Africa Writes Back: The African Writers Series and the Launch of African Literature (review)

James Currey (who often prefers to write about himself in the third person), known nowadays to have hived off as the eponymous imprint of African specialty books, was over 1967–1984 the pioneering editor of Heinemann Educational Books’ African Writers Series. That wonderful orange ghetto of little volumes surely was one of the most powerful factors, as his subtitle says, in the postwar launch of African literature, particularly in English.

His Africa Writes Back, then, is a memoir-scrapbook of those burgeoning years, including an introduction on the in-house team and chapters of the various regions (the West and the East where offices and editorial advisers were maintained, the North-east, South, and Southern), with sidebar biographical portraits of star turns (like Chinua Achebe, Nuruddin Farah, and many more), concluding in a bibliography of the series up to 2003 (over three hundred titles with, in the 1970s, a rate of twenty titles per annum). The whole is generously illustrated with George Hallette author pics and his black and white front covers that became so familiar. This is a benchmark achievement, yet, as Currey remarks, “A lot for a single publisher. Not many for a continent.”

For the first decade it is understandable that West African males dominated the list, with Achebe as the editorial adviser offering his imaginative support for the first hundred titles. Incidentally, it also emerges that his own titles in the series account for an astounding one-third of the total revenue. Which means a sporty spark of humor between favorite author and publisher when their most famous title goes on to a rotary press using an unsewn binding, with fingers crossed that things do not now really fall apart. (The striking wit of the book, however, is Taban lo Liyong.) But the actual disintegration that was to take place was the Nigerian foreign exchange closure in 1982, leading to what Currey often calls “the African book famine,” which compelled the search for new titles to move elsewhere.

From Achebe, Currey proceeds to Ayi Kwei Armah, with whom relations must have been scratchy (the latter memorably described the whole operation as “a neocolonial writers’ coffle owned by Europeans but slyly misnamed ‘African’ ”); on to Ngugi, making it as the first writer aiming to live off his earnings in royalties; to spirited vignettes of Tayeb Salih and several others, such as Luís Bernardo Honwana. In the latter case Currey is typically unable to give credit where it is due for his achievement in releasing the wonderful We Killed Mangy-Dog of 1969, when many of the pieces had previously won prizes and been boomed in Nat Nakasa’s The Classic two years before (i.e., prior to making it next into Alan Ross’s The London Magazine). Some other such local initiatives have the right to be miffed at being overlooked as well.

As a white male with age-old South African connections, Currey has had to do some duck and diving, in order to establish his personal nonracist credentials. His forebears include the first British sheriff of Natal Colony, not that he says so, and his father was the highly distinguished South African poet R. N. Currey. The inheritor of such a history is thus at pains to stress that, for example, while working for OUP in Cape Town, from 1962 he moonlighted on The New African, following it into exile in London later in the decade. Indeed, through this fine and brave radical review where he worked hands on, including lettrasetting headings and contributing accounts of his own collecting trips through newly independent African countries, he first made contact with several contributors who would become his future authors (Can Themba, Richard Rive, Bessie Head, Alfred Hutchinson).

During the anti-apartheid boycott decades he prominently...