Today we continue with our analysis of the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation (Unesco) report on the book industry in Africa titled The African Book Industry: Trends, challenges and opportunities for growth.
While last week we examined the report on public libraries, which revealed that Kenya is doing poorly on this front, today we look at the Kenyan book industry in general.
The Unesco report says that Kenya is among a select few countries in Africa that have thriving book sectors. The others include Nigeria, Ghana and South Africa.
The Kenyan book industry supplies books to neighbouring countries, such as Uganda, Tanzania, Rwanda and South Sudan.
How did this come about, you might ask? To answer this question, we go back to the beginning, or at least close enough to the beginning.
You see, formal education as we know it was introduced to Kenya by the colonialists, in this case the Britons. For education to take root, it requires books and that is where publishers come in.
The earliest providers of educational books were British publishers, who included Oxford University Press, Macmillan Publishers, Heinemann Educational Publishers and Longman Publishers, among others.
Local takeover
The same trend continued well after Kenya gained independence, but now the difference being there were government run publishers, namely Jomo Kenyatta Foundation (JKF) and the Kenya Literature Bureau (KLB). These two were working in concert with the then Kenya Institute of Education (KIE), which came up with the syllabus materials to be studied in schools.
At some point KIE, which later transformed into the Kenya Institute of Curriculum Development (KICD), through its staff, became so entrenched in producing educational materials it forgot that its core mandate was the evaluation and vetting books to be studied in schools.
By going into book production, KIE effectively became a player, as well as the referee; raising questions as to who would vet what they were producing. This inevitably raised questions of quality.
Before this there had been changes in ownership of publishing houses.
In the early 90s, Henry Chakava, who after being head hunted from the University of Nairobi, rose through the ranks to become the general manager of Heinemann EA Educational Publishers, bought out the British multinational, to create East African Educational Publishers (EAEP). This was followed by Longhorn Publishers, which divested from another British multinational, Longman Publishers. David Muita joined this progressive club when in 2010, turned Macmillan Publishers into Moran Publishers.
In the 90s, the few locally owned publishers could only watch with envy as the JKF, KLB and KIE made all the money from the production of course books. They could only make do with the publication of supplementary materials which, in the larger scheme of things, was not that lucrative.
In the meantime, through their umbrella body, Kenya Publishers Association (KPA), they kept on petitioning the Ministry of Education for reforms in the book sector.
They scored their first major victory when they succeeded in stopping KIE from producing books and to focus on its core mandate of vetting and evaluating educational materials.
Better news awaited locally owned publishers, when the Mwai Kibaki led Narc party swept to victory with the promise of providing free education for school going children.
Donors, such as Britain’s Department for International Development (DIFD) offered to chip into the provision of books donating a shilling for every shilling the Kenyan government invested in the production of school books.
With Kibaki’s free education programme came new rules, which opened up the market to privately owned publishers. They had a seat at the high table. Their manuscripts could now compete on merit with government owned publishers at the KIE vetting panel.
This period ushered in prosperous season for publishers whose books were approved for use in schools.
With the expertise gained in producing books for the Kenyan market, these publishers found their services in great demand with neighbouring countries also requiring these services.
To service this need, a number of Kenyan publishers opened subsidiaries in those countries to produce the much needed books.
By and large, Kenyan publishers continued ‘eating well’ through the free education programme until corruption started rearing its ugly head in the sector.
Distribution reform
Under the free education project, the government would provide schools with funds through which they purchased books from booksellers, who would then order the books from publishers.
Greed started creeping in when crooked booksellers conspired with equally crooked head teachers to supply air to schools and split the money amongst themselves.
Whenever ministry inspectors visited schools, they were shocked to find pupils without books, yet school heads indicated that they had purchased books.
Meanwhile, publishers found themselves saddled with books in their warehouses, as booksellers were not ordering books.
This trickery hampered the realisation of 1:1 ratio of pupil to book.
The failure to realise the desired pupil/book ratio troubled Fred Matiang’i, who was Education CS, a great deal. In the end, he came up with a new deal that ensured that pupils in public schools around the country got a book each for every subject studied.
This deal involved cutting out the bookseller, from the distribution chain. Publishers whose books had been approved for use in schools, would henceforth deliver books directly to schools.
And that is how the 1:1 ratio of pupil to book was achieved. It also killed off the bookseller/head teacher collusion that was causing loss of funds.
Just as the Jubilee government was wrapping up its final term, it introduced the Competency Based Curriculum, requiring another wave of textbook production, which is ongoing.
The focus on textbook production comes with a downside. It means that publishers are left with very little time to produce leisure reading materials (novels, plays, poetry, novellas etc.)
Aside from the storybooks and readers required by the curriculum, mainstream publishers have produced very few leisure titles over the past decade.
And just as nature abhors vacuum, the void left when publishers neglected leisure reading materials, self-published authors stepped on to the plate and have been keeping readers occupied.
Ngunjiri is the curator of Maisha Yetu, a digital Arts and Books media platform