Publishers’ networks and the making of African literature

This chapter explores some of the interactions that surround the launch of Chinua Achebe’s Arrow of God in Lagos and Ngugi’s Weep Not, Child in Nairobi, draws attention to the ways in which ‘publishers’ networks’ can act as a useful frame for reading African literary production. Patrick Jagoda has explored the ways in which from the 1990s onwards the language and science of networks as ‘the principal architecture and most resonant metaphor of the globalizing world’ has come to frame and influence our perception and methodological approach to a diverse range of forms and disciplines. In July of 2004 the literary magazine Farafina, published by Kachifo, organised a series of readings in Nigeria for Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s debut novel Purple Hibiscus. On 1 June 2012, Kwani Trust launched the East African edition of Binyavanga Wainaina’s One Day I Will Write About This Place in the grounds of the Nairobi Railway Museum.