par Odimegwu Onwumere
African writers are truthful, they write without biasness and don’t cause conflict between literature and history, culture and tradition of other continents. They are preservers of cultures and traditions. Especially Nigerian home-based writers are a very powerful people. They continue to write with limited or even no resources. They have always maintained in seeing that the African literature is not relegated to the background by the thousands of books they churn out each year, (as against the plan of the western world). They are always writing to rejuvenate African literature from the sobered and piqued state it was orchestrated to navigate to by the western world.
But publishers are the home-based writers’ greatest woes. Hardly do publishers accept and publish manuscripts of the budding home-based writers. They preferred to publish the works of the renowned authors. And hardly do the publishers pay royalties. The ones that pay do not pay appreciable amounts. They pay 10% or less of what was sold from a manuscript that was published. This has made many writers turned to self-publishing (otherwise called vanity publishing). The dearth of responsible publishers in Africa to explore the budding talents is a blow below the belt.
African governments are even abetting to these woes. They forgot, or they are yet to comprehend, that their shrug-attitude towards the exploration for new writers in the continent is a setback to widening the mental horizon of Africans. These governments’ unconcerned attitude towards their writers also affects the economic growth, social unity and the promotion of culture and tourism in Africa. This has made the writers of the Black race always look up to the West for the promotion of their writing careers, without minding that the western people stole the African literature and culture and christened it their own. This is the time Africans stopped believing the hypocrisy of the white men that, “all road leads to Rome”. Rather, Africans should start singing, “all road leads to Egypt”….
Copyright, Blaise APLOGAN, 2010,© Bienvenu sur Babilown
Toute republication de cet article doit en mentionner et l’origine et l’auteur sous peine d’infraction
Commentaires