In certain parts of the world, like Europe and the USA, it’s easy to visit a library or bookshop and find a good range of literature. What isn’t available on the shelves can be easily picked up online. There is a publishing, marketing, distribution and sales infrastructure which is well established and allows that to happen.
Masobe Books
It isn’t like that everywhere, mainly because that infrastructure does not exist, or is rudimentary. A big shout out then, to Othuke Ominiabohs, who was so frustrated with the unavailability of local literature in Nigeria, that he set about creating that infrastructure himself. From small beginnings, his company Masobe Books has grown impressively. From 28,000 copies of 28 books in 20023, last year the company sold 60,000 copies of 41 books.
Ominiabohs has big aims, hoping to see Masobe become a major player in publishing across Africa. He already publishes work by writers from a number of African countries besides Nigeria.
This comes at an opportune moment, as African literature is receiving global recognition. In 2001, Tanzanian writer Abdulrazaq Gurnah was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature and South African Damon Galgut won the Booker Prize with his novel The Promise. After Half of a Yellow Sun and Americanah, Nigerian Chimamanda Ngozi Adiche’s latest novel Dream Count is impatiently awaited, due to be published in March. Zimbabwean Tsitsi Dangarembga won the Windham-Campbell Literature Prize in 2022.
As this article explains, Masobe’s success has been down to Othuke Ominiabohs’ hard work, travelling across Nigeria to forge relationships with bookshops, creating vibrant, attractive covers and sing social media for promotion. In what sound like a proverb out of Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart, he describes his journey:
I would learn as I went along. There is a saying: a path is created by walking. It doesn’t just appear. You have to move.
Affordability
Another key factor has been to make books affordable. An illustration of the need is Maaza Mengiste’s The Shadow King, a novel about the role of women soldiers in Ethiopia in the Second World War. It was longlisted for the Booker in 2020 and can be bought in the UK for around £9 or $15 in the USA. As this article explains, in Ethiopia itself, it can be picked up for 3,000 ETB, over a quarter of a lecturer’s monthly pay.
The Masobe Books website reveals the apt inspiration for the company’s name:
Masobe is a word derived from the Isoko Language of the Isoko people who hail from the Niger Delta region of Nigeria. It means ‘Let Us Read’.
It’s also worth looking at the Brittle Paper website to keep up to date with African literature.