Ayebia picks up where Heinemann left off
Heinemann's African Writers Series is no more, but it seems the mourning period is over as Ayebia publishing has picked up where the series left off. The first book released by the independent publishing house set up by Becky Clarke, formerly editor of the Heinemann series, is The Cry of Winnie Mandela, by Njabulo Ndebele, vice-chancellor of the University of Cape Town.
The Ayebia edition of The Cry of Winnie Mandela
Clarke has lined up a broad list of titles to be released by early 2005, including two by Zimbabwean Tsitsi Dangarembga, a collection of African love stories by women and a book by South African Lewis Nkosi.
Apart from the authors, she has also brought an impressive editorial advisory panel on board. It includes Prof Abiola Irele of Harvard University, Prof Kwame Anthony Appiah, Ngugi wa Thiong'o, Dr Ato Quayson of Cambridge University, Adewale Maja-Pearce, a former editor of the African Writers Series and Dr Nana Wilson-Tagoe of the School of Oriental and African Studies in London.
The Ayebia website says the purpose of the venture is "to bring talented African and Caribbean writers to a wider audience and will be targetting particularly schools, colleges and the univeristy market, with a view to getting our books onto reading lists in Africa, UK, Europe and the United States". This is addition to a general readership. This is what Heinemann's series was doing but pulled the plug because it was too small a part of the company's educational publishing focus. What makes Ayebia different is that its primary focus is African writing, it is not a subsidiary part of a large group.
The first title from Ayebia, Ndebele's fictional work about South African women who waited, was first published in South Africa by David Philip. The Ayebia edition was laucned in March 2004 at the South African High Commission in London and was attended by high commissioner Lindiwe Mabuza.
While the work is fictional it mixes sociology, politics and journalism into the stories of four women, representative of South, and southern, Africa, who, like Homer's Penelope, waited for their men to return from the city, the mines, exile, prison.
The Cry of Winnie Mandela is Ndebele's first fiction title since Fools and Other Stories from the mid 1980s and his collection of essays on culture, Rediscovery of the Ordinary, from the early 1990s.
Further titles to be released in 2004 by Ayebia are:
- Nervous Conditions by Tstsi Dangarembga (one of Africa's 100 Best Books)
- Remembering Ken Saro-Wiwa and Other Essays by Adewale Maja-Pearce
- Underground People by Lewis Nkosi
In early 2005 the following will be released by Ayebia:
- Bira: Stopping the Time by Tsitsi Dangarembga
- African Love Stories: An Anthology of African Women's Writing edited by Ama Ata Aidoo
- Amina by Mohammed Kabir Umar
Although Harcourt, owners of the African Writers Series imprint, stopped publishing new titles in the series, over its 50 years of publishing of African writers it laid the groundwork among a reading public for consumption of African literature and created expectations of originality and excellence from the continent. Nevertheless Ayebia has its work cut out for it precisely because expectations among consumers of literature are so developed. African origins is not a selling point in itself - curiousity and charity are not enough to get books off the shelves. Ayebia's line-up of new titles is evidence that Clarke understands this only too well. She has put her 12 years as editor for the series to good use in Ayebia, and appears to be off to a flying start.
