Bibi Bakare-Yusuf Quotes

We need to understand that every action we take in the present moment, every cultural production, every scientific discovery, every dance movement, every new melody, every Yoruba panegyric that is slowly receding from our tongue, every Facebook update, every twitter spat, every email exchange, every graffiti on a mutatu is an opportunity to create and contribute to the archive. Whether we conceive of our actions as a potential contribution to the archive or not, someone else is already doing it for us, watching our updates, mapping our habits of being and archiving them to better understand how to induce new desire(s) in us for profit and capitalist accumulation.

We must take ourselves more seriously and value what we do, even the minutia action and document. There’s no other time in history then now when archival creation is available to us all. All of us can contribute to the archive. We do not have to wait for the great archival institutions of the past which are usually controlled and organised by government institutions or some royal court record keepers. The time is now!

So today, I want to talk about why, despite its many ups and down, I am a publisher. I am a publisher because I love stories. I am a publisher because I love ideas and I think ideas and words can change the content of our mind and transform our worlds and the norms we live by. I am a publisher because I like power, especially enabling and productive power which we must embrace. Finally, I am a publisher because I am interested in the future. I am interested in contributing to and helping to shape what people in 100, 200 or even 500 years’ will be discussing and mulling over when they take a walk into the labyrinth of their past that is our present moment. I am interested in how we can create the archive of the future in the present.

So much so that a figure like Achebe (never mind that he himself rejected the term) is heralded as the father of African literature despite being preceded by other writers such as Amos Tutuola who had published 3 books before him and even earlier writers in South Africa like Thomas Mofolo, writing in the 1800s and whose work was translated to English in the 1900s or The Life and Struggles of Our Mother Walatta Petros: A Seventeenth-Century African Biography of an Ethiopian Woman, written by the Ethiopian emperor Galawdewos. This means that even the systemising and the categorising of our literary tradition is wrong, there’s a gap, a missing antecedent of writing in favour of writings and writers who pay homage to the metaphysics of English. Of course, this has meant that in the literary space, we have not been as prolific as our situation demands or the population of the continent.

Digital innovation is likely to have an even stronger impact across Africa than in the West, simply because of the historic lack of access to books... Digital innovation is allowing us to build our audience base through social media. And because we have a single platform for markets —Nigeria and the rest of the world–audiences are able to interact, connect and engage each other in a way that they would not have previously done.

It is also through books that some of the most enduring and pernicious images about Africa and black people persist. Yet, books also have a redemptive potential and plenitude. It is through books that we come to learn and read about each other as Africans across our differences and continue to have a reason to gather…

When we understand the archive in these relational terms, we’ll then begin to see that there is a fundamental problem and an ontological injustice in our complicitous silence and tacit acceptance of English or any of the European languages as the inevitable medium to transmit African writing across our linguistic differences. Perhaps then we can begin to have a sense of urgency and deliberateness about how we narrate and share our stories with the world and the urgency to produce loads and loads of data about how we see and imagine the world that is opening itself to us.

Secondly, on mourning and melancholia, we know that mourning is still better than melancholia. At least with mourning there is a recognition that there has been a loss, a hurt or a wound that is necessary in order to recover from that loss. It is therefore not construed as a pathology, but a ‘working through’ of the hurt or absence. However, when melancholia replaces mourning, we are moving into a state of mental disorder and this may come with suicidal impulse. It is this that is considered a pathology. I guess given the successive blows of the last 500 years, the African world (from Lagos to Los Angeles, Benin to Bahia) probably oscillates between mourning and melancholia and we are still struggling to shake off.

If we don’t like the structure of our present is, if we think the books by African writers coming out of the western publishing establishments do not speak to the fullness and totality of the reality we see around us or how we want to appear now and into the future, we have a responsibility in the present for the sake of tomorrow to flip the script and create our own publishing infrastructure across the continent that is more than the skeletal ones that we currently subsist on and over-celebrate.

African literature today is still struggling to emerge from the shadow of that 1962 conference, which according to Mukoma, set in motion the hegemony of the realist tradition in African literature. The realist tradition inaugurated by the Makerere Brotherhood (and yes, we can talk in terms of brotherhood because only two female writers were present) not only disregarded and arrested the growth of writing in African languages, it curtailed the growth of writing styles and flights of fancy that may be more attuned to some of the fantastical wanderings of nocturnal storytelling traditions that many may be familiar with.

I am so happy to be here today. To be on this stage and to share the Abantu vision. Before I begin, I want to say thank you, thank you for inviting me. I always feel I am home when I am here. Joburg is my second home. London is my first and Nigeria, my third home.

We have to talk about and acknowledge the unseen infrastructure that ensures that books are in circulation, because books, unlike print media or blogs, offer us some of the densest, extended and interpretive conversations we can have about the world around us. It is also through books that some of the most enduring and pernicious images about Africa and black people persists. Yet, books also have a redemptive potential and plenitude.

...In the age of new socializing media, who can deny that a book as a material object is infinitely richer and more meaningful than any of the arts? This is because, through the thick description they enable, all the other artifacts of civilization (music, fine arts, film, science, etc) can be folded and compressed into that singular object. In the book, worlds, cultures, emotions, and habits of being are collected, dissected, and revealed to us so that we can have different voices to converse with, in that quiet moment of aloneness or to whip out to stimulate debate, dialogue, or foment a revolution.

It is through books that we come to learn and read about each other as Africans across our differences and continue to have a reason to gather (as we are here today) so that we can salivate over the apparent genius of the solitary writer while we sublimate the collective geniuses (the editor, book designer, proof reader, copy editor, publicist, sales people, indexer, the literary critic, the blogger, instagramer etc.) that are involved in the production of any one book for the celebration of the singular authorial voice.

Will they find only the record of African writing that has been served up from the conveyor belt of large corporate and indie publishing houses of western metropolis? Will some of the mediocre writing that is currently being peddled as the pinnacle of African excellence and genius by the legitimatising authority of the west be the only thing they have to subsist on and account for as our own contribution to civilisation and to the global archive of ideas? Or will they only find the realist tradition of writing bequeathed to us from the Achebe generation?