THRILLS AND SPILLS

 

It is a fallacy that fewer Africans are writing ... or reading... these days....Actually large numbers of new books come out now even in Africa regularly

It is just that reading is becoming elitist as it were, as few people can afford to buy new books in our continent.  But check out newspapers etc and you see new books being reviewed there on a regular basis .

Newspapers? Yes, how many people do we see reading or buying even them these days? It is part of the financial problems in the continent now. It is particularly depressing to see so many well educated people, who love information, simply unable to buy papers on a regular basis. So how would they even think of books?

Nostalgia thus becomes a great thing. The older people in society will recollect how they used to buy new books on a regular basis, point out how they had very large personal libraries in the past, how they always bought the latest (or reprinted) editions of James Hadley Chase, Nick Carter, Agatha Christie, Harold Robbins etc.

And not only "white" (Eurocentric) books. In the past,  virtually all fairly educated people in Africa were familiar with the books of Achebe (above), Soyinka (below), Munonye, Armah etc. The even more popular books like the Pacesetter series could be seen in most homes. Thrillers or adventure books were not left out. Fagbamigbe publishers added their own quota by publishing many books written by African writers.

I have in mind the exciting works written by Louis Omotayo Johnson, Kole Omotoso, Dillibe Onyeama, Sola Oloyede - books weaved around different adventures, and tough characters, with local characters, lovely looking works, still a bit different from the Pacesetters.

Such books of course further boosted the local reading culture at the time. People could now follow the adventures of protagonists with local colour, penchant, dialogue and dialect. Kalu Okpi, Johnson, David Maillu, and Victor Thorpe will always stand out in this wise, as their plots and characters were ingenious.

What would happen next (in the books)? Read on.  And teeming people did so...

But as I pointed out in the beginning here, if anything, larger numbers of such new books are being published now, but the pity of it is that very few general readers get to read, or even just see them. Many fine African writers even self-publish now, but are still rarely known.

How do we get the literary excitement back locally in many parts of Africa?

-         K. Awoniyi