The collections and the history of African-language publishing

The outlines of the history of African-language publishingFootnote ³ can be traced through the BL’s collections, which reflect major historical trends in this field, despite the fact that they also contain many gaps.

Unless otherwise stated, all the works noted below are in the BL’s collections and may be found by searching the main catalogue (British Library n.d.d). Some older works are also fully digitized and freely available online (where this is the case, it is indicated in the catalogue).

Printing began in Africa south of the Sahara as an evangelical and governmental tool. While colonial government publications were usually in European languages, Christian missionaries were strongly motivated to publish in local languages. The missions produced two main kinds of tools: Bibles and other religious literature, and linguistic aids such as dictionaries and grammars. Christian texts were thus key in defining and codifying individual African languages, and developing their written form (in roman characters).Footnote ⁴ As Davis et al. put it, ‘Histories of the mission press in the [Southern African] region recount a familiar pattern of missionaries standardising orthography, producing the first vernacular Bibles and schoolbooks, and establishing newspapers’ (Reference Davis, Dick, le Roux and Walder2021: 26). These works were published in the European countries from which the missionaries came and, increasingly, in Africa itself, as missionaries imported printing presses.

Such publishing really took off in the 19^th century, but its earliest forms reflect the inroads made by missionaries into specific African regions. The BL holds a copy of the first printed book in a Bantu language known to have survived. Doutrina Christãa, published as early as 1624, is a catechism in Portuguese and Kikongo, and was produced by the Roman Catholic mission to the kingdom of Kongo (which was largely in modern Angola) (Jorge Reference Jorge1624; British Library n.d.b).Footnote ⁵ Other early publishing of note came from, among other places, Madagascar, where an early 19^th century Christian period under King Radama I was suppressed by Queen Ranavolona I, and many Bibles buried or burnt. The BL holds rare surviving copies of Bibles from this period (Ny Teny n’Andriamanitra 1830; Holden Reference Holden1997).

African languages were also preserved in other, less obvious forms. When Thomas Bowdich visited the Asante kingdom in 1816, he wrote down the words and music of songs he heard there, and later published them in his account of the visit (Bowdich Reference Bowdich1819).

As, from the mid-19^th century, Christian evangelical work in Africa rapidly increased, dictionaries, grammars and Bible translations were produced in numerous African languages. A particularly important early text, Polyglotta Africana, published in 1854, is the result of work led by missionary Sigismund Koelle. It is based on interviews with people living in Sierra Leone who had been enslaved and then freed, and gives translations of specific words into approximately 160 African languages (Koelle Reference Koelle1854; Wallace and Topp Fargion n.d.).Footnote ⁶

In the late 19^th and first half of the 20^th centuries, certain missionary presses were prolific in publishing both secular and religious texts, for example at Lovedale (in South Africa) and Morija (in Lesotho). The BL holds numerous titles from these publishers: from Lovedale, there are approximately 100 African-language items published between 1865 and 1978, mainly in Xhosa. This total includes both books in African languages, and linguistic tools such as dictionaries.Footnote ⁷

Missionary interventions in African linguistics were, of course, no more neutral than their broader endeavours, with their often close relationship to European colonization. Davis et al. refer to ‘the historical and entrenched disparities in print culture – racial, linguistic, gender-based and geographical’, arguing that these help ‘to explain some of the present inequalities in knowledge access and production in the [Southern African] region’ (Reference Davis, Dick, le Roux and Walder2021: 71). In some cases, too, missionary linguistic work was influential in the creation or redefinition of ethnic boundaries (Irvine Reference Irvine, Petersen, Gavua and Rassool2015; Harries Reference Harries and Vail1989).

One example of the inequalities inherent in mission work was the fact that the local linguists with whom Western missionaries collaborated often went unacknowledged in the published texts, of which the former were often in fact authors or co-authors. For example, a Nama woman, Zara Schmelen (née Hendrichs),Footnote ⁸ a convert in the early 19^th-century mission in what is now Namibia, is probably responsible for the first translation of the Gospels into the NamaFootnote ⁹ language. However, it was her husband, the Rhenish Mission missionary Johann Schmelen, who was generally credited with this work. (Nama Annoe Kayn Hoeaati Haka Kanniti, Nama-Kowapna Gowayhiihati 1831; Trüper Reference Trüper2006; Kleinschmidt n.d.).Footnote ¹⁰

From the later decades of the 19^th century into the 20^th, African intellectuals, particularly in West and South Africa, were making use of printing technology to bring out their own publications, sometimes in African languages. The work of Sol Plaatje, the South African linguist, author and politician, is of particular note. In addition to producing key works in English, Plaatje authored translations of Shakespeare’s plays into African languages (Shakespeare Reference Shakespeare and Plaatje1937; Reference Shakespeare and Plaatje1981) and contributed (anonymously) to A Book of Homage to Shakespeare, an upmarket commemoration of the 300th anniversary of Shakespeare’s death in 1916, his piece appearing in both Setswana and English ([Plaatje] Reference Gollancz1916a; Willan Reference Willan2016).Footnote ¹¹ He also published a book of ‘Sechuana’ (Tswana) proverbs and, with Daniel Jones, a Sechuana reader (Plaatje Reference Plaatje1916b; Jones and Plaatje Reference Jones and Plaatje1916).

Other African authors were branching into fiction from the early 20^th century. A major figure was the novelist Thomas Mofolo, who wrote in Sotho. The BL holds translations into English (and other languages) of his three best-known novels, Chaka, Pitseng and Moeti oa Bochabela (Traveller to the East), but the only one of these held in the original is Pitseng.Footnote ¹² The posthumously published novella Phakoana-Tsooana is also held in Sotho (Mofolo n.d.). More generally, a succession of works of literature in African languages was published in the ‘Bantu Treasury’ series by the Witwatersrand University Press (Ntshangase Reference Ntshangase, Altbach and Tefera1999): the BL holds approximately forty of these titles, published between 1935 and 1970.Footnote ¹³

African-language newspapers were also hugely important for communication, political mobilization and the development of African-language publishing by Africans. In South Africa, titles including Imvo Zabantsundu (in Xhosa) and Ilanga lase Natal (in Zulu) were being published from the late nineteenth century. The BL’s holdings in this area are significant, but patchy: they include, for example, some issues of the former from the 1880s, but no hard copy or microform issues of the latter. However, both titles have been acquired, and are available to BL readers, in digital form in the Readex African Newspapers collection, as are a good number of other early African-language newspapers from South Africa (Readex 2022). From West Africa, African-language newspaper titles include an 1891 issue of Ìwé ÌròhÌn Èkó, although Ìwé ÌròhÌn, Elétí-Ọfẹ and Akéde Èkó, three other early Yoruba-language newspapers, are missing.Footnote ¹⁴ The digital collections of the Endangered Archives Programme include a run of the Hausa newspaper Gaskiya ta fi Kwabo (Endangered Archives Programme n.d.b).

The printed books collections occasionally help to fill gaps, where the original items are missing. The newspaper Abantu-Batho, published in South Africa between 1912 and 1931 in Xhosa, Zulu, Sotho, Tswana and English, was a focus for political debate and mobilization in and around the African National Congress. Only a two-year run is held in libraries (not, sadly, the BL), but work for a recent book tracked down more of the paper’s ‘elusive archive’ and brought together a range of articles (translated into English) with scholarship on this publication (Limb Reference Limb and Limb2012: 6).

The BL’s collections reflect how, as the 20^th century progressed, works of fiction, poetry and drama flourished in a number of African languages. Holdings, for example, of the works of the great Tanzanian poet and novelist Shaaban Robert, who wrote in Swahili (Ricard Reference Ricard2004: 66–9), are good. The approximately twenty of his books already in the collection have recently been augmented by more titles from a major donation from the library of the Swahili scholar James Willoughby Tarleton Allen (acquired in December 2021 and being processed at the time of writing). For Nigeria, the holdings include, for instance, the classic Igbo work of Piti Nwana as well as several books by the Yoruba novelist D. O. Fágúnwà and many others, as Kọ́lá Túbọ̀sún’s detailed article on the British Library’s Yoruba collections in this issue explains (Túbọ̀sún Reference Túbọ̀sún2022; Ricard Reference Ricard2004: 77–86).

From the mid-20^th century and into the period of independence, many African countries saw increased attention to African languages. The flourishing, or otherwise, of African-language print publication was influenced by a number of interlocking factors: the extent to which individual languages were taught in schools; the focus of university departments and intellectuals on those languages; the activity (or absence) of influential authors writing in particular languages, the example of the Kenyan writer Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, who writes first in Kikuyu (Gikuyu),Footnote ¹⁵ being the most obvious; and, perhaps most important, the extent to which government support and funding has been given to language development.

Government promotion of African languages may have begun during the colonial period – and, in South Africa, was intended as a cultural bulwark of the apartheid system – but many newly independent countries adopted or set up institutions of language development. Such policies probably had the most success in Tanzania, with the result that it became one of the few African countries where the official or national language was not a European language (Mulokozi Reference Mulokozi, Altbach and Teferra1999; Ricard Reference Ricard2009). This is reflected in the fact that Swahili-language material is the largest category of African-language printed material in the BL’s collections (see Table 1 below), and includes, as well as imaginative literature and other genres, government publications and those of the ruling party, Chama cha Mapinduzi. Publishing in Swahili was promoted by the East African Literature Bureau (EALB) (active 1948–77), which had offices in Kenya, Tanzania and Uganda. Its longevity and importance are reflected in the BL’s holdings, which include almost 400 books published by the EALB between 1953 and 1977, of which about fifty-five are in African languages (including grammars and dictionaries).Footnote ¹⁶ However, this is a fairly small proportion of the EALB’s output in African languages which, as Mulokozi (Reference Mulokozi, Altbach and Teferra1999: 13) notes, stood at over 1,000 items by the early 1960s.

Efforts to develop African languages led, among other things, to the production of readers and educational pamphlets, often published around the time of independence. These are not necessarily easily identifiable in the BL’s collections. Some of them are catalogued individually, but others may be found boxed, with one catalogue record for a box that may contain ten or twenty items, or more. For example, there are nine boxes of ‘miscellaneous publications’ of the Bureau of Ghana Languages from the 1950s and 1960s, each containing items in a different Ghanaian language.Footnote ¹⁷ From Sierra Leone, there is a box holding eighty-four separate items.Footnote ¹⁸

Swahili is among the small number of languages that have had sufficient resources invested in their standardization and development to encourage the emergence of significant written literatures. Ricard (Reference Ricard2004) identifies those of particular importance as Yoruba; Igbo; Hausa; Akan; Ewe; Swahili; Amharic; Sotho; Zulu; Xhosa; Venda (Tshivenda); Shona; and Malagasy. It will be noted that this list closely resembles the list given above of the languages in which the BL’s holdings are particularly strong.Footnote ¹⁹

Post-independence crises of various kinds have led to many difficulties for publishers, and, overall, African-language publishing remains fragile across the continent. Nevertheless, such publishing does continue, if often through the self-publishing route, and it continues in print as well as online. Indeed, there is often a positive relationship between the two. Of particular note is Jalada Africa’s project to have Ngũgĩ’s short story The Upright Revolution: or why humans walk upright translated into other African languages (Jalada 2016; Kilolo Reference Kilolo2022). In February 2022 this resulted in the donation to the BL of a print publication containing versions of this story in three Gambian languages (Ngũgĩ 2017).

Overall, while the BL’s African-language collections are among the most extensive in the UK, there are nevertheless significant gaps in the holdings. This is also evident from Kọ́lá Túbọ̀sún’s (Reference Túbọ̀sún2022) article in this volume on the BL’s Yoruba collections. Research carried out in 2018 on the Somali collections found that some classics of Somali printed literature are held, but many others are missing. Subsequent efforts to fill these gaps were only partially successful, since many works are no longer available to purchase through the usual channels.

The BL’s acquisitions of African-language printed items

Many of the earliest works held by the BL were acquired through legal deposit legislation (sometimes called copyright deposit). A copy of each book published in the UK was (and is) required by law to be deposited in the BL (or its main predecessor, the British Museum Library). Because many African-language items were published in the UK, this brought them into the BL’s collections. This has continued to be a source of acquisition, resulting in some surprising and sometimes charming holdings, such as bilingual picture books for young children in English and Somali.Footnote ²⁰

Under the British empire, colonial legal deposit legislation applied, meaning that one copy of every item published in the colonies had, in theory, to be sent to the British Museum Library (Sternberg Reference Sternberg1991). Although publishers often failed to comply, acquisition via this (now sometimes controversial) route did lead to the creation of a substantial collection of African-language titles. These can usually be identified as colonial legal deposit material by the place of publication given in the item, in conjunction with the blue British Museum Library stamp to be found in the copy held by the BL (also normally visible where an item has been digitized).

Historically, donationFootnote ²¹ and purchase have also been important means of acquisition. With the end of the colonial period, and thus of colonial legal deposit, buying African-language material became the main method of acquiring it. A variety of factors have meant that, while the collection has continued to grow since that time, collecting has been neither consistent nor comprehensive. For one thing, acquisitions have been influenced by the nature of the publishing and distribution industry in Africa – generally more fragile for this material than for titles in English, French, Portuguese or Afrikaans – and by difficulties in the distribution and supply of these items. For another, the BL’s policy towards buying it, and capacity to do so, has also varied over time.

In the absence of deeper research on this subject, my own experience may be a useful indicator of policy in the past. On my arrival at the BL in 2003 to take up the (to my knowledge) first curatorial post dedicated to Africa south of the Sahara,Footnote ²² it was not at all clear that African-language collecting should be a priority; there was a question as to whether responsibility for this material should be left to SOAS University of London, as the specialist library in the area. I was able to clarify that, although SOAS did have extensive collections, there were a great many items held by one, but not both, institutions, and that there was less duplication than might be expected. More fundamentally, I argued successfully that it was important strategically for the BL to collect this material, and that a department (then Asia, Pacific and Africa Collections) that specialized in world languages ranging from Chinese, Arabic and Urdu to many minority and lesser-known languages across Asia should also be focusing on the no less important languages of Africa – even if the quality and quantity of printed material in these languages might be suffering in the face of the enormous dominance of European languages on that continent.

The BL currently acquires as much as possible in African languages. Regular buying trips have not been authorized in the recent past (this was the case even before the Covid-19 pandemic), but on occasional trips to Africa for other reasons, I have taken the opportunity to buy African-language material wherever possible (for example, some Yoruba items from a visit to Nigeria in 2017). A more important source of this material, however, consists of offers from the BL’s regular suppliers, which very much influence the nature of current collecting. Swahili-language publishing, particularly of novels and other creative works, seems to be currently undergoing a renaissance; also of note are items in Somali, and in a number of South African languages. Purchasing of books in Amharic and other Ethiopian languages has also been restarted. Interestingly, modern missionary endeavour appears to include new linguistic work, and recent purchases include a number of new Bible translations into African languages, often those in which little other literature exists, as well as some Qur’anic material.

It appears that, among UK academic libraries, the BL is currently the institution acquiring African-language items most consistently. SOAS University of London also continues to actively purchase this material.

Overall, the BL’s acquisition of African-language titles has been shaped not a little by Britain’s colonial past, as expressed in the colonial legal deposit system, as well as the undervaluing of African-language cultural production, particularly since independence. It has also been restricted from time to time by budget considerations, the weakness of the African publishing industry and the practical difficulties of collecting consistently. These limitations help to explain gaps in the collections. On the other hand, a great deal of collecting has taken place, and the collections have been treated with care and in many instances actively conserved. Despite the gaps, the BL collections are among the most extensive – indeed, perhaps the most extensive – African-language collections in the UK, as I discuss in the next section.

Identifying and counting the African-language collections

How big, exactly – or even roughly – are the BL’s African-language collections? Aside from the fact that they are growing all the time, meaning that a total figure constitutes a moving target, there are catalogue-related factors that make it difficult to answer this apparently innocent question. It is therefore necessary first of all to understand how African languages are classified and catalogued in library systems.

Under the MARC standard, established by the Library of Congress and used worldwide by libraries including the British Library, languages are assigned a three-letter code (Library of Congress 2007). For example, Zulu is coded ‘zul’, and Swahili is ‘swa’. The catalogue record for all books should include the correct language code. These codes then form a ‘behind the scenes’ bank of data, not usually seen in its raw state by readers, which enables catalogue users to select items in languages of interest to them. For example, in the BL’s catalogue, an initial search can be refined by going to the ‘language’ menu on the left-hand side and selecting the language of interest.

There are problems, however, with using this method to identify and quantify African-language material in the BL’s catalogue. The most serious of these is that many items lack a language code at all, or are incorrectly coded. This applies in particular to older books, records for many of which were created in the early days of computer catalogues without being coded by language. Correcting this manually would have been a massive task, and so colleagues at the BL have recently researched and created a clever automated approach based on statistical analysis of the frequencies of words present in the title.Footnote ²³ This Language Identification Project (Languid) has vastly increased the number of catalogue records assigned correct language codes, dealing with over two-thirds of the roughly six million records with no undetermined or invalid language codes at the beginning of the project in 2017 (Morris Reference Morris2019; Reference Morris2020).Footnote ²⁴

As a result of this, the number of records assigned African-language codes (excluding Afrikaans) increased from 5,287 at the start of the project to 8,921 on 3 March 2022. Records for Afrikaans-language items showed an even bigger increase, from 3,500 to 11,543.Footnote ²⁵ However, these figures contain a number of uncertainties, including (but not limited to) the following points.

First, there is some over-counting, because not all the BL’s catalogue records have an item attached to them – in other words, some records (not visible in the public catalogue) contain information about titles not actually held by the Library. Conversely, under-counting will result from the fact that I have counted language codes in the main catalogue field for language (008), but not those in the field for supplementary language information (041).Footnote ²⁶ Under-counting also results from the fact that the statistical approach cannot assign a language code to everything uncoded, and large numbers of such records remain. There is also the matter of the existence of a single collective record for a number of titles held in the same box, as noted above.

I have taken the view that the headline figures generated by this analysis of language codes are a reasonable way of estimating the approximate size of the African-language printed collections, and, on the basis of the analysis above, I would also argue that the figures obtained in this way are likely to be under- rather than overestimates. Overall, I believe we can safely say that the total number of items in African languages (excluding Afrikaans) is likely to be over 9,000 in 2022, and continues to increase.

How many African languages are included in the BL’s collections? Here we come up against an additional problem: the MARC system itself also places barriers in the way of a comprehensive answer.

In researching these collections, I put together a list of 113 African languages or language categories as defined in the MARC system. The BL holds records for printed items in all of these, with the exception of N’Ko and Zenaga.Footnote ²⁷ However, as is well known, Africa is home to thousands of languages, and it is extremely unlikely that only 113 of them have been expressed in print.

The answer to this apparent conundrum lies in the phenomenon of ‘collective language codes’ in MARC. Consider the top thirty-five African languages held by the British Library – that is, African-language printed items for which the BL holds the most records (Table 1 below).

Table 1.

African-language printed items: largest thirty-five holdings by language

Seven of the languages given here are in fact collective language codes. They are: Niger-Kordofanian (other); Bantu (other); Nilo-Saharan (other); Afroasiatic (other); and three ‘Creoles and Pidgins’ categories, respectively ‘other’, ‘French’ and ‘English’.

The first four of these categories include languages in major African-language groups that have not otherwise been coded. They can be extensive: for example, the Bantu (other) group comprises, at my count, 127 individually named languages. It might be assumed that the logic behind this is that these are all ‘minor’ languages, spoken by relatively few people and with little political importance. Even if this were so, the ethics of not assigning individual language codes would be dubious. In any case, it is certainly untrue for some of these languages. For example, Bantu (other) includes Chokwe, a national language of Angola; Kalanga, an official language in Zimbabwe; and Tonga (Zambezi) (Tchitonga), with 1.5 million speakers in Zambia and Zimbabwe.

It will be seen from this that it is highly likely that the BL holds items in a considerably greater number of languages than the 113 identified through the MARC system. The Creole and Pidgin categories, on the other hand, present a different problem. Again, they are catch-all categories for a number of languages, but they also cross continents: many of the items catalogued with these codes are not, in fact, African.Footnote ²⁸

The ongoing discussions in cataloguing circles about how to deal with this issue – which is becoming increasingly important in the context of decolonizing debates – cannot be addressed here. Once again, we will have to settle for an approximate measure: we can at least say that the BL holds items in well over 100 African languages.

How do the BL’s collections relate to the holdings of other UK libraries? To provide an outline answer to this question, in May 2021 I used Library Hub Discover (Jisc n.d.), the UK union catalogue for academic libraries, to search for records for the fifty oldest items (Figure 1) and newest items (Figure 2) in four languages (Amharic, Swahili, Yoruba and Zulu), and count the holdings for these items of the various libraries.

Figure 1.

UK libraries holding the most extensive printed African-language collections, based on records for the fifty oldest items available on Library Hub Discover.

Figure 2.

UK libraries holding the most extensive printed African-language collections, based on records for the fifty most recent items available on Library Hub Discover.

The results of this preliminary (and rough) research suggest that the BL’s collections are certainly among the most extensive in the UK, appearing to come second for the earliest works, and easily the largest for modern books. Other libraries with key collections are those of the University of Cambridge; the University of Oxford; SOAS University of London; and the National Library of Scotland. Since all of these except SOAS are legal deposit libraries, these figures probably suggest the importance of the legal deposit of UK publications in building up these collections.

We should beware, however, of placing too much reliance on these preliminary figures: apart from the small size of the sample, there is also the fact that other libraries may have similar gaps in relation to language coding as the BL has had until recently, and that therefore their collections may not be fully discoverable through a language code search. It is possible that the SOAS collections, in particular, are underestimated here. The figures are most useful as an indication of where African-language material can be found in the UK. It is also intriguing that, although only a small number of libraries had quite extensive collections, my survey revealed a ‘long tail’ of libraries with one or only a few of the items sampled. These included university libraries such as those of Birmingham, Durham, KCL, London, Manchester and Trinity St David’s, Wales. The National Trust (although not appearing in this survey) also has a few items in African languages, most importantly about twenty items in Swahili in the library of Khadambi Asalache at his home at 575 Wandsworth Road, London (National Trust n.d.), which was bequeathed to the Trust in 2006.Footnote ²⁹

Accessing the collections

Finally, a word on how to access the BL’s printed African-language collections. I have indicated above where items may be available online; generally speaking, however, these are print-only titles which are available to registered readers in the reading rooms at St Pancras, London, and in some cases at Boston Spa, Yorkshire.

To identify items of interest, use the main catalogue (‘Explore the British Library’). Readers can narrow down their search results by using the ‘language’ menu on the left-hand side. An alternative is to search directly by language in Library Hub Discover, on which the BL’s collections can of course also be found. Remember, however, that there are still many records not coded by language, and it will continue to be useful to search for a range of terms, including, if appropriate, variant and older spellings of the language in question.

Reader passes are available to anyone aged over eighteen wanting to use the BL’s collections, and the Library aims to be an open and welcoming space for everyone.Footnote ³⁰ In recent years, African-language material, and the African collections more generally, have also been used as the basis for engagement events, whether on-site or online, including events with London-based Somali community groups (Ali Reference Ali2018), and an online symposium on Yoruba orthography spearheaded by Kọ́lá Túbọ̀sún, then Chevening Fellow at the BL (Túbọ̀sún Reference Túbọ̀sún2020; ‘How Should We Write Yorùbá?’ 2020a; 2020b).