Sheila Akwany

The "nobody buys collections" narrative by Africans is lazy and self-serving. People buy what they see other people buying. Visibility drives sales, and publishers who repeat this excuse are describing their own marketing failure as a fact about African readers. Just look at some facts around this as it concerns African literature (this is not an argument about publishing in general). The two most prestigious and widely recognized "African" literary prizes — the Commonwealth Short Story Prize and the Caine Prize — are both short story prizes. Both are run by non-African institutions (don’t let the black faces fool you). The genre with the deepest prestige infrastructure in African letters is the short story, and still local publishers treat it as commercially dead because Western publishers say the same thing. This is a contradiction that should embarrass the African publishing industry (if anything like that exists) For me the most important argument against this is that the short story is the most natively African literary (prose) form. It descends from oral storytelling traditions built around single sittings, single tellings, single emotional arcs delivered whole. A publishing industry that can't sell that form isn't exposing a flaw in African readers but its own disconnection from the tradition it claims to serve. The problem of African publishing is primarily structural, and it mirrors the pathologies of African business more broadly: chronic underinvestment, weak regulatory frameworks, a habit of grabbing low-hanging fruit for a quick headline instead of doing the institutional work that sustains a market, and publishers who won't collaborate with each other even when collaboration is the only path to scale. Again, there is a deeper failure of imitation where African publishers (and so called “black” publishers) borrow the outward form of Western publishing houses without the capital, distribution networks, discipline or editorial infrastructure that make that model function. They've copied the shape of an industry without building the muscles underneath it and worse without looking at their own very peculiar market. There are many hardworking African publishers struggling against this tide, who are working hard but have to deal with all of this shit. So no, there is no short story problem in African literature. In fact the short story is how African literature of the past 25 years (once the internet made this possible) went truly global, not the novel.