Bibi Bakare-Yusuf Quotes

The African literary space is most likely the only artifact of culture in this neo-colonial moment that has yet to cut loose from its colonial mooring.

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.

However, if we take the project of archive seriously now, what they will find will be determined by people like me, what we produce now, the decisions we take now – whether we are satisfied to continue to do wonders with the English language as Achebe implored us to or follow in Ngugi’s step and develop a robust African language literary culture – will be entirely up to us.

What I am interested in is how we create what I am calling the African archival future which will then form part of a global archive. Publishing for me is therefore essentially the work of archival creation and a potential tool of power and control, a tool that helps to shape how we view ourselves and make sense of the world.

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.

The archive as a reservoir of and for memory is the place where ideas and material culture of historic interest or social relevance are stored and ordered. It is where society warehouses what it wants to remember and what it sees as worthy of remembrance, especially for the future. Whether that archive is of literature, music, visual art, film, plastic art, buildings, I am interested in what future people will find that gives them a record, a sense of this present moment.

It is publishers who take stories from their raw state and turn them into food, food that may nourish or poison us. 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.

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.

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…

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.

It is not enough for us to say we must tell our own stories if we don’t equally think or talk about the enabling infrastructure that supports the generation of those stories, the infrastructure that enables the circulation of ideas and the flow of knowledge.

We need to produce our own data in awesome, saturating quantities so that our own archives come to drown out the noise and the interpretive bias of the excessively confident outsiders who have little regard for our multi-tongued, polyrhythmic, polytheistic and metaphysical horizon.

Let me begin, in 2003, I moved back to Nigeria to take up a position as a senior research fellow at Obafemi Awolowo university. The plan was to embark on a research project exploring how Yoruba women experience and conceptualise erotic love (This was before Lola Shoneyin gave us an incline into the erotic universe of Yoruba women in her brilliant, tragic-comic debut novel The Secret Lives of Baba Segi’s Wives).

Perhaps the biggest challenge of publishing in Nigeria is that it’s close to impossible to find a consistently reliable local printer. After several disastrous experiences, we made the decision to print overseas.

There are some infrastructure challenges but they are challenges that I see as opportunities. In Nigeria and across the continent, you have a publisher, who is also the distributor, who also warehouses the book, who is also doing the bookselling as well. But that is an opportunity because it means that we also have a direct relationship with consumers.