The Politics of Postcolonial Publishing: Oxford University Press's Three Crowns Series 1962-1976

In July 1962, Oxford University Press editor Rex Collings "discovered" the plays of Wole Soyinka.¹ He immediately attempted to persuade his manager, David Neale, that these plays should be included in the Three Crowns series, an eclectic collection of books about Africa published in London for both the UK and international market. Encountering initial opposition, Collings wrote an emphatic response:

I am convinced also that there is still a place for us in African publishing if we can plainly show that we are not in fact only interested in selling enormous quantities of primary school books by expatriate authors. This is quite commonly felt and believed although it is not altogether true in fact. Politically therefore it is also important that we should publish. If we don't, I think we will have missed the bus.²

Rex Collings's argument for the publication of original African literature by OUP hinged on its political expedience. He emphasized the importance of embedding "high culture" in the African publishing program for the purpose of prestige and public relations, and predicted that Three Crowns might serve an important function in compensating for the more commercial activities of the press. This argument was evidently persuasive. He was given permission to begin acquiring African writing for the Three Crowns series, initially with the publication of Soyinka's plays: A Dance in the Forest and The Lion and the Jewel were published in 1963, followed by Three Short Plays in 1964, The Road in 1965, and Kongi's Harvest in 1967. Three Crowns came to be dominated by English-language African literature: mainly drama, with some poems and short stories. For OUP, this was a significant departure from its general pattern of commissioning and writing texts in the UK for the African educational market.

Within the context of postcolonial publishing in Africa, this article explores the development of Three Crowns and the political debate surrounding the series. Based on previously unresearched archival material at Oxford University Press and interviews with Three Crowns editors, this study considers the strategy, finances, and management of the series, which in turn reveal the political complexities of postcolonial publishing in the 1960s and 1970s. Three Crowns was to become a highly contentious series, subject to two major reviews. It narrowly survived on both occasions before being finally closed in 1976. What saved Three Crowns from earlier closure was the same liberal argument that Rex Collings first used to justify the initial experiment into African literary publishing: the fact that this cultural enterprise helped justify Oxford University Press's commercial publishing in Africa.

Oxford University Press was one of several British companies that consolidated publishing empires in the postcolonial period. Peter Sutcliffe writes in his history of the press: "As the Old Empire dissolved, the Overseas Education Department set out to build a new one."³ The end of formal colonization in Africa gave British publishing companies the opportunity to become more, not less, deeply entrenched in the cultural life of the continent. New offices were established by OUP in South Africa (reopened 1946), Nigeria (1949), East Africa (1954), and the Gold Coast (1955). As African nations achieved political independence in the early 1960s, OUP sales offices throughout Africa were converted to publishing branches. In 1963 the Nigeria branch (Figure 1) and East Africa branch were opened, followed in successive years by branches in Lusaka (1964), Addis Ababa (1965), and Accra (1966). OUP's International Division was based in the London office of the press and was the coordinating center for the foreign branches, except New York, which was independently managed. The African branches had a degree of autonomy over decisions that affected their own markets, and increasingly managed their own publishing and production programs for these markets, but decisions affecting an international market were referred back to the center.

The expansion of OUP in Africa in the 1960s and...