Knowledge production and publishing in Africa

Abstract

This article explores the practice of ‘knowledge production’ and ‘publishing’ in Africa. Knowledge production and publishing in Africa has been and still is dominated by Western experts, most of whose interests do not serve Africa. Powerful social groups in post-colonial Africa construct knowledge about Africa from the sites of universities. Ordinary people also produce knowledge, most of which is elaborated through unwritten forms, and actually contest dominant modes of knowing. Publishing in Africa ought to be controlled by Africans if African states are to realise the dream of an African renaissance. African governments ought to invest in knowledge production and publishing. African intellectuals with university education should work with ordinary African intellectuals to create new sites of knowledge. Knowledge production and publishing is not an ideologically neutral phenomenon. Therefore, African governments should create, and not thwart, conditions conducive to knowledge production and publishing that is self-interrogating.

1. Introduction

The aim of this article is to offer a critical but open-ended analysis of the conditions under which knowledge production and publication takes place in Africa. Knowledge production occurs in every society in contexts where human beings interact with nature and with other human beings. The level of knowledge production is determined by the degree of technological sophistication that a society has achieved. The necessity to survive generates a technical consciousness that enables human beings to produce more sophisticated technology, which in turn is used to produce new forms of knowledge. The pool of knowledge and technical expertise can be used to dominate or free human beings from the caprice of nature and from powerful people in society (Bhebhe, 2000: 7).

The production of knowledge implicates and is implicated in power relations. This is because those who have superior technology cannot only generate but also control, store, monopolise and disseminate information as and when they wish, and to whoever can safeguard their interests. Powerful social groups can produce words, discourses and forms of written and unwritten knowledge regimes that have, throughout the history of mankind, often been used to stereotype and control the majority of people. Foucault (1972) suggests that the relationship between power and knowledge has its origin in who owns the means of material productions and the technical expertise. He further states that the way in which the powerful describe, name, structure and control the minds and imaginations of ordinary people in society is a function of discourse. By discourse, Foucault refers to the capacity that human beings and social groups possess and use or abuse when they evolve vocabularies that they institutionalise and with which they then permanently fix the identities of those that they subordinate. Edward Said (1978: 3) suggests that, in a colonial and post-colonial context, Western powers, using their local agents in Third World countries, have been able to develop elaborate cultural and political institutions where knowledge production exists with supporting vocabularies, scholarship, imagery and doctrines to justify the mental conquest of Africans. This, according to Said, is done by the Western and local African elites who – to paraphrase Said – make statements, authorise views, and describe and teach those over whom they exercise their hegemony.

However, both Foucault and Said are aware that the so-called ordinary people also possess the power to generate their own forms of knowledge, which can contest, interrogate, counteract, collide and sometimes collude with the knowledge produced by the elites. This point is useful because it implies that any form of knowledge is a social and political construct and, as such, that knowledge can be questioned, revised and even rejected in favour of new knowledge systems. Goran Therborn (1980) supports this view when he argues that in situations where the majority of people are dominated by a few, the ‘ideology of power’ is to make the ruled believe that their social conditions are natural, when in fact, the ‘power of ideology’ is such that ordinary people are able to understand the workings of the values that attempt to subordinate them. In the history of knowledge production, ordinary people have forced their presence on the stage of history through struggle (Cabral, 1973). The context of struggle enables ordinary people to generate knowledge that operates as counter memories to the sensibilities of the ruling elites. James concurs with this view when he states that, in writing his book, The Black Jacobins, he had made up his mind that he ‘would write a book in which Africans or people of African descent instead of constantly being the object of other people's exploitation and ferocity would themselves be taking action on a grand scale and shaping other people to their own needs’ (James, 1982: v).

Therefore, we are going to argue in this article that knowledge production is a result of human intellectual efforts and that it can either be used in the service of liberation (Freire, 1976) or for the domination by elites of ordinary people and by ordinary people to dominate the less powerful members of their own groups. We will emphasise that knowledge production is separable from the concept of publishing-produced knowledge, although there are very intricate relations between the two. While publishing depends on the value of knowledge produced, the published knowledge in the form of written and unwritten words encourages further elucidation and elaboration of new knowledge. Publishing knowledge is a way of codifying certain forms of knowledge so that the knowledge can be used by readers and oral raconteurs. Published knowledge and knowledge contained in the oral forms enables people to reflect and elaborate on their previous knowledge, so that new forms of knowledge are made possible. Structuring knowledge through written or unwritten verbal forms enables people to use their critical consciousness gained in past struggles to deal with the challenges posed by nature and other human beings. In other words, publishing knowledge by itself is not a process that confers superiority to the written word. Knowledge production takes place at different sites that do not necessarily need codifying and settling in the written form. Knowledge production can – and indeed, in Africa, is – largely mediated through oral means, through popular songs, myths, legends and African proverbs, among others. These forms of orally mediated knowledge are not intrinsically reactionary or revolutionary. It is the content and values contained in our images of what is valid knowledge and what is not, that describes the relationship of power to knowledge production (Vambe, 2004).

2. African knowledge and knowledge of Africa

There is no society within which knowledge production does not take place. In Africa, knowledge is produced in institutionalised contexts, such as a university. It is elaborated into values and ideologies and codified into the written word. The power of the written word has, however, not displaced African knowledge that in Africa is generated not at universities but in the urban slums and rural areas. This knowledge is, in most cases, elaborated through oral means. In these contexts, knowledge is a manifestation of the people's struggle with nature and with each other. This knowledge is carried from one generation to the other through popular songs, folktales, myths and legends.

This knowledge is by no means inferior to that which is codified in books. In fact, knowledge production in Africa is far more complicated. The written word itself has emerged from the oral base. The orally transmitted knowledge has found a new lease of life through the new multimedia technologies. It is thus important to underline from the outset the distinction between knowledge production as is implied in the processes of intellectualisation and critical reflection, and the process of publishing knowledge, which is mechanical.

Within the ensemble of an industrial model, publishing of knowledge occupies some middle ground. There must be knowledge production first, which has to be disseminated through publishing (written and oral or both). Once knowledge is published it creates an archive that scholars can reflect upon. This process encourages the generation of new forms of knowledge that emerge from interrogating the assumptions of previous knowledge regimes. Thus, in Africa, knowledge production and publishing do not necessarily mean the same, although they are intricately linked to each other. Some people have the political power to authorise certain forms of knowledge and ensure that it has been published and disseminated. Their knowledge is more widely circulated through the technology which they control and monopolise.

Marginalised communities also generate knowledge, which they communicate orally and even through low-level technology (Pikirayi, 2000: 47). Although this ensures that their values and memories are circulated as knowledge, sometimes the ordinary people have to struggle against lack of appropriate tools by creating appropriate indigenous technology. And in the modern African context, ordinary Africans have appropriated the technologies developed and controlled by the elites so that the ordinary people can also elaborate their philosophies through written channels of communication. We therefore agree with Eileen Julien (1997), who argues that the predominance of orally based knowledge in Africa is not a fact that suggests that Africans are oral by nature, and that Europeans are intrinsically rationalistic in their approach to life because they use the written word more than the oral. These inequalities are a function of the technological control that elites have at their disposal, although in many cases that technology is developed using human and material resources from poor African nations.

3. Africa's publishing economic infrastructure

It is now common knowledge in Africa that knowledge production has become an institution or a conglomeration of institutions with distinct sites at universities, in civil organisations, and commissioned research with the post-colonial African education systems as purveyors of that knowledge economy. Specific sites have taken over from the politics of the everyday in the production of knowledge. People are now paid to produce certain types of knowledge and this is a process that inherently excludes the authorisation of other forms of knowledge. Knowledge is now a commodity which is bought and sold at the academic market place. It has entrenched itself as power. Knowledge production is now driven by the imperative of profit. It is copyrighted. It is budgeted for in publishing houses. It is selective knowledge because not all of what has been created as knowledge, or what is authorisable as knowledge, sees the light of day.

The authors would then suggest that the economics of knowledge production is the entire infrastructure. This infrastructure of publishing is also owned. In Africa, most of that publishing is in foreign hands. Publishing is an appendage of European publishing houses. Publishing in Africa is viewed as a special area that is not expected to produce knowledge but to be a conveyer belt of information developed as knowledge in other climates. Or, in most cases, if publishing is in African hands it first imagines its readers as European. It becomes African knowledge by virtue of marking its consumers as people living outside the borders of Africa.

In these constraining circumstances it is true that African publishing has done much – mainly as popularisers of other people's knowledge in our society. In some cases African publishers working with lean budgets and exhausted staff have created a minute body of knowledge that Africans can call theirs. Not all knowledge that Africans come to consume is produced in Africa or by people of African descent in the diaspora. We are forced to pose the following questions. What is African knowledge? Are we talking of European knowledge in Africa, or African knowledge in Europe? What are the other forms of the knowledge economy that exist in Africa that have been marginalised by powerful multinational publishing houses working with their local agents? How and where can these marginalised knowledge forms be brought into the mainstream as valid African knowledge through publishing in Africa? Lastly, what are the links created between knowledge production and publishing in Africa in the context of the equally daunting task of democratising the knowledge production infrastructure and the African societies themselves?

Africa has diverse cultural backgrounds and economies at different stages of development. Its publishing industry tends to follow this pattern in which the most industrialised countries on the continent have tended to attract foreign investment in the publishing industry. This is the case with South Africa (Evans & Seeber, 2000). However, sometimes this pattern is disrupted. A small country such as Zimbabwe, for instance, can have a more dynamic publishing industry than some African countries that do have the economic infrastructure to promote publishing. Zimbabwe is going through an economic downturn, but publishing houses such Mambo Press, College Press, Longman Books, Baobab Books, Prestige Books and Zimbabwe Publishing House continue to dominate the local scene and these publishing houses have in fact competed at the previous Zimbabwe International Book Fairs held in Zimbabwe since 1980.

Another exciting new phenomenon in the publishing industry in Zimbabwe is the emergence of individually or family-run publishing houses. A case in point is Weaver Press, which is efficiently run by Irene Staunton and her partner and husband. Weaver Press has posted impressive publications in both the fiction and non-fiction book categories in Zimbabwe. Authors such as the late Yvonne Vera, who won the 1997 Commonwealth Writers Prize (Africa Region), have come from Zimbabwe. Her novel, Under the Tongue (1997) was published by Baobab Books. Another of her novels, The Stone Virgins (1999), was published by Weaver Press and it won the Zimbabwe's Publisher's Award, the Macmillan Writer's Prize and Sweden's ‘Voice of Africa’ award. Chenjerai Hove's novel Bones (1988), published by Baobab Books, won the Prestigious Noma Award for Africa and Shimmer Chinodya's novel, Harvest of Thorns (1989), published by Baobab Books, won the Commonwealth Writer's Prize (Africa region) in 1990.

This vibrancy of the Zimbabwean publishing industry should come as no surprise, because culture, politics and economics do not travel or function in parallel. Culture industries have the capacity to thrive in adverse conditions in ways that interrogate those conditions and produce their own conditions of possibility and perpetuation. In other words, in Zimbabwe the paradox is that the negative publicity surrounding the country and the current economic disjuncture make publishing possible. In making this point, the authors are not suggesting that Africa needs violence or economic misfortune in order for knowledge to be produced and publishing to prosper. It is rather to underline the fact that cultural developments in many parts of Africa, and the rest of the world, do not follow a linear progress.

In South Africa, foreign publishing houses also dominate, although Afrikaner nationalists made sure that some strategic publishing is in the hands of Afrikaner capital. West African countries have traditionally been dominated by Western publishers. One of the reasons for this is that, generally, the West African reading public creates a reading market for both local and international publishers. The authors could continue to enumerate the regional differences in financial resources that go into publishing in Africa. However, the point is that Africa, whether north, south, east or west, is still dominated by Western publishers. They have been doing sterling work. But the fact that only a small section of locals have control over what is published has implications for the kind of material that is published.

4. Knowledge production, African publishing and the need for paradigmatic shifts

The intellectual process by which something becomes knowledge is a critical debate in Africa. In Africa, colonialism brought with it not only written forms of knowledge. It also brought a perspective. It imported ideologies. The well-rehearsed ideology of colonialism is that African systems were archaic and had to be replaced by colonial notions of modernity and development. Colonialism brought the paradigm that was constructed upon binary perceptions of social reality. Its mission was to civilise and tame the African, as it also sought to domesticate the environment. These mental frameworks kept Africans in servitude. This legacy has continued in some people's minds in post-independent Africa. For example, published knowledge still commands a lot of ‘respect’ from both African and non-African intellectuals, especially those who acquired knowledge through the written media.

Some publishing houses perpetuate these colonialist perceptions as part of the agenda of dominating African non-written and indigenous knowledge systems. Since the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s, African nationalism has contributed to the generation of a paradigmatic shift in terms that constructed and imagined the new nations through the medium of the written word. Elitist ‘written’ histories emerged from Africanists and nationalists who created and popularised the image of a homogeneous African.

From a historical perspective, international and local publishing houses seized the moment to produce commissioned writings and critical publications that promoted a sense of nationhood among Africans. In post-independence Zimbabwe, local publishers working with international capital have also been at the forefront of financing knowledge production that has tended to undermine the interests of the ordinary people. A book in question is one published by Weaver Press, entitled Zimbabwe: The Past is the Present (Harold, 2004). Its argument is that the post-colonial Zimbabwe is equal to, if not worse than, the malignant tumour that was colonialism. The German scholar, Flora Veit-Wild and a French critic, Alan Ricard, state in their edited book, Body, Sexuality, and Gender: Versions and Subversions in African Literature 1 that from now on, in analysing African literature, they seek to move ‘beyond worn-out clichés’ of ‘cultural authenticity’ and ‘national liberation … towards critical exploration of African modernities’.

The African liberation struggles that created the peaceful conditions for Western scholars to research African literature have, for the critics, become clichéd. African modernities are narrowly conceived as cultural processes that can exist outside the different valences of African national liberation struggles. This goes to show that an expansion of publishing in Africa does not always mean that those knowledge systems that are being popularised are in the interests of the African people. The authors are aware that Western critics with vast resources are in the habit of isolating those African critics who speak out against them. The authors are also aware that there are several young critics whose school fees were paid for by European scholars and whose time has now arrived to make recompense by way of betraying Africa. Knowledge production for them is not about what is happening in Africa, but about their imagination of the worst that should happen in Africa (Mukoma, 2003). In other words, some African intellectuals are also willing vectors in the world intellectual equation that encourages producing knowledge about Africa, for Africa, which knowledge denigrates the object of Western desire and revulsion – Africa.

The irony is that in other African countries publishing houses in fact operated as third spaces, where ideas of democracy were published long before the countries became independent. This is the case, for example, in South Africa where, until 1994, some private publishers were persecuted for publishing ideas that attacked the system of apartheid (Evans & Seeber, 2000). In yet other countries with a long history of publishing in Africa, such as Ethiopia, publishing took very contradictory paths. A semi-feudal society under Emperor Haile Selassie had its own forms of publication. Also, individuals created their own publishing houses. Of late, privately funded knowledge production and publication has become more common. The Panos Institute in Ethiopia, for instance, aims at producing knowledge by stimulating informed debate and discussion on development issues both at national and regional levels. To this end it is involved in:

• producing radio programmes on combating violence against women, dealing with the roots of the problem: how the construction of violence occurs in the minds of men; the ways violence occurs, policies (national and international) and testimonies by women who have experienced various forms of violence

• environmental and sustainable development issues, dealing mainly with the crucial relation of environmental preservation to development in general and agriculture in particular, touching upon policy issues regarding international covenants and agreements

• producing Afar radio, a programme operating as a community radio without ownership, transmitting basic educational principles that are useful in the everyday life of pastoralists and providing the community with a forum to air their views and concerns

• producing AIDS radio, educationally targeting the sexually active population through calls from listeners and interviews with experts and people living with AIDS

• producing newspapers: Panos contracts a page of one of the Amharic weeklies, Tobya, to transmit knowledge on development issues. Every week it carries articles on development issues that are read by development practitioners in particular

The Forum for Social Studies (FSS) is an independent, non-profit institution engaged in policy-oriented research on the development challenges facing Ethiopia (FSS, 2005). It provides a forum for the discussion of public policy and promotes public awareness. The FSS, in encouraging broad participation in policy debates, makes an important contribution to the democratic process. To achieve its goals, the FSS organises public conferences and publishes and distributes its research findings to policy makers and other government officials, civil society institutions, professionals, the business community, donor agencies and the public at large.

One of FSS's major activities in 2001 and 2002 was a series of workshops, research and publications on poverty and an extended assessment of the government's Interim Poverty Reduction Strategy Paper (FSS, 2005). Having launched a bi-monthly discussion forum called the Poverty Dialogue Forum, FSS held several workshops to which it invited civil society organisations, the poor and representatives of the government and donors as speakers to discuss the problems of poverty and ways to address it.

The main FSS forum since 2000 has been its Policy Dialogue series (FSS, 2005). These are public workshops in which participants from civil society, government, the business community, academic and professional institutions, donor agencies and the media come together to discuss development policy issues. The aim is to provide a non-confrontational environment for dialogue and exchange of knowledge and experience among a wide spectrum of social actors.

The FSS's FM Radio programme, Dewel, broadcasting a programme of discussions on development and community issues, was launched in 2001 (FSS, 2005). Supported by the Friedrich Ebert Stiftung and produced in collaboration with WAAG Communication, a local media company with extensive experience in the field, the programme has attracted wide public interest.

The FSS publishes diverse policy-oriented papers, monographs and briefings (FSS, 2005). Its publication list expands with a series of new titles every year. FSS documents are largely the product of research findings, discussions at its public workshops, conference proceedings and occasionally specially commissioned studies.

The fortunes of this diverse publishing enterprise have changed as power configurations have changed during the last 50 years. Different countries in Africa had space to experiment with different knowledge systems, depending on how they were located in relation to the West and to themselves. The educated elite who share Western and African sensibilities introduced ideas of neoliberal democracy. Publishing houses have tended to promote these ideas as the most appropriate modes of democracy and governance. In spite of this, other intellectuals have created their own publishing houses in order to have their ideas disseminated.

The politics of knowledge production and publishing is not an innocent undertaking. It has never been. There are vested interests in government publishers, as well as in international and local publishers. It is possible to argue that instead of viewing this scenario negatively, this picture of conflicting paradigms in publishing in Africa is what makes publishing worthwhile. It has helped keep debates on the need for good governance alive.

Although publication of the written word seems to be in the limelight in Africa today, there is no point in the history of knowledge production in Africa at which other forms of knowledge such as popular songs and African drama were ever dormant. Oral knowledge and its circulation in rural and urban contexts in Africa always threatened to undermine the self-proclaimed power and confidence of published knowledge. For example, in Zimbabwe the late Professor Beach, while at the University of Zimbabwe's Department of History, wrote history books that denigrated African heroines (1994). On the other hand, Aleck Pongweni, one of the first African lecturers at the University of Zimbabwe, gathered songs which counteracted colonial hegemony in Rhodesia. These songs are appropriately called the Songs that Won the Liberation War (1982) in recognition of the capacity of knowledge in indigenous song to carry the aspirations for a democratic Zimbabwe, when the written and electronic channels of knowledge production were heavily censored by the Rhodesia Literature Bureau.

In Kenya, Maina wa Kinyatti produced a book on Mau Mau songs which reveals how, through popular songs, the Mau Mau guerrillas struggling for Kenyan independence were able to capture and forge a Kenyan national identity. The compilation of the songs entitled Thunder from the Mountain (1974) scared colonialists and even the post-colonial leaders of Kenya and the book was withdrawn from circulation and the author had to seek political asylum in America. In the 1970s, Ngugi wa Thiongo, Micere Mugo, Ngugi wa Marii, Kimani Gecau and others formed and ran the Kamiriithu Community Centre, at which ordinary people, in conjunction with the Western educated intellectuals, were able to elaborate a distinctively Kenyan consciousness of struggle. The irony is that for creating a truly indigenous knowledge system that captured the dreams of the African peasants, the dramatists were chased out of Kenya by Daniel Arap Moi's government.

In other words, the suppression of the knowledge production that can liberate Africans from the shackles of poverty is, in post-independent Africa, being carried out by some black leaders whose interests are to safeguard their elitist lifestyles and those of their Western partners. So, when talking about knowledge production in the post-colonial Kenyan context in particular and the African context in general, it must be possible to distinguish elitist sensibilities that serve the interests of African elites and Western interests. This is so because ordinary African people and some Western-educated intellectuals who are daily struggling to shift the frame of understanding, and defining a liberatory knowledge ethos, are the ones who are hounded by their own African leaders. Knowledge production and its dissemination through publishing or the oral means cannot be taken for granted. In Africa, knowledge production and the sites where it occurs have become bitter arenas for class and ethnic struggles, in the same way that under colonialism knowledge production in Africa was a racially contested terrain.

In other words, the primary carrier of knowledge in African societies where large sections of the population have not had access to written material is not the published book. In these communities, knowledge is generated and expressed through unwritten songs, folktales, proverbs, masks, carvings and other modes of expressing knowledge. The politics surrounding the different modes of knowledge are that it is wrong to assume that those without access to written forms of expression have no knowledge. In some parts of Africa, this assumption is still prevalent and decisions about people's lives are taken on the basis of whether or not they have book knowledge. This has tended to undermine unwritten forms of knowledge that would otherwise contribute significantly to the debate about what knowledge is within African publishing. In pre-colonial Africa, oral forms of knowledge were also used by dominant groups to rehearse their histories, which they then used to subordinate the identities of other groups (Niane, 1960). So when we talk of paradigm shift we encourage the use of oral knowledge with the understanding that this base of African knowledge in some cases is infiltrated by dominant sensibilities. In other words, oral knowledge can interrogate the political and intellectual assumptions contained in books (Vambe, 2004).

5. Africa's readers and publishing in Africa

It is easy to generalise about African readers and conclude that little reading takes place in Africa. This would partly explain the assumption made about why some publishing houses have not been sustainable. But the picture is more complex. Countries such as Zimbabwe have a reading public of more than 80 per cent, even though the country does not have a sound economic infrastructure. This is possible because cultural developments do not move at the same pace as the economic and political processes. In fact, the phenomenon of private publishers multiplying is partly responsible for the proliferation of published works. In its desire to control the arts through such literary organs as the Literature Bureau, the Ministry of Education and Culture in Zimbabwe has encouraged generation of knowledge and its publication in the Shona and Ndebele languages. This has resulted in fictional works and textbooks being published. On the other hand, the situation for South Africa differs. Although South Africa had a better infrastructure, the apartheid system discriminated in such ways that black people, who form the largest group, did not have sufficient opportunities to learn to read and write. It is ironic that with the arrival of democracy in 1994 not many new publishing houses have invested in the country. Those that produce knowledge focus on publishing for secondary schools. This system of education is not yet sufficiently standardised to allow potential publishing houses to take advantage of the large population.

In other words, the politics of knowledge production, its publication and the question of the readers' access to these books cannot be decided by one factor in Africa. Similarly, the presence of a variety of publications in any African country does not necessarily mean that reading is taking place, or that its population is a reading public. Issues of financial resources are crucial in any debate on reading patterns in Africa. Most African populations are poor. When most African countries are confronted with high levels of unemployment, general poverty and with people living below the poverty datum line, it is easy to appreciate that very little money, if any, can be committed to buying books. Buying books will be seen as a luxury.

In fact, part of the irony of the politics of reading in Africa is that sometimes reading patterns are influenced by the decisions taken by powerful internal institutions. These same institutions can strangle a reading culture in Africa by introducing inappropriate strategies to deal with questions of literacy or illiteracy in Africa. For example, the World Bank blueprints claimed at the 1986 conference of African Vice-Chancellors in Harare that Africa did not need university education. Some countries followed this advice, with the resultant disastrous consequences that their educational sectors have not significantly improved qualitatively or quantitatively since they were under colonial rule or the apartheid system.

In southern Africa, Zimbabwe did not follow the bad advice of the World Bank at that time, with the fortunate result that the country achieved a literacy rate of more than 80 per cent after the 1980s. That percentage declined to around 70 per cent, mainly because of the economic meltdown which the country is going through. It is important to note that the so-called Western experts on Africa who are resident in European institutions can determine who reads what, and that way often give advice that undermines Africa's quest to enhance her knowledge production. The World Bank only helps to finance primary education in Africa. The main aim is to create a pool of employable Africans with basic literacy for the smooth running of capitalist interests in Africa.

Related to the issue of African readership is the thorny issue of who decides the content of what is to be read. Who validates the kind of knowledge production that is published? These questions are not simply about the race, class, gender or even the nationality of a person. They are epistemological. They implicate the ideological orientations of those who produce knowledge. For example, African governments are not famous for investing in culture and the book industry. They would rather buy more arms. This is not a stereotypical depiction of African governments. The question may be asked why, in a post-apartheid era, a country such as Zimbabwe with a fledgling economy needs to buy high powered jets from China? Similarly, being the southern African, if not the continental superpower in Africa, why would the democratic South African government buy – as it did – 28 fighter jets from Germany? In saying this, there is no intention to minimise the security threats to southern Africa, whether real or imagined. It is to highlight the fact that sometimes African governments' priorities do not coincide with the aspirations of the masses who want to have access to books. There is no single reason that can account for or explain this cynicism.

Compounding the occasional reluctance of African governments to encourage African readership are the problems associated with the hegemonic designs of Western interests in the African book industry. To give an idea of the graveness of this problem one may pose the following question: if a non-African writer writes about Africa, is this African knowledge? If an African writer writes about Africa in a European language, is this African knowledge? The issue at stake is how to broaden the theoretical catchment area from which African knowledge can originate. Ngugi wa Thiongo, the Kenyan writer, has asked similar questions about the use of language in African literature. He asks:

What is African Literature? Was it literature about Africa or about the African Experience? Was it literature written by Africans? What about a non-African who wrote about Africa: did his work qualify as African literature? What if an African set his work in Greenland: did that qualify as African literature? Or were African languages the criteria? But, what about Arabic, was it not foreign to Africa? What about French and English, which had become African languages? What if a European wrote about Europe in an African language. If… if… if… this or that… (Ngugi, 1981: 6)

These questions make us recognise the plurality of the potential sources of African knowledge systems, without making us forget that we are ultimately referring to the kind of knowledge that we are calling African.

As implied in the questions that Ngugi wa Thiongo poses, the language in which knowledge is produced and published, or orally transmitted and circulated in the communities, matters. It determines who reads and who does not, and who has access even to the spoken word and who does not. But Ngugi adds a caveat when he says that ‘writing in our languages… will not itself bring about the renaissance in African cultures if that literature does not carry the content of our people's anti-imperialist struggles to liberate their productive forces from domination’ (Ngugi, 1985:125 – authors' emphasis). Although anti-imperialist struggles are not the only struggles that Africans know, the point is made that African people's experience at the levels of lived culture and theoretical explications of these struggles could be the real sources of African knowledge. It is of course another battle to determine who wields the power to represent these struggles (publishing) and in what form, or whether or not the knowledge becomes accessible to the majority of the people who need it most, or whether the knowledge remains the private property of a few, as the situation in Africa threatens to be.

The question of the African readership must however, be conceptualised to go beyond whose national, official and ethnic languages ought to be used. This is so because the fact of writing in an African language does not necessarily mean the knowledge being offered promotes the interests of the people for whom it is intended. The Shona writers' experience with the restrictive policies of the colonial government through the Literature Bureau has shown that it is possible to use an African language to promote Western interests (Chiwome, 1996). Writing in the Shona language in Zimbabwe does not also guarantee that all the Shona people can read books written in that language and that, if they can indeed read, all have the access to the knowledge that they want. In Kenya, Ngugi wa Thiongo wrote Devil on the Cross (1982) first in the Agikuyu language with the title Caitaani Mutharabaini. However, there is no empirical evidence that suggests that every Gikuyu person can read this book.

This point is not meant to cast aspersions on the novel ways in which African writers and knowledge producers have been writing in indigenous languages. We are aware that any language is a carrier of culture and that people's images of themselves and others can best be conceptualised in their own language. But for us, reading is a skill. It is acquired through exposure to education. It is not innate. In other words, other variable factors must be considered when rethinking African readership. One of these factors is the level of formal (alphabetic) education that the population has. To have African knowledge carried through indigenous languages requires funding, if the ultimate terminus for this knowledge is to have it published. This point should not underestimate the fact that the bulk of African knowledge production happens through the oral medium and that orality still carries this African knowledge (Vambe, 2004).

6. African intellectuals and African knowledge production and publishing

Repositioning African knowledge production through adopting more democratic paradigms will deepen the ethos of transformation in society. African scholars are ashamed to identify openly with ideological positions that range them against other intellectual formations. African intellectuals who have acquired colonial or post-colonial education are made to feel ashamed to use the ideas of Cabral, Fanon, Blyden, Dubois, CLR James, Ngugi, Achebe and even the popular lore of our people. Dipesh Chakrabarty (1994) suggests that one of the symptoms of the subordinate status of African intellectuals in relation to European scholars is that they run to European sources to validate their experiences the way ducks run to water.

And yet, on the other hand, European scholars do not feel compelled to use sources of African knowledge when they write about Africa. A new intellectual – perhaps not necessarily an academic, but one who questions things in the spirit of reconstruction – is needed in Africa. This intellectual will provide the human dimension to the equation of repositioning African knowledge systems. This new intellectual need not come from or be confined to those who have acquired Western modes of thinking that denigrate Africa, like the character Ocol in Okot P'Bitek's book, Song of Lawino, Song of Ocol (1966), who regrets that he was born black.

The alienated African intellectual who rues having been born in Africa does not understand that the underdevelopment of African knowledge production and publishing has a historical explanation and that it is not a biological problem. This new intellectual need not necessarily be willy-nilly uncritically identified with the ordinary man and woman. Some of these too are mentally colonised to a point where they would actually want to oppress their own families, like the male character, Jeremiah, in Tsitsi Dangarembga's novel, Nervous Conditions (1987). Rather, as Chakrabarty (2002) argues, we in Africa need an intellectual who understands the politics of knowledge production fully, one who can challenge the stereotype of the idea of wholeness and stability imagined for Western knowledge systems and fragments ascribed to African knowledge productions.

7. Africa's publishing and marketing strategy: Constraints and prospects

Marketing of African knowledge suffers from two major ailments. The first is the lack of conceptual clarity of what it is that is to be marketed and in what form. The conceptual understanding of what is marketable has to do with the regimes of knowledge that are circulated in Africa. Unfortunately, what is marketed in Africa is knowledge contained in the written form or books. Other forms of knowledge that are produced in Africa in the oral arts do not circulate as much as they could if there were enough funds to move oral performers from one African country to the other, let alone from Africa to Europe. Oral artists, such as musicians who are contracted to travel and perform in international contexts, are funded by outsiders who benefit immensely at the expense of the artists. In some cases, as in Zimbabwean sculpture, the government has not set up the structures to market the African knowledge contained in these fine arts. The consequence is that individual sculptors are left to the caprices of those with money, who pay very little for the sculpture that they sell profitably in Europe. The sad dimension of the marketing of fine arts is that Western tourists have tended to create their own exhibitions of African art without the Africans knowing or benefiting (Ponter & Ponter, 1992). It is mainly the useful and sometimes not so useful books that are meant to be used without due consideration for the contexts and sensitivities of the local people which are marketed in Africa. Some African intellectuals on the continent have also discouraged vigorous production of knowledge and aggressive marketing because what their intellectuals produce is, at best, mediocre and Africans do not find value in them, while at worst they are decidedly anti-African (see Appiah, 1995; Mbembe, 2001) in ways that put off potential readers. These problems force the African readership to shrink. Once the readership becomes small, it becomes uneconomic to invest in marketing when the products are either poor or insulting to the very same people for whom the books and audios and videos are intended.

The second challenge of African knowledge production and publishing has to do with the absence, near-collapse and uncoordinated marketing infrastructures in the continent. Very few countries in Africa and their marketing agents understand the law of competitive advantage. As a result, book marketing agents all want to deal in textbooks, or fiction and literary work under one roof. This often stretches their financial capabilities to the extent that most are forced into folding. This was the case with Nehanda Publishers of Zimbabwe.

Sometimes problems of marketing arise out of poor planning on the part of publishing companies. Struggling African publishers find it hard to join hands with other marketing agents in neighbouring African countries. Consequently, there is no guarantee of a broad financial backup in times of bad business. Opportunities for enhancing additional funds through establishing publishing cooperation are lost or diminished and African publishers end up failing to reach other parts of the African continent, before thinking of European markets. The infrastructure of African marketing is geared towards satisfying the European markets to the extent that although it is cheaper to publish a book in Africa, some authors want to be associated with Euro-American publishers, not only to validate their knowledge, but also to market their books. When the books are marketed from Europe and America into Africa, the books, audiotapes and videos tend to be expensive because of the falling value of African currency against the Western currency. Consequently, Europeans will come to produce, know and market an ‘African’ book and control the global flow of knowledge in ways that perpetuate the unequal access to knowledge in the so-called global village.

However, this general picture of marketing malaise in publishing in Africa is in some instances qualified, in that some countries have forged marketing strategies to try to take advantage of the local reading market. In Zimbabwe, textbook marketing aimed at primary and secondary schools is big business. For example, the College Press of Zimbabwe which is part of Macmillan of the UK, exports books to Macmillan branches in Botswana, Lesotho and Swaziland (BOLESWA). Unisa Press of South Africa have developed marketing relations with Africa Book Collective (ABC), and the latter also works closely with Mambo Press and Weaver Press to market books from Zimbabwe to North American readers. Weaver Press produces books that are marketed by Prestige Books, whose forte is the distribution of African books within Zimbabwe, in the continent as well as in Europe.

Local publishers sometimes create their own marketing outlets in the countries in which they operate. For example, Mambo Press in Gweru, Zimbabwe, runs Mambo Book shops in Harare, Gweru and Bulawayo. The College Press in Harare sells its published books to bookshops, such as Kingstons and Mambo Press. Individual innovative publishers such as Irene Staunton of Weaver Press also sell their books to local book shops. Weaver Press also co-publishes with publishers in Europe and this way Weaver Press broadens its client base. Sometimes individual authors are forced to market their own books nationally and internationally. It needs to be emphasised that lack of sound infrastructure and coordination among players in Africa still remains the greatest challenge to marketing African knowledge in Africa and outside.

8. African knowledge production and publishing: A blueprint

The authors have argued in this article that knowledge production in Africa is taking place at various sites. But knowledge production cannot and should not be equated with publishing, because some of the insightful African knowledge systems do not come from the written word. It is important to highlight those aspects of African knowledge production that can enhance the process of the control of African knowledge by Africans and for the benefit of Africans. That process can be achieved by acknowledging to ourselves that:

• Knowledge production must be committed to knowing Africa through African eyes and not via Western institutions. African intellectuals of all persuasions, from the ordinary people to the colonially and post-colonially educated intellectuals, can help. This can happen only when African governments do not suppress African intellectuals and African intellectuals do not operate from a position that assumes that forging intellectual ties with the state is always negative. The untenable situation now is that African intellectuals have made themselves self-anointed critics. They pour scorn on their governments. They do not advise. This is where they are ‘beaten’ by European intellectuals who are, generally speaking, the think-tanks for their governments. The authors are not suggesting that there is no conflict between some Western intellectuals and their governments. Neither do they suggest that African intellectuals should always shower praises on their leaders, even when some of the leaders kill their own people.

• African knowledge production systems and publishing can thrive in Africa if the institutions built in Africa are responsive to the interests of the majority. Too often, competition for higher posts, lack of funds and lack of tolerance of self-reflexive practices hamper the creations of consolidated institutions. An over-reliance on civic organisations whose agendas are created by Western money is in danger of reflecting the views of those who call the tune. Non-governmental organisations (NGOs) can play a crucial role in fostering development, but the unfortunate reality is that they have tended to abide with the foreign policies of their own governments. In Africa, one has yet to see a conglomeration of NGOs whose agendas run counter to those of their governments of origin.

• The authors are not ashamed to state that the activities of NGOs should be monitored by African governments, because in their own countries of origin they do not possess the kind of power they would want to impose on African governments. The authors do not apologise for making the point that African knowledge production publishing or disseminating knowledge through orality should not be left to be directed and controlled by NGOs, whether these are from Europe or are of African origin. Experience with NGOs in Africa shows that even those of African origin can be bought by Western power blocs in order to undermine African culture and knowledge systems.

• As Africans involved in the production and publishing of African knowledge we need to proliferate the number of journals as sites of knowledge production. We need to house these journals in Africa. We have resources. Nigeria has oil. South Africa has gold, platinum and diamonds. Botswana has diamonds. Zimbabwe has land. West Africa has the most educated people in Africa. With this human and cultural capital, Africa can go far in terms of knowledge production and publishing in such a manner that this knowledge is circulated in Africa before it goes to Europe.

• In producing African knowledge we should not underestimate the fact that new academic elites, governing elites, traditional elites and a new crop of African leaders will promote a self-serving system of knowledge production, patronage and the creation of knowledge cast in their own image.

For a vibrant culture of knowledge production Africans whether in the continent or in the diaspora we need to:

• identify what constitutes knowledge in an African context

• search for sites of knowledge outside the universities

• redefine the concept of the African University, which is then globalised from an African perspective (Appadurai, 1995)

• identify the old forms of knowledge and a new crop of intellectuals (not academics) that have something original to offer even if they depend on diverse ideas. ‘Everyone is an intellectual, it depends on where the intellectual activity is weighted’ (Gramsci, 1971)

• assemble a dedicated team with the political will to generate knowledge that could be of use to Africans, and also in the international arena. These people would then drive the intellectual processes of knowledge production and publishing or dissemination using inter, multi- and trans-disciplinary approaches

• apply the concept of Africanisation from a critical African perspective, determining whether knowledge production is weighted towards Africanising Western knowledge or globalising African knowledge

• provide the financial, human resource and physical infrastructure that promotes intellectualising, production, distribution and readership/access to African knowledge in any form

• recognise that marketing of ideas is big business. It is not fortuitous. It is possible to engage in social processes of producing knowledge that is named or labelled by others. There is a danger that the vision and the linguistic description of the vision is in dissonance. African intellectuals must find a language to describe their achievements. Otherwise other people will describe and distort these processes

9. Conclusions

Knowledge production, the authors have argued, is not necessarily established by the fact that something is written down. It is the sum total of people's beliefs and values as they engage with other people and with nature. This knowledge can be codified in other ways and elaborated at other sites. We have mentioned as some of our examples only books, popular songs, performance and rituals that are daily used by the majority of the people to make sense of their worlds, without claiming that these are the only sites where contradictory African knowledge can be recovered for the benefit of Africans. And because not all people have access to written material does not mean that those people who have not acquired academic knowledge are not intellectuals with the potential to produce and circulate their forms of knowledge through the audio, video and oral media.

Put differently, before Sundiata: An Epic of Old Mali was put in written form by the great DT Niane (1960) the epic circulated in the oral form. Even today it is transmitted orally, since it has generated multiple versions from its ‘initial’ narrative. This point about the oral forms' capacity to refuse to carry monolithic values is the strength of African knowledge generated and circulated in oral contexts. In other words, when describing a paradigm shift in African knowledge systems we are also acknowledging the instability and contingent nature of orality. Instead of closing multiple interpretations of African knowledge systems, the provisionality of the meanings in oral texts suggests the potential of oral forms to be used to understand the changing African world from a multiplicity of ideological perspectives (Vambe, 2004).

In this article the authors further argued that African knowledge production is happening in a context that is tilted to the advantage of Europe, because Europe possesses and commands the technological resources which even the most patriotic Africans need to use in generating their own forms of African knowledge systems. The challenge that Africa possesses is how to make those audio and visual and unwritten forms become part of the global (Robertson, 1995) knowledge economy that has the power to influence the global village. This point is significant because there is no culture within which there is no knowledge production. The politics of knowledge production in Africa are defined by power relations. These determine who gets to publish, read and then distribute knowledge.

It seems to us that Africa has not done too badly. It is true that the continent is still dependent mainly on foreign publishers to finance Africa's ideas. Sometimes there are conflicts because what Africans think should be published is not always in the interests of publishing houses who, apart from their obligation to knowledge production and dissemination, also work for profit. Local publishers work under even more extreme constraints, such as lean budgets, poorly trained staff and shoestring financial resources to fund big publishing projects. Nevertheless, they have been recording some successes. They need support that might come from governments. But then, governments have more than their own priorities for spending money. Governments' ideas about what kind of knowledge must be generated, published and circulated for public consumption sometimes differ from international and local publishers' expectations. In extreme cases this leads to governments instituting legislative restrictions that further threaten to destroy an already fragile publishing industry. The politics of knowledge production can thus be defined by who has the funds and for what kind of publications. We emphasise this point even at the risk of sounding reductive.