my other job doesn’t suffer. I have a course release this semester. But as you can tell, it’s a labour of love; it’s something I enjoy doing. I cannot think of my life any other way other than of being an academic but also helping others tell their stories. So I see it as my calling … I’m trying to juggle my different callings. I don’t see any of them as suffering. My principal job as an anthropologist is not suffering. Yes, I could publish more, personal stuff, if I were not doing stuff for other people. But I don’t see them as mutually exclusive. I see it as an accomplishment.”

In the contemporary moment, this strikes me as a good example of practising ‘defiant scholarship’.

Cameroonian Book Distribution

ABC isn’t primarily a distributor in Africa itself, although it does handle orders from the continent with the publishers’ consent. We are aware of the many challenges: of getting books across borders, customs, costs, the lack of regional distributors. There are no known Print-on-Demand publishing and distributing facilities in West Africa. The global print wholesaler, Ingram/Lightning Source, has recently begun such an operation in South Africa, which should help improve the availability of African published books in that country.

One ray of light, perhaps, is the potential for digital distribution of e-books which inherently transcends borders. In West Africa, there is Nouvelles Editions Numériques Africaines (NENA), a Senegalese-based e-book platform with 4,000 titles, half of which are in French. Marc-André Ledoux, who runs NENA, has a vision for digital publishing and digital libraries. For a forthcoming article of the journal Logos, he writes:

“the fact remains that reading in Togo a book published in Senegal is an obstacle course as there are no distribution logistics. … To expose current and potential readers to the works of African knowledge and imagination, we need to take advantage of their habit of clicking and touching. Just as in the aisles of a physical library, they need to be able to wander through the virtual aisles of a digital library, browsing at random, and one day stumbling across the astonishing book they didn't know they had.”

ABC has from 2022 established its own e-book platform, with over 2,000 titles. Our own platform affords us direct control over distribution and pricing of e-books.

These e-book models are not a panacea. They do not replace print, and come with their own challenges: the high costs for smaller players of affording the digital infrastructure; the metadata provision expected by libraries, which may have considerable budgets to invest in the platforms; e-book production costs (for an expanding range of requirements, including to meet accessibility standards throughout the world); digital rights management; the question of fair returns to authors; and how best to interface with a series of competitive e-book vendors, each with complex purchasing models.

E-book production and distribution is an area where we need to work together – in these examples, ABC, NENA, and the Cameroonian publishers. It’s not feasible for each book publisher to do this on their own. But they don’t have to, thanks to the existence and innovations of book publishing collectives on and beyond the continent. In an older idiom, this would have been glossed as ‘collective action’. Perhaps it is also akin to ‘defiant scholarship’.

There is a Read African Books companion blog by Professor Jude Fokwang, Spears Media Press Publisher: 'Centring Africana Voices in Contemporary Publishing'. 

Image: Participants and coordinators at 3-day writing workshop on ‘Defiant Scholarship in Africa’ in Yaoundé, Cameroon on 20 June 2024. Credit: Césaire Wang.
The event was funded by the British Academy (grant no. IWWAF\100013) and cosponsored by the University of Buea and the University of Oxford. The second of such workshops will be held at Addis Ababa University in October 2024.