Book-publishing is in crisis in most African countries. The deepening economic recession and chronic balance-of-payments problems have taken a severe toll on publishing and book development, and the resulting dearth of publishing outlets has meant that African writers are finding it increasingly difficult to place their work.
Until recently, it appeared that publishers in francophone Africa were better off than their colleagues in anglophone Africa, largely because they had access to a convertible currency, the CFA. However, recent developments (in 1990) indicate that they, too, have not escaped the recession, and government funding for textbooks or library development has dramatically declined, with the inevitable consequences for the book industries. A major publishing initiative taken in the early 1970s, the establishment of Les Nouvelles Éditions Africaines (NEA), would appear to be in danger of collapse.
Publishing activities in francophone Africa have always been heavily concentrated in two or three countries in West Africa: Senegal, Ivory Coast, and, to a lesser extent, Cameroon. The first full-scale indigenous publishing house was Éditions CLE in Yaoundé, Cameroon, founded in 1963 with the help of the Dutch and German Protestant churches. The number of new books from Éditions CLE has dropped sharply over the last decade or so, but its early list included names such as Bebey, Dadié, Oyono-Mbia, and Lopes. Other, smaller Cameroonian imprints have included Philombe's Éditions Semences Africaines, which had a strong list focusing on poetry and drama, Buma Kor Publishing House, and Timothée Ndzaagap's Éditions Le Flambeau.
The launching in 1972 of the Nouvelles Éditions Africaines consortium was a significant publishing development. The main aims of NEA, a joint undertaking of the governments of Senegal, Ivory Coast, and Togo together with French publishing interests, were to foster African authorship, to promote the reading habit, and to produce school-books adapted to African, rather than European, realities and experience. NEA quickly became a major force in all areas of publishing, with a massive and impressive list which included most of the top names from the academic and literary world, among them Birago Diop, Cheikh Anta Diop, Amadou Hampaté Ba, Maunick, Diakhaté, Menga, Nanga, Sow Fall, Sall, Tati-Loutard, Mariama Ba, and of course Senghor. NEA also produced a wide range of attractive children's books, including some splendid comic-strip-type books.
Although the NEA experience has set an example of more enlightened government attitudes towards supporting indigenous African publishing, it could be argued that their dominance has stifled the growth of small independent publishers. The only other publisher of note in francophone West Africa is the Centre d'Édition et de Diffusion Africaines (CEDA) in Abidjan. Although the CEDA output has dropped substantially in recent years, they still maintain a strong literary list of novels, drama, poetry, and popular fiction, including a series copublished with Hatier in Paris. Dadié, Adiaffi, Diabaté, Pliya, and Sony Labou Tansi are among the internationally known CEDA authors. In Togo there have been a number of initiatives to set up small privately owned publishing-houses, including Éditions Akpagnon, owned by the writer and political activist Yves-Emmanuel Dogbé, whose list has included fiction, poetry, and short-story collections, and Éditions HaHo [‘for all’], launched in 1984 and publishing both in French and in African languages.
Publishing activities in other parts of French-speaking Africa, e.g. in Zaïre or the former Belgian colonies, are insubstantial. There is a fairly lively publishing industry in the Maghreb (especially Algeria and Morocco), but much of the literary publishing is of course in Arabic. In Africa south of the Sahara French publishers continue to dominate the markets, although the Canadians are beginning to make some inroads. Small autonomous publishing houses are unable to compete with the multinationals and the French publishing giants; and a viable publishing industry, which can produce books on a scale that matches local needs, is still a dream in most parts of the continent.
[<auth init="">HMZ]
