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 embar… - Bibi Bakare-Yusuf

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.

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.

...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.