Bring Back the Book: Engaging Jonathan on our terms
By Richard Mammah
Chinua Achebe
An impression yes, but that also conflicts with the clearly very clumsy way the administration handled the public relations fallout of the rejection – and for a second time too – by Nigeria’s pre-eminent reading champion, Chinua Achebe, of a national honour offered him by the same Presidency.
In rejecting the award, the author of the 1958 classic, Things Fall Apart had reportedly stated that the current occupants of the Aso Rock villa had not done much in improving the socio-political and economic climate in the country as to warrant his giving the renewed offer a second look.
And while someone may be tempted to ask what a writer’s business is with the social order, politics and the economy, the appropriate response here would be to send the questioner on a Google mission to look up and read the text of a speech the same Achebe read while accepting another national honour offered him in the 1980s. To give one more clue, that treatise was aptly titled, ‘what has literature got to do with it?’
Away from treasure hunting and negatives however, this writer prefers to look at the opportunity introduced by the Goodluck Jonathan-Bring Back the Book initiative as one of those rare moments of possibility for the expansion of the place of the book in our national life. However, as with other opportunities before this one, it is being borne out that it is really more of how the system actors respond to the opportunity more than the primal intention of the original anchors that would ultimately make the difference as to how far the project can go. And we will look no further than to the history of our engagement with the book to add flesh to this thesis.
For starters, it is almost now beyond debate that the first wave of our modern experience with the book came with the proselytizing efforts of Christian missionaries. In responding to the package however, local communities soon began to explore more firmly the secular dimensions of this pre-eminent book project, tapping into the harambee spirit to pick and send the best brains from within the community through scholarship schemes to go back to the source from where those first seeds came to get all of the Golden Fleece.
This paid off handsomely for the new nation as representatives of this generation not only established very firm foundations for a book society, they also bought into the anti-colonial logic with which they later pushed off the formal domination of the colonialists.
Indeed, it is this development and deepening of the anti-colonial movement that was to provide the second opportunity for the flourishing of the book in Africa. As the new elite immersed themselves in the debate over the future of the continent, they set up sundry newspapers, wrote and published books and established political parties as a natural anchor of the enveloping ferment.
This connection between developments in the socio-political space and the growth of the book sector continued in the decade of the 1970s and 1980s when first, the indigenous publishers began to stand up to be counted and then the African book conferences and fairs, those big ticket platforms for calling attention to products and developments within the industry, were also being organized. Reaching its initial peak in the long-rested Ife International Bookfair, and moving on to Harare, Calabar, Lagos and now Cape Town, these advocacy platforms also provided opportunities for the crystallizing African books sector to firmly and frontally take its place within the increasingly maturing continent.
With the development of the book space has also come some attention to its cousin, the reader. Thus, emerging side by side, progress in one has seen associated concern for the other. In Nigeria particularly, as the authors emerged and the publishing scene deepened, we also saw commendable efforts and initiatives on the reading promotions plane.
For example, the movement into independence saw not only the revolutionary expansion of the educational space as was notably the case in Obafemi Awolowo’s Western Region, this was complemented by the aggressive library expansion and reading promotions schemes within the region with many towns playing host to well-stocked and promoted public libraries, in addition to mobile library services and the almost unhindered use of state radio, television and print media in this effort.
Not left out of the developing ferment were the newly established publishing organizations which also began to float their own readership promotions initiatives as exemplified in the Onibonoje readers club of the 1970s. At the national level, the National Library of Nigeria undertook a series of Reading campaigns, Radio Nigeria and the Nigerian Television Authority were drafted into the fray even as several other state-owned and reader-friendly print media and indeed book publishing organizations were also established and run. Notable of this was the Nigeria magazine project of the Federal Ministry of Information and Culture and Ethiope Publishing Company that was set up by the government of the then Mid-Western State.
Not left out of the entire scheme and with a view to firmly establishing their own tentacles in the unfolding dynamics, professionals and other stakeholders at different levels of the book chain also organized themselves accordingly. These included the Nigerian Publishers Association, the Association of Nigerian Authors, the Nigerian Booksellers Association, the Association of Nigerian Printers, the Nigerian Librarians Association, the Reading Association of Nigeria and the Network for the Promotion of Reading.
It is within this historical frame then that the Jonathan Presidency in those early days when it needed to define for itself some thematic thrust that it believed was going to be hopefully different from that of its predecessors commenced the Bring Back the Book campaign.
An initiative which saw the President reading to an assembly of school children and other young people and bibliophiles at its commencement in Lagos, it was further expected to develop into a national book advocacy movement, calling attention to reading and indeed the book sector and its products.
Sadly however, the dream appears to have lapsed and this notably for several reasons, one of which is clearly a poverty of project conception, but another, and more important for this writer at this point is a stark absence of meaningful stakeholder response to the initiative and structural engagement of the President and his implementing team.
While someone may argue at the face value that the Bring Back the Book scheme was not in the first place designed by stakeholders and as such they should therefore not be held responsible for its multiple incapacities, the reality of the democratic project which we are incipiently engaged in now suggests otherwise.
In a democracy, there is a continuous struggle for issue elevation and resource allocation. What issues get to be addressed depends in the first place on their being put in the front burner and then on how many resources do get allocated to it. And finally, there is the issue of implementation which is again invariably helped by sustained stakeholder engagement, pressure, lobbying, tracking, monitoring and resoluteness.
It is these political variables that those who are massively benefiting from the current political order very well know and work with. Whether it is in sinister forms as securing vexatious and phony multi-billion naira waivers or ensuring that the Petroleum Industry Bill (PIB) does not see the light of day or even in more progressive formats as scuttling obnoxious third term ambitions and halting ill-defined subsidy removal gambits, the name of the game is: ‘stay on top of your matter!’
For many of us however, this very simple line of action does not come natural. And understandably so too. While the final word on why this is so may be left to a more discriminating sociologist to exegete, this writer however has a pet notion that somewhere between our history and culture, something has happened to the average African as to leave him massively powerless. This is the explanation for our virtual incapacity to engage the power systems in our land, even when they pass the ball to us as has unwittingly been done in the current ‘Bring Back the Book’ matter.
But all hope is not lost. At the formal inauguration of the Network for the Promotion of Reading in Nigeria at Ibadan in 1998, some of us were challenged to do something about the then sorry state of the Nigerian Book and Reading space. And we rose to the challenge and did. Spending the better part of the last six months engaging myself in about all the major book convocations and chatting with many of the stakeholders in the land, it is clear that for all of the gains secured since then, we continue to be saddled with the reality of many small ticket book convocations when we can do more together to inaugurate the one (or more) most desirable big ticket platform (s) that would provide super-space for all of us to better engage the system and build the firmer book and reading space we have long sought and desired..
Am I by this asking that we shut down or merge all existing platforms and organizations. No. But until we shed the mental togas of small space survivalism and begin to take more solidly coordinated organizational steps to confront the challenge of Nigeria’s big ticket book games, we will sadly not get to our desired success peak. This in my view is the challenge of the moment and a good place to begin is with a thorough and most critical stakeholder re-engagement of the Bring Back the Book project. So who is calling the conference?
Mammah, author of History and Prospects of the Nigerian Book is Executive Director of the reading promotions and book advocacy watchdog, Synergy Educational.
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