Part 2 of an Interview with
James Currey
NB: Talking about A Level, how do you think
the empire’s ‘products’ – we are talking here about the educational
system, the English language as a medium of instruction, and so
on – providing fruitful grounds for the industry of publishing
to flourish in Africa, particularly after the fall of the British
colonial rule?
JC: Yes, the English language, of course,
was the language of authority, but it was also the language of
resistance. So, that’s a vehicle… it’s there for you to get your
message across even if it is one of authority or even if it is
one of objecting to authority.
NB: But for a publisher like Heinemann Educational Books, the
existence of a relatively large readership in English across the
African continent, as Alan Hill notes in his autobiography, was
providing more opportunities than in North Africa for example…
JC: Yes, what was very important to the
Kenyan company under Henry Chakava was beginning to publish books
in Kiswahili. But it was quite difficult because, unless they
were prescribed in the school system, the sales were negligible
and so, you know, you can’t afford go on publishing books which
aren’t selling. That was quite difficult. We published little
that was not in English. We tried to do a few books in Yoruba.
We did few books in Kiswahili, and in South Africa we specifically
did not publish because there the African languages were only
prescribed by the Bantu Education Department which was a sell
out.
NB: How do you think British publishers accommodated new post-colonial
discourses and agendas?
JC: The problem is publishers respond
on a very ad-hoc basis to the market opportunities in a particular
situation. And so, one of the things that did happen was the generation
of whole new area of study which at one stage was called Commonwealth
literature and then postcolonial studies. But this did mean that
the growth of African literature has been a serious area of study.
NB: Launching overseas branches in Nigeria and Kenya in 1960s
as well as in other commonwealth countries was to reflect the
economic and political policies at home towards Africa in the
period following the Suez Crisis. There were other motifs behind
this urgent search for profitable markets in Africa, though. Alan
Hill noticed that other British publishers “were taking profits
out of West Africa, and putting nothing back in the way of investment
in local publishing and encouragement of local authors”(123).
For Alan Hill ‘profit, though important, was not [his] primary
concern’. His idealistic vision was almost prophetic particularly
after the success of Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart,
which prompted Hill’s team to develop African Writers Series,
publishing literary works by African authors hitherto unknown
in Africa and the world at large. What was the philosophy behind
the making of Heinemann AWS?
JC: Well, (laugh) it happened I was looking
at Alan Hill’s autobiography last night and, of course, Alan Hill
is saying that he is the only pure one. All of us have mixed motives
and some of the motives of which we were not so sure turned out
to be actually quite valuable. Anyhow, what he says is not quite
fair. For instance, Oxford University Press had a Nigerian chief
T. T. Solaru as head of the Nigerian company in the late Fifties,
I think…. They did not have Kenyan in Nairobi, but certainly as
in West Africa, there was always a tension between the branch
and the centre. I know that Charles Lewis, head of OUP in Nairobi,
fought with his bosses in London and in Oxford because he wanted
to keep the money that they made out of publishing an English
course… he wanted to put back into publishing plays in Swahili,
and into Zuka, a literary magazine. He actually wanted to put
it back, but he was turned off. These tensions were running. Alan
Hill’s central philosophy was very positive – his father had been
in the teachers’ trade union – and so he came from a concerned
leftish stand point. Sometimes, Keith hesitates using the word
‘left’ about Alan… but anyhow, that was his central philosophy.
We were owned by Tillings – the big bus company
nationalised by Labour in 1947. They said: “Last year you achieved
13.5 per cent return on funds. As long as you achieve a little
more than that, as long as you don’t slip back, we are happy.”
What Alan said to me was: “We have to do that, we’ve got to be
efficient, we’ve got to make that sort of return on funds… but
the important thing is the more you can make, the bigger margin
you can make, the greater freedom that gives you to experiment
… that money is working capital for us to invest in new projects.”
So that was very positive practical philosophy… it was working
within the capitalist system. This was very important. For instance,
when I was told that Bessie Head was having difficulties in getting
Question of Power accepted, I was able to persuade my directors
from my reaction, from Keith’s reaction, from the reports that
this was an outstanding novel and we ought to accept it. The argument
was even if we can’t sell it to schools, within the context of
the general market for the African Writers Series, the book will
sell perfectly, comfortably and profitably. Alan said: “As long
as you give them their profit, they are not going to question
you much, but if you don’t give them that profit, they’ll start
cutting back and be cautious.” So it was a very basic philosophy.
In the eighties, Heinemann, in five years was
owned by four companies; and the first company was BTR who, a
dawn raid on the stock exchange, took over Tillings who owned
Heinemann. They immediately demanded that return on the funds
went up from 13%, 14% to 23%... and they actually confiscated
our cheque book because they made a lot of money over being very
tight on the management of money. There were lots of different
companies… and some of them were doing rather badly and Heinemann
was doing very well. The Heinemann group of publishers was in
the early Eighties was only about, I think, eight per cent of
the money invested in the whole of the Tilling Group, but it was
about twelve per cent of the profit. But we were being profitable
by being enterprising. A book like Sembene Ousmane’s God’s
Bits of Wood… again the argument was that because that was
a big fat book it was going to cost more than ten shillings –
which was the old fifty pence – and, therefore, schools wouldn’t
buy it. But it sold over 50,000 in the next few years. Within
Heinemann there were tensions about what we, as an educational
company, could do. In Africa we were not just regarded as an educational
company; we were a general company as well. In Britain, we sold
the AWS through the William Heinemann’s reps who went to the bookshops
and promoted the books as general books…
NB: Just in relation to what you’ve just said concerning publishing
writers from different parts of Africa and about HEB’s
philosophy, both Van Milne and Alan Hill’s intention was to publish
“black” African writings… as a North African myself, it seems
to me that there was a kind of marginalisation of some interesting
‘African’ writings…
JC: The use of “black”, over the years,
has shifted. Hasn’t it? The rough and ready philosophy about the
African Writers Series was that the writers should been born in
Africa or spent their formative years there. Doris Lessing wasn’t
born there, but she wrote about something which was of concern
within two black African countries. South Africa was in a funny
situation because it was cut off from the rest of the continent
in political terms, but, of course, it was the most advanced in
terms of the publishing industry. We never had a racial line,
because how the hell do you know about Angolans and Mozambiquans.
I was saying only the other day that when I was in South Africa
in the early Sixties, there was a feeling that somehow people
of mixed colour were not actually quite properly African. There
is a very good new book by Christopher Heywood published by Cambridge
UP about South African literature and he is absolutely fascinating
about ‘creolisation’ as he calls it. He sees this as part of Atlantic
creolisation as the mixture in the southern states of America,
in the Caribbean, within Africa itself. Some of our most distinguished
South African writers were people of mixed race… I mean…Alex La
Guma’s father, I think, boasted of Japanese, Mauritian, and Scottish
ancestors… (laugh)…none of them African. I think Africans in South
Africa, to a certain extent, were imprisoned by apartheid. They
were put apart by the whole apartheid racial ideology and they
are mixed as anything…
Nuruddin Farah wrote from Chandigarh in India
where he was at the university and sent the manuscript of his
first novel. All the people who read it said: “Is this written
by a woman?” because it is very sensitive about the whole position
of women in a Muslim society. So, I asked him if he was an African
and if he was a woman (laugh) and he thought this was very funny.
Anyhow, I did not know it is a Muslim and I did not know… in fact,
like yours. I did check up that he was African. We had one manuscript
which was sent by Black American, who said his name was Musa Nagenda
which was a Ugandan name. We accepted, but not for the AWS. I
asked him for a photograph and he sent a photograph of his cook
(laugh)… who was a Ugandan... Nadine Gordimer … I said to her:
“Look, I am interested to discuss with my colleagues in Ibadan
and Nairobi which collection we should include in the AWS.” After
some thought, she put together Some Monday for Sure. Lots
of enthusiastic reactions came from Henry Chakava and his team
in Nairobi. Silence from Nigeria, which was unusual but Nadine
was saying “Oh, it doesn’t matter... it was worth a try to see
what people feel.” Then a belated, very enthusiastic, report came
in from Nigeria, which she described as perceptive. Having worked
in Cape Town for five years one is, a sort of, hyper-sensitive
on these racial issues.
As you will see, unfortunately, there was a very
poor representation of North African writing in the AWS… we got
involved in the Arab Authors where the criterion was that the
book had to be written in Arabic.
NB: And, of course, Tayeb Salih was a bestseller
JC: When I was at Oxford University Press,
I met Denys Johnson-Davies… he was doing an anthology of stories
from Arab countries and he said that he had this friend in the
BBC who had been published in the Arab
world. So, he brought round his manuscript of his translation
of The Wedding of Zein. Keith Sambrook rang me up - I had
already accepted the job at Heinemann - and he said “Chinua Achebe
is coming through next week, it would be a chance for you to come
and say hello”... because I had never met him before … I had met
Soyinka, Clark and other OUP authors, but not Chinua…I took the
manuscript of Zein because it had been turned down for
the Three Crowns at OUP. I was just amazed because I showed this
manuscript to Chinua and to Keith Sambrook and they both spent
five or six minutes at it and they said: “Oh, this looks promising”
and almost by the end of that meeting that they accepted it. This
was completely different from OUP where everything was formal
and you had to go through committees and everybody was very snooty
… and “Oooooh, not up to our standards” and all these sort of
things.
So, it was a very different atmosphere where Chinua and Keith
were absolutely delighted by fresh writing like that… As soon
as Heinemann accepted Zein, Denys said “What about
Season of Migration to the North?” We got the English
translation of Season out within a year of its first Arabic
publication and as a result of that Denys came back and said:
“Look, what about these Egyptian writers - Naguib Mahfouz,
Taha Hussein, Tawfik Al Hakim, Yossef Idriss and so on?” Arabic
was an African language, or an African based language, of
great importance and, of course, we didn’t want to miss out on
that for the AWS. So, we started publishing Naguib Mahfouz, but
people in the Arab World were snobbish about the African
label. So we started Arab Authors. More writing came from
Egypt and Sudan together than from the rest of the Arabic
world. We just gave them fresh covers and marketed them
differently and that was quite a successful series. I remember
one Penguin rep said we were soon selling better in the Gulf than
Penguin was selling their fiction in English.
NB: Heinemann Educational Books has enabled African literature
to become a concrete reality for Anglophone audiences, it has
perforce shaped certain general tendencies and allowed them to
emerge and dominate: what particular audience had Heinemann targeted
in the publication of African writings?
JC: Because we were an educational company,
the major audience was through the educational network.
For instance, for every new book in the African writer
series, we had a list of something like a hundred people to whom
we sent specimen copies of the latest title… this was a mixture
of academics and writers and some key booksellers and so on. So,
we particularly had the academic market in mind … what we discovered
in places, interesting cities like Ibadan, Accra, Nairobi, Johannesburg,
Salisbury (Harare as it was then) was that people were going in
to buy, to look, to see what the latest AWS titles were
and they were buying for their own interest. And libraries
were certainly buying not only for an educational, but also for
a general audience…
NB: When targeting these audiences, what kind of ideologies or
values did Heinemann support?
JC: What we did not support was racialism!
(Laugh) …all your value judgements about writing are very subjective,
but in all the three publishing centres – Ibadan, Nairobi and
London – we had quite a good group of readers. Quite few of the
advisors were actual writers themselves, particularly novelists
and playwrights and so on. We were confident that this
was some of the most exciting writing that was been done in English,
but we also got other professionals to help writers
develop their manuscripts, to work on their plots, to reconsider
the balance of the book… shortened… lengthened… all these
sort of things… but the people we would get to help us were not
ordinary educationalists. They were professional practising writers
and university teachers doing their best to judge
things by international standards. Simon Gikandi, who was another
of Ngugi’s students in Nairobi… Henry Chakava got him to work
with him before he went off to Edinburgh to do his doctorate…
and Simon’s reports were replete with comparisons with John Carlos
Williams, with Fuentes. His international comparisons were
with the most interesting writing of the time wherever
it came from. So, that was very much the philosophy, and
Simon Gikandi was a particularly good editor. Chinua
and Ngugi also advised quite a lot at one stage…we used our published
writers to give us advice as well.
NB: Talking about Achebe and Ngugi, wasn’t the liberalism with
which Heinemann received their radical views, and others’ of course,
a strategy of domesticating the wild?
JC: We tried to achieve, particularly
Henry, Aig and myself, that the input from Africa was very strong
in terms of advice. Not that it was always necessary good
advice from Africa…. When I sent to Henry Chakava Dambudzo
Marechera’s The House of Hunger, he gave it to a
local academic who complained that it put Africa in a bad
light…. Henry ignored this advice. It was just that he
didn’t rate it. He just said: “If this is the first work
by this writer, then he has a great future.” Nuruddin
Farah’s second novel, A Naked Needle … actually in that
case both the British novelists who worked on it didn’t much like
it…they thought Nuruddin was too much influenced
by James Joyce - indeed Nuruddin had done his thesis on
James Joyce. Gikandi in Nairobi was very
enthusiastic about it as was in fact Molara Leslie in Ibadan…and
she said that with this book the African novel comes of
age….
So, during that period in the late Seventies,
we really did have a very very virile exchange of ideas. One
of the things that one, of course, takes for granted now is communication
but in those days it was quite expensive to communicate: airmail
was expensive.. you tended to use cables… they were expensive…
airmail letters were quite fast, but that still meant even if
you replied by return you probably wouldn’t get the message back
in under three weeks from the original. There was a sort of rhythm
about the posts… you were writing all these letters out
and on the whole you could trust those services. Telephoning
was extraordinary expensive … you had to book calls and so on…Travelling
by air was very expensive. A lot of Africans used to arrive
in London from July to September… they used to flood
into our offices to get free lunches and so on…we were
able to be very hospitable…and lots of African writers used to
meet at the Heinemann offices. If a couple of people were
coming in at the same time … we would book a dining room
and then we have another sort of half a dozen writers or artists
would turn up. And so, there was a great deal of exchange
going on between the writers themselves and we as
publishers. When our own people like Henry Chakava
and Aig Higo would be in London … again we set
up gatherings with whoever was in London at that time.
NB: Diana Athill in her memoir Stet says that: “for a time
during the Fifties and early Sixties it was probably easier for
a black writer to get his book accepted by a London publisher,
and kindly reviewed thereafter, than it was for a young white
person”. The question that Dr Gail Low raises is: was it the guilt-feelings
over the British imperial past that prompted these publishers,
literary and academic to support the ‘South’s writings’ or was
it the curiosity to listen to the voices of Africans?
JC: Yeah …when she says ‘black’, she is
talking about mostly Caribbean and some black Americans…. It
was difficult for Africans to get accepted before the African
Writers Series. I admire Stet in the way that
I am reserved about Alan Hill’s book, because, I think, it’s much
more self-aware and self-critical than Alan’s… Alan, thank goodness,
we had him… because, you know, he did break the rules… he was
a non-conformist and that’s the great achievement… but thank goodness
we had Diana Athill too… I was in a meeting the other day
where Austen Clark, the Barbadian writer, and he was talking about
that period particularly the importance of having something
accepted and read on the radio from London … that was a tremendous
thing … he also said that it was marvellous that he had to struggle
through the same textbooks in Barbados that contemporary students
were having to struggle through in Britain. Diana Athill
was of course was the early publisher of Naipaul. Guilt
did not enter into the terms of young people … elders might
have had guilt …but the young people were determined to do something
about it. Alan Hill quotes Chinua Achebe saying that Chinua’s
teacher said that he thought the group of people that he had to
teach in Nigeria were better than he had ever to teach in a British
school. You had the Malaysian emergency, the Mau Mau in
Kenya, and then you had the idiot Suez adventure… and so by the
end of the Fifties, Macmillan and Macleod thought ‘let’s get rid
of this lot… there can only be more trouble’… but in terms of
people in the intellectual world, there were young people trying
to do jobs one way or another. We were just enthusiastic
about the end of empire … John Reed who did the anthology
… Reed and Wake’s anthology of African verse… he was saying the
other day: “We didn’t know what the hell we were doing!”
He was teaching in Salisbury … we just did want to do things
… we just kept on trying this and that… we were well educated
... we had a good rounded education ourselves … and we didn’t
see why African shouldn’t have a good rounded education.
Of course, it was through the medium of English, and that
meant that a lot of the cultural values were transferred, but,
I think, when you look at the teachers at the universities at
that time, it wasn’t a sense of guilt. They were trying to do
a decent job…within the terms of their own society… you
know… we are all coming from wherever we come from…
Publishers are like book makers… they
have a range of bets, and they think: “Oh, this look quite
promising for that sort of market and that looks promising for
that.… we do a couple of those there…” and they spread the betting
on books … and when one or two succeed, then that provides
the money so that they can try a new lot. When Things
Fall Apart was published by William Heinemann, it would have
been probably one of a couple dozen novels published during
that year by William Heinemann, and they were pretty sure that
they would get their money back from selling to libraries. What
they hoped as a hardback publishing house to do was to sell subsidiary
rights particularly and immediately to paperback, film, broadcasting,
all those subsidiary rights. Basically their initial bet,
like a book maker, was “This is reasonably decent book and
got quite a good report … we have some hopes about it.” This
is what they were saying about Chinua Achebe’s book “Well,
put that into the spring list or the autumn list”… so you hedged
your bet. There was the Collins’ Fontana imprint and which
took up some books such as Camara Laye’s The African
Child. They took up Ike’s Toads for Supper. It
had quite a batch of African writers within a general paperback
series selling in bookshops around Britain. So people were
trying these different writers, but basically there was
quite a prejudice against African writers.
NB: This will bring us to the question of literary “standards”.
In the colonial time there was a general assumption that Africans
were unable to write… when Achebe published his first novel… that
was a novel that reached a level of commanding the “western” style
of writing… in one of your articles about Achebe published in
African Affairs in 2003, you say: “In Africa there were
no established standards to inhibit originality. New standards
would emerge out of the manuscripts they were offered.” On the
other hand, and in a letter to Ngugi dated the 13th
of august 1962, Van Milne wrote: “As it stands Weep Not, Child
is not quite up to standard for the African Writers Series, but
the writing is very promising and I would like to find some way
of helping you to revise the manuscript still further.” Arguably
there were some “standards”? Who set them? And what were they?
JC: I was talking ironically because when
I was talking about “the standards” of the OUP… because
the OUP was mistaken not taking Tayeb Salih’s book. I was absolutely
certain that it was up to the standards of other titles already
published in Three Crowns. Quite honestly I don’t think you’d
find in my letter what Van Milne was saying to Ngugi. Who is talking
about standards? I mean…what are the standards? I am all in favour
of revision or suggesting revisions, but I never ever prescribed
revisions. When I took Bessie Head’s Question of Power
on, Richard Lister, the novelist who had discussed Head with me,
he said “I don’t think there is any great problem about her writing,
it’s a bit dense … often it is just a question of punctuation…
a comma here, a comma there…” I wrote to Bessie and said “Look,
you don’t need to change anything…you don’t need to change a comma…
we will publish it as it is…but I think it would help everybody
if you did work through it again.” She was so relieved to have
the book accepted … “Oh! I have already got back to it. I am already
working on it…” When I observed Keith and Chinua working together
for first time, they were not looking over their shoulders about
standards… they were making up their own standards… they were
making up their own minds… they were reacting to Tayeb Salih’s
writing and thinking “This is fresh… this is interesting…it deserves
publication.” We were short of manuscripts at that time and Tayeb
just stood out …
NB: But in some way when we look back at the beginning of AWS,
particularly when Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart was
published, Alan Hill, in his autobiography, explains why they
hadn’t published anything before… he cites Amos Tutuola…but for
him, Achebe’s novel was absolutely a new book… let me quote him
“In Things Fall Apart we now had something entirely new
from Africa: a novel which affirmed permanent human and social
values in the context of a traditional tribal society in crisis,
and which expressed those values in terms which the Western-educated
reader could understand.”
JC: What about these people that Alan
Hill cites as being enthusiastic about it, Gilbert Phelps, Donald
MacRae, James Michie, Alan himself… they thought it was good…
what they did not understand was that this was … they had no cultural
means of telling … in fact…just was talking at a very African
level below the Western competence of the presentation… it was
a well presented book, but of course the deep Ibo cultural input
they wouldn’t have understood it at all … it wouldn’t have occurred
to them really… people like Bernth Lindfors and others African
critics began to analyse this in depth … but the book, although
it was written in English, was operating in Ibo, wasn’t it? They
took on it as culturally good and competent … but they could not
sell it to a paperback house… the fact that it wasn’t picked up
by Penguin or Pan or Collins Fontana meant that it was almost
unknown in Africa … I mean… I found it on shelves in Cape Town,
but Cape Town was a very prosperous part of Africa … the general
book trade already worked there…
NB: In your view, what did make the AWS successful more than series
started by other publishers like OUP and Longman?
JC: I have already given reasons comparing
with Oxford’s Three Crowns, which, I think, was quite an enterprising
series, but it was handicapped by just being plays and short stories
– no novels. Longman was immensely successful as an educational
textbook publisher, but the director of Longman African division,
Julian Rees, did want the Longman series to rival the Heinemann
series. But they were a bit slow on starting. Heinemann series
was quite well established by the time that they really got down.
They kept changing the title of the series, Drumbeats and other
names… sometimes they put the Caribbean and African together and
of course they have published Ben Okri’s short stories and there
were various other ones… Sam Selvon, George Lamming… they had
quite an interesting list… but Julian Rees always laughed about
us… “Oh, yes, you are the literary publishers… Yes we are wiping
the field with textbooks!” which I certainly felt was the case.
But in fact it turned out he was deeply envious
of AWS as he has said in very generous terms in recent years.
I think they were so successful at school textbook publishing
that the literary publishing was very much more of a sideline
than it was for Heinemann. Heinemann was really only beginning
to get into Africa at the same time as the African Writers Series
started. The African Writers Series got off to a flying start
because of the enormous enthusiasm of Van Milne, Keith Sambrook
and Alan Hill. They were all quite committed in left politics
and they had the confidence. They were absolutely certain that
there must be more good writing out of Africa. If you got Chinua
Achebe, there must be other good stuff around. It was Chinua Achebe
and Van Milne who first read Ngugi’s script at Makerere in 1962
at a meeting there. There were two major rivals. One was the Modern
African Library in East African Publishing House in Nairobi, which
was the publisher of first choice in Kenya. Although we got Ngugi,
there weren’t many East African authors to begin with in the AWS.
It was quite difficult to get them… they were choosing to be published
by the very active East African Publishing House. Alan Hill completely
goes on about Okot p’Bitek’s Song of Lawino…we weren’t
the originating publishers… it looks as though we were … we weren’t
… East African Publishing House made a success of Song of Lawino
and Song of Ocol before. We were just anxious to get rights
for outside East Africa …Then the later date, Macmillan set up
this popular series called Pacesetters and they were very successful.
They started in Nairobi, but went absolutely enormously in Nigeria
…
