Bibi Bakare-Yusuf

Bibi Bakare-Yusuf Hon. FRSL (born 1970) is a Nigerian academic, writer and editor from Lagos, Nigeria. She is the co-founder of the publishing company Cassava Republic Press in 2006 in Abuja. Bakare-Yusuf was elected an Honorary Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 2019, as well as having been selected as a Yale World Fellow, a Desmond Tutu Fellow and a Frankfurt Book Fair Fellow.

Quotes

• 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.
  • [1] Bibi Bakare-Yusuf speaking about the need to not just write stories but also make sure it circulates.

• 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.
  • [2] Bibi Bakare-Yusuf at the 2018 Abantu Book Festival speaking on the importance of publishers

• 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…
  • [3] Bibi Bakare-Yusuf speaks about Books.

• 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.
  • [4] Bibi Bakare-Yusuf speaks about how African literature is still copied from the West.

• 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.
  • [5] Bibi Bakare-Yusuf on diversifying the voices of African literature

• 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.
  • [6] Bibi Bakare-Yusuf speaking about the completely inaccurate representation of our culture by outsiders.

• 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.
  • [7] Bibi Bakare-Yusuf on the struggle at home on publishing

• 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.
  • [8] Bibi Bakare speaking about the impact of technology on easing the business of publishing and circulating books.

• ...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.
  • [9] Bibi-Bakare on archives and publishing books.

• 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.
  • [10] Bibi Bakare Yusuf speaking about the Cassava Republic and the rise of Nigeria’s publishing Houses.

• 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.
  • [11]

• 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).
  • [12]

• My research was going to be substantive, thorough and deliciously juicy and it would preoccupy me for the next few years. But, I was confounded by the empty bookshelves or lack thereof, in the middle-class homes I visited. As an avid reader who loved to talk about books, I looked into people’s shelves to get a sense of who they are and more importantly, their politics. Instead, many of the places I visited had empty bookshelves or when stocked at all, were filled with business, religious and self-help motivational books with titles like: ‘The Purpose Driven Life’, ‘Chicken Soup for the Soul’, ‘Rich Dad, Poor Dad’. And the few times I spotted fiction it was Dan Brown or John Grisham.
  • [13]

• Really, I thought to myself, how do you build a civilisation or ignite the imagination based on such a meagre diet of Euro-American airport fiction and self-help books? Yes, I am judging! Where is the counter-balance? I wondered why Amos Tutuola, Mariama Ba, Bessie Head, Aminatta Forna, Zaynab Alkali, Paulin Hountondji, D.O. Fagunwa, Bernardine Evaristo or Ben Okri were missing from these shelves. These emptied of spirit bookshelves, this erasure of African voices and vibrancy from view became the inspiration to set up a publishing company, Cassava Republic Press.
  • [14]

• 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.
  • [15]

• 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.
  • [16]

• Still, even in the age of new socialising 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 artefacts of civilisation (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 forment a revolution.
  • [17]

• 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.
  • [18]

• 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.
  • [19]

• 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?
  • [20]

• The African literary space is most likely the only artefact of culture in this neo-colonial moment that has yet to cut loose from its colonial mooring. And the reason is simply, it still relies on the colonial centres for its aesthetics, market, economics, relevance, affirmation and symbolic legitimacy.
  • [21]

• The framing of African literature only in terms of the English metaphysical empire was not only a tragedy and an act of symbolic violence (perpetuated and sedimented by Africans themselves), it created a rupture in how we periodise our literary tradition(s).
  • [22]

• For Wa Ngugi and Beach, the English metaphysical empire, refers to ‘an empire of language and literature that would outlive the actual British empire’ (p19). The crowning of English language (and to a lesser extent the other colonial languages) as the medium to transmit and transmute African literary expression, according to Wa Ngugi was (and I agree with him) inaugurated in 1962 at the “African Writers of English Expression” conference that convened at Makerere University, in Uganda. Even the title of the conference already suggests that the quality and depth of African literary tradition will be determined in English, leading to the erasure of earlier literature in African languages. What a waste! What a wasted and a missed opportunity to break away from colonial linguistic capture!
  • [23]

• 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.
  • [24]

• If we do not start the deliberate project of infusing our vision of the world now with what we want to see, if do not start publishing in vast quantities, what future beings will find in the archive about Africa and by Africans will be yet more emptiness and silence no different to the emptied bookshelves in those Lagos homes I visited. As with our generation, they will have only recourse to the meticulous and avaricious archiving of colonial records at the British library or what HarperCollins or Penguin Random House tells us African writers are writing and thinking today or what the Makerere generation left us with. What an impoverished archive that will be!
  • [25]

• 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.
  • [26]

• 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.
  • [27]

• 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.
  • [28]

• 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.
  • [29]

• So, we have to stop thinking of the archive merely as that which is past, we have to think of it simultaneously as past, present and future. We have to think of the archive as a curation of knowledge, experience and worlds in the now, to help order a past for the purpose of the future. We have to understand that the archive and its curation is always caught up in regimes of power and control.
  • [30]

• 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.
  • [31]

• 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!
  • [32]

• 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.
  • [33]

• 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.
  • [34]