Africa Writes Back: The African Writers Series & the Launch of African Literature

Currey, James. Africa Writes Back: The African Writers Series & the Launch of African Literature. Athens, OH: Ohio UP, 2008.

Heinemann Press, a European publishing house based in London, entered Africa's literary sphere in 1958, when it published Chinua Achebe's classic and best-selling Things Fall Apart, the book that gave birth to modern African literature. This publication not only set the foundation for the African literary canon but also provided the impetus for the foundation of the African Writers Series, which started in 1962, with Achebe as its editorial advisor. Thanks to the efforts of James Currey, the editorial director of Heinemann Educational Books of the African Writers Series from 1967 to 1984, African poet-activists and public intellectuals entered a new era of literary innovation, creativity, and cultural decolonization. As Achebe observes, the "launching of the Heinemann's African Writers Series was like the umpire's signal for which African writers had been waiting on the starting line" (1). In Africa Writes Back, Currey recounts this adventurous journey, detailing the publishers' endless conversations with writers and with Heinemann's literary agents, as well as the cultural and political phenomena that informed these exchanges. The Series "was to become to Africans in its first quarter century what Penguin had been to British in its first 25 years" (1). The goal of the book is "to provide a narrative of how it came together" (viii).

Africa Writes Back focuses on the first quarter-century of the series from 1962 to 1988. The book is the first account that discusses the genesis of the African Writers Series in such copious detail. The preliminary section, "The publishing and selling of the African Series," highlights the main actors and summarizes the challenges, successes, and the joint labor and commitment of Currey's colleagues to initiating and expanding the Series. Achebe uses the phrase "conspirators in the launch of African literature" (24) to refer to the collaborative effort of Alan Hill, Aig Higo, Henry Chakava, Keith Sambrook, and James Currey to establish the African Writers Series.

The book is structured geographically, and divided into five equal parts. Representative writers from five corners of Africa (West, East, North-Eastern, South, and Southern) are introduced accordingly. The book's geographical orientation rightly indicates the significant contribution of continental African literature...