Have publishing standards been lost in the archives?

Looking back at the path travelled by African literature, an honest observer cannot deny the sense of nostalgia that comes with remembering specific novels with yellow covers, and the logo of Heinemann’s African Writers Series. Even though James Currey has clarified (in Africa Writes Back (2008)) that these publications by Heinemann Educational Books began in London with Alan Hill around 1962, what we all agree on is their typographical quality.

There is no comparing the meticulousness of Heinemann’s work then, with the sea of typographical chaos that Kenyan book readers swim in today. I think that quality left with the likes of Peter Abrahams, Chinua Achebe, Tewfik Al-Hakim, T M Aluko, Elechi Amadi, Jared Angira, I N C Aniebo, Ayi Kwei Armah, Kofi Awoonor, Bediako Asare, Mariama Ba and Francis Bebey.

Perhaps Mongo Beti, Okot p’Bitek, Dennis Brutus, J P Clark, Cyprian Ekwensi, Buchi Emecheta, Mugo Gatheru, Nadine Gordimer, Bessie Head, Samuel Kahiga, Alex la Guma, Taban Lo Liyong’, Mazisi Kunene, Naguib Mahfouz, Jack Mapanje, Ngugi wa Thiong’o, and many other writers of their calibre have no successors.

True, you needed both ‘sagely art,’ and ‘consummate publishing’ to have created such a literary building block. Yet I suspect that marketing relies on the latter more than the former. In our case, it’s even pure conmanship; an overrated exaggeration akin to Shakespeare’s ‘sounds and fury’.

Except in very rare cases, I cannot count the number of times I have spent money on books by Kenyan ‘authors’ and met extreme small-headedness, which should have warranted the pouring of ice-cold water on the backs of publishers of such books.

Even so, I doubt that the yam-rich smell of Achebe’s Things Fall Apart (1958) would have crossed whole continents had that book been wrapped in the sloppy packaging that characterises some Kenyan offerings today. In this grouping, I include books by Kenyans abroad.

Even in an area as obvious as spelling, most of these books win the heart of the Luo metaphor, okapu janek (a mad man’s basket). Keen people realise that most reviewers today end their job with loud cries of agony and teeth-gnashing at the endless typographical errors.

Are all publishers a kraal of dishonest conmen? I do not know. I have never asked them. But on the basis of certain well-known percentages of sharing book proceeds, many published authors are likely to give you a definite answer.

And, perhaps, they are right, because most school textbooks I have gone through do not reveal the same bloodbath of typographical errors I see in the purely creative works rolling from the presses of these same publishers.

Ruinous

Until I read Bethwell A Ogot’s A History of Luo-Speaking Peoples of Eastern Africa (2009), I often underestimated the stench that endless typographical errors could smear on a gem of a book. Now I know that the taste it spreads on your tongue is more ruinous and lasting than a drop of bile on an otherwise mouth-watering carcass.

But I can forgive the writers any day, even in my sleep. You see, creative writing is a church; it welcomes even probable-mules whose shrill bloatedness of ego has all the colouring of would-be asylum neurotics. People whom I insist — because they have no disciplined training — we should reward with trophies even when they miss both the logic and the spelling.

Because of the standards set in the Heinemann Educational Books, it was almost impossible to even imagine a misspelt word or misplaced comma in Things Fall Apart, and in every other book once published by that superb initiative. If our editors cannot match such standards today due only to their own exceptional talent, then we should beg them to kindly scale down the errors for us just a bit.

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