Ngũgĩ & the Decolonization of Publishing

Abstract

The publication of Ngũgĩ's Weep Not, Child in 1964, two years after the foundation of the African Writers Series (AWS) with Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe in 1962, was the moment of take-off. The original plan was for the AWS to republish in paperback books first published by general literary publishers in hardback. However, Keith Sambrook and Chinua Achebe rapidly ran out of books by African authors to republish. At that point, Heinemann became the originating publisher in hardbacks for reviews and library sales, with their own paperback to follow. All too often, writers of a successful first novel find it difficult to write the second. Not Ngũgĩ. The River Between (1965) had been written before Weep Not, Child and some of the reviews of A Grain of Wheat (1967) compared his writing confidence with that of Conrad. Along with Achebe, he was established internationally throughout the English-speaking world as evidence that exciting writing was coming out of Africa. Ngũgĩ was addressing an audience through English, the language of colonialism. In 1962, at a meeting of teachers of English literature in African universities convened by Ezekiel (Zeke) Mphahlele and Eldred Jones at Fourah Bay College in Sierra Leone, it was decided that writing by contemporary writers from Africa should be used in teaching English literature at universities in Africa, and that the examination boards in West and East Africa should choose titles to prescribe as set texts. For example, in 1974, 50,000 copies of Weep Not, Child were sold in Nigeria in one month alone as it was the set book for the West African Examination Board for school certificate. Ngũgĩ was within sight of being able to survive from royalties on his writing. Ngũgĩ may not have had trouble with his second novel but he certainly had trouble with the second stage of his career. He had become famous and the longer people waited for his next novel the greater was the level of public expectation. By the mid-1970s his philosophy had been transformed by pan- Africanism and the black power movements. The Caribbean writers he had studied at Leeds had influenced his work and thought.