SANTA NO-CLAUS

As a Nigerian Publisher,author, editor and someone who has been in the literary space for over a decade and half, here's what I think: All books deserve to be published, for the same reason that people have freedom of speech. However, publishers have a responsibility to think about the impact of what they release. But we also need to eat 😭. At the end of the day, it’s less about censoring entire books and more about publishers being intentional about what they choose to put their name behind. Gatekeeping, which you are proposing, is as damaging as irresponsible publishing ( if not worse). Scholarship (and readers) need variety ie. different perspectives, schools of thought, points of view, experiences, and even ideas we may strongly disagree with. If only a narrow group (in this case - Nigerian publishers) gets to decide what is “worthy” of being published, we risk creating a literary ecosystem where the same ideas keep circulating and reinforcing each other. Good scholarship should give us room to question, challenge, disagree, and discover. Variety doesn’t mean every idea is equally valid; it means there should be enough intellectual diversity for ideas to actually be tested. Otherwise, we’re not protecting scholarship. Instead, we’re just deciding in advance what scholarship or shared knowledge should look like. And that poses even greater problems for us.