 Welcome to this group's discussion titled Knowledge, Production, Media and Access in African Studies. My name is Stephanie Kitchen and I'm the Publications Officer of the International African Institute based here at SOAS. Nowadays I'm mainly concerned with the publication of long term research on Africa in humanities and social sciences fields and with the wider dissemination of such knowledge. Notably we publish the Ethnographic Journal of Africa coming up to 90 years of publication and the high profile contemporary book series on topical issues, African arguments. I'm very pleased the conveners of this conference agreed to a slot to discuss publishing and dissemination or knowledge production and access in relation to Africa and knowledge produced in and about the continent. Our kind of collective shared contention is that these issues are of central concern to researchers, writers, editors, publishers, cultural producers, media and information specialists wherever we work and just picking up a few things that struck me today. Rebecca Roac Bucosa from Uganda this morning was talking about these issues already and On Your Culture this afternoon spoke about the need to increase knowledge production and of course we all know that the central theme running through the conference language is very central to the discussion. I'm very soon going to hand over to the four speakers who have been asked to address various aspects of this discussion today and in respecting the spirit of this event all the speakers are going to be fairly brief and as un-technical as possible whilst addressing you our large and diverse audience. We then hope we'll have time for a lively debate. Please keep your comments and questions until after we've heard all four speakers. I'm going to introduce all the speakers together and to do so I'm first of all very delighted to welcome Nanjala Naobala who agreed to take part in this event as a writer and researcher with a legal background from Kenya with particular interests in politics and social media, marginalised voices, refugee policies and gender. Second I'm equally delighted that Kadija George a writer, literary editor, activist and publisher associated at least for me with Sable, Litmag and People Tree Press and many many other things agreed to join this panel to discuss her research and activities in black and African publishing in the UK, East and West Africa. Then we will have Janet Remington, an editorial director from Routledge which publishes some 90 academic journals related to Africa most of which originate from the continent. Janet is also involved in research, recently publishing a collection of scholarly essays to mark the centenary of sole play kids' native life in South Africa. Last but not least, my colleague Helen Porter runs the SOAS institutional repository called SOAS Research Online, a publicly accessible website and database containing PhD theses, journal articles, books and chapters produced by students and staff within the school. I believe her to tell us more about that and how many items are contained within the repository, might have mentioned that. She also advises SOAS staff and students on open access, the publishing process and is working on the development of support for research data management in the school. So I'll sit down now and ask Nandiala to come and talk to you. Good afternoon everyone. Okay, in my country we have this question that we, I'm from Kenya, we ask people when they're in this state of mind the post lunch and it's very easy to go pwmbodd ja, which means are we together and you say yes, or you can say eh. To go pwmbodd ja. I do have a PowerPoint but I'm not going to share it with you because I like secrets. And no, the reason I'm not going to share it with you is because I find often if I put the PowerPoint up then you're reading the PowerPoint and you're not listening to what I'm saying and I'd like for you to listen to what I'm saying. I think it's good but I'm obviously biased so take that as you will. As Stephanie said, my name is Nandiala Nyabola. I'm an independent researcher. I wear very many hats. It confuses people, not least of whom, myself. And the reason I was asked to give this presentation is because I've been working for the last year and a half now on a research project about how social media and digital spaces are shaping Kenyan politics. And I think in the West everybody's kind of consumed right now with a fake news discussion. And I find it a little bit disingenuous because I'm like, well, fake news isn't new. The reason why we have libel laws and slander laws is because we have a tradition of using information to disparage political and social opponents. The thing that's new, the thing that's different, is the internet, which is changing the speed at which information is generated and disseminated around the world. So I've been in Kenya for the last, on and off for the last two and a half years now but I know every detail about the Trump election. Every detail that's in public, at least, about Brexit and about all of these things. And I'm not even following these things with like a level of in-depth analysis. It's just the speed at which news is travelling has changed. Africa is not immune to these things. This is happening in many countries and Kenya is actually an excellent example of this because we have a significant presence on online spaces and it's changing the way we interact with power and the way we interact with authority. So a lot of what I'm saying is coming from that research which is really investigating the reasons why ten years ago I could go to the office of the deputy public prosecutor and say someone has stolen my car and he could ignore my filing for ten years. But today I can tweet at him, say Duncan someone stole my car and he has to respond. And he's been compelled to respond. That's the origin of this research and that's kind of where I'm going to be guiding this direction. This conversation, sorry. Three questions that I'm going to be looking to answer. Who is Kenya's media and what function does the media serve in Kenya? That's, I would say, uniquely Kenyan or very specific to the Kenyan condition. And finally, how is new media changing the traditional media and the way knowledge is produced and consumed in the space that we would call media? So who is Kenyan media? The most popular form of media in Kenya by and large by every metric is radio. 78% of Kenyan households have radio. And in the modern world, even in Nairobi, we have this, I don't have a radio anymore. I haven't had a radio for a while. I used to listen to radio every morning. I don't have one anymore. And so there's this sense that it's a dated technology because we all have our smartphones and whatever. But every time I leave Nairobi, every time I go into a rural area and not even that far, I always find this pattern repeating itself. People sitting around a public space, sharing a single radio and discussing the news. So by and large, radio is still the most popular form of media in Kenya. The largest station is the formerly owned state broadcaster, the Kenya Broadcasting Corporation, which has 100% nationwide reach. You can get it anywhere. But here's an interesting thing that's happened the last 10 years. In 1992, there were two radio stations in Kenya. The English service, the Swahili service, and then you had the international stations, the BBC World Service, the VOAs and what have you. In 2017, there are 158 radio stations in Kenya. 54 are broadcasting in languages other than English and Swahili. And 19 languages out of Kenya out of a possible 44. The Royal Media Group is a private corporation. It's not a listed corporation, but it is a private corporation and it owns the broadest variety of local language stations. Now, what does that suggest? The person who is able to shape and influence the Royal Media Group is able to shape and influence information consumed by people in up to 11 different languages. This was a huge issue after the 2007 election when we had the post-election violence. A lot of people were... The challenge with local radio stations is that I, as a Lluya speaker, as a Banyale speaker, don't know what the Kikuyu radio station is broadcasting. And so it's difficult for people to monitor content across all of these local languages. But there is the advantage that more people are able to consume information that's generated on these platforms. So the debate about whether local media, local language radio stations are good and bad is still very much up for discussion in Kenya. The second piece of the pie is television. Again, the Kenya Broadcasting Corporation is the only nationwide station in the country. But the most watched television station is Citizen Television, which is also owned by the Royal Media Group. You can see... I hope you can see a little pattern developing here. Only about... Excuse me, I'm getting over a cold. Only about 28% of Kenyan households have television. But a survey by the BBC that actually came out this week found that television is the most trusted source of information, of political information in Kenya. And those of us who are Kenyan kind of know this instinctively. I'll tell you why. I was away for most of the 2007, the build-up to the 2007 election. I only went home for the actual election. And I was consuming online what the print media was producing online and I thought I knew everything that was happening. But there's something about video and something about the ability to capture a person at a podium, giving a speech that having to transcribe and then produce the newspaper article after that kind of loses. And it also has... It has a lot to do with the fact that we are an oral culture. People say things, politicians say things at speeches that they would not be able to... it's difficult to capture in the written word. We switch languages very easily. Ni chi amwau chwanzaeth cwzwngwm dda chi swael i nad yw mai'n ni gwam bachwn am twap am bai yn ysgol cwn i elew. That's how Kenyans speak. We switch between two, three, maybe even more languages. And that orality makes television a more powerful medium of capturing a political moment than print media. With the digital migration, right now there's no interest, there's no analogue television in Kenya. The space for television has opened up dramatically. In the beginning we had KBC, 1991 we had our first private television station, KTN, then came MTV, Citizen Blubber, and right now, if you have a set-talk box, at the bare minimum you can get about 20 television stations. Some are music entertainment, MTV style stations, some are news, some are politics, some are just telenovelas, literally just telenovelas. I love them, that's how I learned Spanish. And the last piece of the puzzle, as I've implied, is print. Kenyan print media is dominated by two brands, the nation and the standard. Both of them are publicly listed corporations. That does not mean that both of these are publicly owned corporations. The largest shareholder in the nation media group is the Aga Khan Foundation, and the largest shareholder in the standard is Question Mark. There's a lot of speculation that it is the current sitting president's family, a combination of the current sitting president and the former sitting president's family. Why does this matter? There are over 7 million newspapers that are sold in Kenya every day. People read newspapers, people rely on them for a lot of political information. The biggest advertiser in the newspapers is the state, is the government. In recent years we've seen a warring trend whereby it's called ffiskin, whereby the state threatens to withdraw advertising from the newspapers in order to control the content that the newspapers are able to produce. The challenge in Kenya is that the state is not subtle about this. There is no subtlety about how they're doing this. Earlier this year we had the scandal with a managing editor for the Saturday Nation called Dennis Galava, and Dennis wrote an editorial which if you read it in the UK today you'll think, this is the most harmless luqwarm thing I've ever seen. But in Kenya it was a big deal because Dennis wrote an article in which he directly criticised the sitting president for political inaction and allowing corruption to ffesta. Dennis was fired, and in fact his version of the story is that he was called to state house for an audience with the Manoes to peace with a spokesman to the president and was told that he was going to be fired. The call didn't come from his boss, it came from state house. And so this story, it was in a secret, everybody in Kenya knows about it. And what does that do? It diminishes public trust in the newspapers. If they're firing people for being critical, what are they keeping from me? If you read Kenya newspapers you'll also find that it's full of blind items. A certain so-and-so minister was caught sneaking into nightclub Y at 2pm. What does that leave? It leaves a lot of gaps for people to fill in information for themselves. So rumours, speculation, I heard, she said, I heard the president has a second wife. If you ask anybody, the former president rather, if you ask anybody in Kenya, does Moa Kibaki have two wives, the answer will be yes. There is no public record of the fact that Moa Kibaki has two wives. So nation media group, 40% of the circulation in Kenya, standard is 20% of the circulation. Having all these facts in mind, Kenya's media has an outsize role in public life because of many gaps in the way in which knowledge is produced and disseminated. In the 1980s, in the pushback against the attempted coup, Kenya's universities got gutted. A lot of academics had to go into exile and flee because their lives were threatened for criticising the states. The archives became manipulated. You can't access information. If you go to the Kenya archives and look at certain subjects, all you'll find is redacted documents. There are things that people weren't allowed to report on. So the media then becomes, there's a saying that the media is the first draft of history. In many ways in Kenya the first draft of history is the only draft of history. That events are captured in the press in a particular moment, but they're not given any historical context or any forward analysis in order to protect the journalists. The journalists are protecting themselves from consequences. So you'll open the newspaper and you'll see something like, there's a famine in Kenya right now and 7 million people have died. Okay, that sounds horrible, but it's not the first time that there's been a famine in Kenya. It's not just because it's not drained. There is an institutional background to the reason why people don't have food, but the press will never cover that because of what I talked about before, the practice of being threatened economically and sometimes physically. Two journalists so far this year have been killed for their reporting, according to the committee to protect journalists. So this first draft of history becoming the final draft of history with an audience that is already primed to mistrust the press, it creates this very weird ecosystem where people recognise that the press is important and they consume the information that's produced by the press, but they also know that the information produced by the press is probably not that reliable. At the same time, there's very little narrative non-fiction that's published in Kenya. If you wanted to read a novel, great. Very few people are writing non-fiction books at the moment, so there's not that longevity that's like, I'm going to write a story about Kenya that captures the last 50, 60, 70 years. Most of the most influential books about Kenyan history that are available to you now are probably not written by Kenyans. And then the last piece of the puzzle is, this form of state control over the press has also always been about content. In other countries, if someone doesn't want you to read a newspaper, they'll just go and buy every single copy of that newspaper arrest. This happens a lot in our neighbouring countries. There's a camera, I cannot go into details. But you'll see people buying up every copy of a specific newspaper and the added standard had this experience so that people don't read what's there. I think this happened in Khartou Malat as well. In Kenya, what happened instead, especially under the first Kenyata and Moe, is that the information became skewed towards this, it's called developmental journalism. Let's work together and build the nation. Let's talk about positive things. Let's build gabions. Does anybody here know what a gabion is? Because every Kenyan does. I see you because that was the narrative that we were being told that we had to work together to build the nation and things of political import become less significant. So if you are the newspaper that's publishing about this historical narrative about extrajudicial killing, for example, you're not participating in the nation building project. You're a bad newspaper. That's a form of censorship too, because it limits the spectrum of information that people are able to access about their country. And tied to this is the consequences of the 2007 political crisis. I call it the peace lobotomy because what happened? In the lead up to the 2007 election, the newspapers were very contested space. Most publications had taken sides with one major candidate or another. And when the post election violence happened in Kenya, one of the main things that was the narratives that was produced was if the media had been more unified, none of this would have happened. And the Kenyan media seems to have internalized this critique. January 4th, I believe, which was four days into the political crisis, the headline in every single major newspaper and the chiron in sort of every TV station was, We Want Peace. We Want Peace in Kenya has come to mean we are not going to ask uncomfortable questions. We're not going to raise uncomfortable issues. And that's why I call it the peace lobotomy, that if you are looking for searing political critique in Kenya, you're not necessarily going to find it in the newspapers, or on television even. So what does that mean overall? For new media, this is why Kenya was primed to be one of the countries in which new media becomes this super significant space for having political discourse, for constructing political identities. Blogging became rose to prominence in Kenya in 2007 precisely because of the low levels of trust in traditional media, coupled with the fact that so many Kenyans did have access to online spaces and a significant number of Kenyans were in the diaspora trying to get information about Kenya and not being able to do so. Traditional media was also self-censoring their website significantly at this point. And those of us, I myself included, this is actually what triggered my writing career was trying to get information that I wanted to about Kenya in the UK and not being able to do that. Another significant thing that happened was that blogging allowed women to participate in media in a way that traditional media would not allow. The most prominent bloggers in Kenya in 2007 were all women. Oriol Kolo, Kenyan Pundit, Juliana Rotici are from using. All of the big blogs that people were using to get information about the political crisis were being run by women. And this space existed primarily because the state didn't understand it. What is blogging? I mean, we're talking about a state that is, you know, a couple of decades behind the public. And so they didn't understand what was happening and so they didn't interfere with it. And this community started to coalesce around this idea of national identity and saving the country and really pushing back against the self-censorship that was happening in the traditional press. Today the most popular way platform for information, for political information in Kenya is probably WhatsApp. WhatsApp is available for free as a default in most smartphones. It's where a lot of hate speech is perpetrated, unfortunately, as well. So we'll slander. Remember I talked about how people mistrust things and it leaves room for rumours and gossip. WhatsApp has been key in leaking financial scandals, especially people take photographs of key financial documents and distribute them on WhatsApp. Facebook, 5.2 million Kenyans are on Facebook and it's a semi-open network. People feel safe to be free because they think they're only talking to their friends, but Facebook is not a closed network and so hate speech posts tend to leak and tend to get people in a lot of trouble. And there are now 2 million Kenyans who are on Twitter. And this is an open network that's preferred by urban elites, especially, and this is what I'm talking about, shaping the behaviour of institutions. So shame, Twitter has made it possible for Kenyans to shame public institutions' interaction and that's made it the most popular platform for having political engagement that is more or less lacking in traditional media. I'm trying to blitz through these last few slides. Yes. So I'm going to basically say the more traditional media, social media started as kind of a couple of, the people who are on the blogging space is talking to each other publicly and this kind of spectator sport, the people who are watching people like Ori and Juliana interact and they say, well, I have something to add to this. And suddenly this community coalesces. If you look up hashtag KOT on Twitter, you'll see that there's a little bit of a community that's forming around political conversation, especially. And what happened really was that this community became super critical of traditional media and the diaspora is consuming primarily information coming from the social media networks. The more traditional media ignored trends that were appearing on social media, the more out of touch traditional media appeared. And so suddenly in the last five years you see traditional media looking to social media for content and allowing therefore discourse that's being formed on social media to influence what is being produced in traditional media and therefore what is being consumed by the nation in general. Some of these trends have actually led to social movements that have had a massive impact on public discourse in Kenya. One I like to talk about is the My Dress My Choice movement, really is about women reclaiming their right to wear short dresses, tight dresses in the central business district, which had come under threat because of the spate of stripping attacks. Women were being stripped in public for being seen to be dressed indecently. The hashtag started online. It led to a public protest. Public protest led to a change in the law. And if you go to Nairobi, walk the streets of Nairobi today, you will see more women, short skirts, bushtops, walking through the central business district than you did three years ago, four years ago before the movement happened. So the stuff that's happening on social media is not insignificant. It is having a really big impact on politics in Kenya. Because there are greater levels of trust in these spaces it also leaves opportunity for exploitation. And so fake information, fake news is actually a significant challenge in Kenya at the moment. To loop back to the theme of this presentation, three points, social media and knowledge production. Social media is supplanting this first draft of history role that traditional media was playing before. People are, because of what I said about how the traditional media is now getting most of its content from social media, the first draft of history of how accounts of events in Kenya is being drafted is being drafted. A lot of it is being drafted on social media. Hashtags are functioning as a public archive, allowing for more collectivisation of knowledge. If you want to find information about a particular thing that's happening, it's much easier to do that if you go online and look up the hashtag than if you sit down and flip through the newspapers, because as I said, newspapers are still very much subject to censorship from different directions. One of the key things, another key thing is that it's challenging this nationalist narratives about identity and belonging. Women, LGBTI Kenyans, Kenyans of Asian origin, groups that wouldn't ordinarily find themselves represented in traditional media are finding more and more space to identify as Kenyans and to be part of the national discourse. If you see how people respond to the... What's Eikil Mutua's job? He's in charge of censorship, basically. But if you see the pushback that he gets every time he comes up, he calls it gaysum, but every time he comes up against LGBTI Kenyans, there's a significant pushback in a way that wasn't able to happen in traditional media, which still refuses to engage with LGBTI Kenyans as full citizens. Finally, there's a fact-finding element that I find really intriguing. Whenever a rich Kenyan dies, the media always produces this hagiography that they were great. Last week we had four prominent Kenyans who were implicated in large massacres who died. The media said they were great men who were interested in education and it's wonderful. Kenyans went on social media and said that is... Because... They had proof of them being implicated in the Truth and Justice Reconciliation Commission and saying these men are not the great men that traditional media portrays them at. Pushing back against this editorialisation of history has become a really important function that social media is serving. That's my last slide. Basically, as I said in the beginning, it's just about this shift between what is considered to be knowledge, who gets the right to produce the knowledge and how is that knowledge consumed. I think that the changes that we're seeing in the ways in which social media is changing the way media is produced and consumed is going to be a significant influence into how Kenyan politics plays out in the next 10, 20, maybe even 30, 40 years. So, thank you for your time. Now we've got Khadija and Cary straight on. I should have worn my heels. Okay. Yeah, my name's Khadija. I'm a bit like her in Anjala. I have lots of hats. I have two names. Khadija George and I write with Khadija to say, but I'm actually one and the same person. I just do the job for two people. So, I post three questions for my presentation, which is about models of publishing that African publishers use. I'm not necessarily going to answer these questions directly, but they're for us to think about since we're thinking about, you know, in this case, publishing in the future. So what are the models of publishing that African publishers have adopted? Whose work are they producing? Whose work are they producing and publishing? Are they profitable? Are they sustainable? And that last one particularly was in the interest to me, because in terms of my research that I'm doing at Brighton, it kind of started when I was looking at, I want to look at black British publishers and in the creative industry. And when I looked at the work in the creative industry and who was doing what and who was earning what, publishing was actually making the most money. And I thought, well, it must be music publishing, obviously. And in fact, it wasn't. So I thought, well, okay, if it's not music publishing, where did the black publishers feature in this? And where is the money? And, you know, I want to look at our visibility and the fact that we need to get a piece of that money pie if it was out there. So that was kind of my thought, because I'm very concerned about the publishing, black publishing in this country and the publishing of black writers. So it's kind of linked. I've kind of moved on from that a little bit on what I'm researching at the moment. But when I talk of African publishers, I am talking of publishers in the diaspora as well. To me, it's all one and the same. Because we do, a lot of times, we work together in different ways. So I'm just going to look at a few models at the moment. Oops, not very good at this thing. And these are the publishers I'm going to be discussing. I'm going to be discussing today. SLWS, Sierra Leone Writers Series in Sierra Leone, Sable, Publications, Stroke Gelada Collective, which is what I run. I'm discussing that in the terms of what's going on, what we're doing in the Gambia. Hansif Publications based in the UK and AWP Africa World Press is based in the US. I'm going to probably talk about those two together, because there's some similar things I want to talk about. And also, that should be actually APWPF, African Publishing Book Fund. But it will get corrected later. Sorry about that. OK. I'm going to start off with SLWS, because this kind of really fascinated me, Sierra Leone Writers Series. And as you can see at the bottom there, it says there are an academic and general publisher for Sierra Leoneans and other nationals have Sierra Leonean content. And like these are the kind of range of books they've published. They've only been going for, I think since about 2011. And the reason why I wanted to discuss them is because they've got quite a very interesting setup. And one of the basic ways they're using to publish it is social media. They have templates of the book, layout and format and design on their website. So, basically, writers are requested, you drop your own content onto those templates. And writers, it's not a vanity publisher. People are not expected to pay to get their books published. But they do have to commit to purchase a minimum number of the books. I did put to cover cost, but it's not to cover all the costs. They are committed to get a certain number, which I think is only reasonable. Because as well at the end of the day, writers are going to sell their books the most. And that happens anyway. Even though writers, a lot of times I've written the book, now it's up to the publisher to market it. It's up to the writer to do as much as they can of the marketing because they're the ones, really, people, publishers, do sell books more when the writer is around. With SLWS, cover designers are often showcased on their WhatsApp group for comment and critique. For distribution, internationally, they sell almost easily via Amazon. And they make sure that it is a cheaper cover price in Sierra Leone, so no matter what the book costs, they do make sure that Sierra Leoneans can afford it. This is what I've found as well interesting about SLWS. They published two anthologies, one of poetry and one of short stories. And they were produced entirely on WhatsApp. The submissions were sent on WhatsApp. The selections were made via WhatsApp. They were edited, proved and designed. Everything was done on WhatsApp. And they've got a group called the Sierra Leone Writers Forum. There's about 100 Sierra Leone writers on this from all over the world. And I joined the group and it was like this thing just kept pinging all the way through the night. These people just don't sleep. So I haven't really got so much involved in the writing, but a lot of the comments are quite interesting. They're done in Creole. So it has really improved my Creole speaker, but it's really improved just being on the WhatsApp. So sometimes the critique can be quite harsh, but actually when it's done in Creole it actually sounds so funny. I don't think people really mind. So SLWS is a very interesting format in the sense that because it's all kind of done by social media they've kind of alleviated a lot of their different costs and putting a lot of the owners on the writer to work with them on that. But things are still, they're not just published as soon as people put them out there on the template. They are all edited in-house and they've got a very, very strong editorial board with quite a few of the most well-known Sierra Leone academics around the world actually on their editorial board. Sable publications. Now we've been doing two things. One of the things, one of my dreams actually was always move my headquarters to Africa. And so we are actually moving to, to the Gambia. And one of the, as part of the Mbocca festival that we had in the Gambia in January we were able to get in Gwgwi Wai Chiongog to come and tempted him and kind of blackmailed him that we were going to publish one of his books in Gambian languages, which we did. I'll do the talk about that in the next slide. So this is a magazine that I published, Sable. So in moving it, I have, you know, kind of printing is a little bit more expensive, but they can, their printing is, is a really good quality. So it is a bit more expensive, but it'll be cheaper for me in terms of designs. I've kind of kind of weighed up those two different things because it is really important for me to say, yes, we are going to be publishing in Africa. And what we did is this is Ngugwi's book that a lot of people are talking about. I know people know about the Jalada Collective and the project that they're doing with Ngugwi, Wai Chiongog, and the translations, but we got involved with that and we were able to publish the upright revolution in three Gambian languages, in Wolof, in Mandinka, and in Jola. And, you know, I met Ngugwi last April and I asked him to come as part of the literary festival and he just said, how many languages do you have in Gambia? I said, oh, we've got about seven. We published a story and he gave us the rights, both through Jalada have the rights to do this, to say that we were going to print. He hasn't given that permission to a lot of people to print, but we got that to print as long as we're just selling it in the Gambia, which is fine with me. And we just did signed copies and we have a very limited edition and as we do with Sable, and we have signed copies and unsigned copies. We did do some audio as well to go up on the Jalada collective site. So it's on their site in Wolof and if you go to their site, I have put the link at the very end. If you go to their site, the story is now online in about 60 languages and at least 50 of those are in African languages. So if anybody wants to be involved, they can just contact them and get the story translated as well for it to go online. For me as well to have it in print is the fact that I can sell this as a limited edition, cover my costs, and the rest of the money goes to a charity and it actually goes to a school, Roots Preschool, to help with the school. Now I couldn't do that if it was just online because I couldn't sell anybody anything online, but with the print one and having Ngugi sign it, I can. So if you do want to buy a copy, I do have some. And they do have, they don't really have any publishing houses in Gambia at the moment. There is only one publisher and it is more like what we call here a vanity press. You see all of these terms now are changing because of all technology, these things are changing. And so people, if they do publish, they do have to cover the cost with the publisher, but we're trying different things and one of the things that Ngugi, this kind of exchange, and what we had is that I would be printing more African languages in Gambia, more books with African languages in Gambia. So what we're actually going to be doing when we do the festival each year is we will publish the guest writers work, we will be publishing them in Gambia languages. So in January we have Linton Quessie Johnson coming and he has a lot of fans in the Gambia. So if we can get, and he's already given us permission to publish some of those in Gambia languages, so if we have a selection of his most popular poems and publish them in Gambia languages, people are going to be so happy because we're giving it to people in, not just in English, but in local languages, which I think is very important. I'm going to talk about Hansib Publications, which is based here, and AWP together. Let me just go back. Hansib Publications has started in 1970 and at the moment, in terms of a black publisher, it's one of the most expansive ones. They have about 16 different categories and they publish such a wide range of books and I put this one, because this one is really important, Black Desert Police custody in human rights, the failure of the Stephen Lawrence inquiry. Something like this wouldn't have come to light with another major publisher. Hansib basically took the risk to do that and they did get into a lot of problems by doing it, but it was important for our community to do that and they did it. All the time I'm thinking about this, for example, I started with SLWS and I talked about Sable, talking about Hansib and when I talk about AWP, none of these publishers are funded or independent, small publishers and it's all about us publishing, our store is the way they need to be published, but also about publishing the books in high quality as well. I do have some catalogs of Hansib in Aberystwynt here, but people want to get, just to have a look at some of the information and stuff about Hansib, what they do and the range of books that they do in terms of the biographies etc. It's really, it really is very good. Africa World Press are based in New Jersey and I put distribution in commerce there because one of the USPs that they had when they were starting up is what they really looked at in terms of the gap in the market was, yes, in terms of getting the books published was one thing. Distribution is always an issue for independent publishers and distributors take a huge chunk. One of the things I find, because I work with writers as well as working with publishers, is that writers don't really understand the business that they're working in. So the writers I work with, when I work with, and as Stephanie mentioned with People Tree Press for example, and all of the writers are outside of London, to go to something like the London Book Fair which is in London, which is I think the second largest trade fair, book trade fair in the world, to come down to London, or to come up to London, whichever one it is, during peak times to attend to London Book Fair is excessively expensive. It's going to be at least over £100. And with a lot of black writers, if they're, you know they're ever working part-time or not working at all, that's a lot of money. So in terms of the project that People Tree Press, we would pay for that because my thing was you need to understand the industry that you're working in, that they're working in. So when they go to the London Book Fair they can see exactly what is going on, the various different stages of publishing when they feel their books should be selected why it isn't. And I think that's really important. And distribution, what Africa World Press did was kind of look at the market and think, OK, let's see how we can get our books out there into the market so that our publishers are visible, so that our writers are visible and they did a very good job at that. They did such a good job at that that major publishers kind of moved in on them and snuck in and kind of moved in on that. And why they kind of lost out a little bit afterwards with the very fact that they did find their distribution and work that is because for some reason, and this comes back to the question of the decolonisation, is that for some reason a lot of Africans, I will try not to be too general, but I can still kind of think that if it's coming from a white business, they're not going to get ripped off, but if they go to a black business, they will. And that's something we've really got to get past. And so, for example, so, for example, a writer might think, well, OK, if I publish with X publisher that I know that's very well known out there, everything's going to be fine, whereas if I go with AWP, it might not be. So, you know, we've really kind of really got to trust ourselves and trust our own businesses a bit more. Sorry, that's my own timer there. So I'm just kind of rushing through this so we can leave things for discussion. But the other thing that AWP did as well, they did distribute for other black publishers. And that's what I just kind of highlighted here. Four Third World Press, which are based in Chicago. Four Black Classic Press, which are based in Maryland. Not Maryland, yes, they're based in Baltimore. And for Karnac, who are based here. I wanted to discuss the African Poetry Book Fund just for a minute, even though it's a funded project and none of the others are, because they're doing something very, very different. The African Poetry Book Fund are trying to promote and encourage more poetry, writing and publishing. And the way they did this to start off with, which is important, is the very fact that we were always saying with people who work with writers to be a good writer, you need to be a good reader. So they've set up five libraries in Anglophone countries and one of them is in the Gambia. And there will be a symposium about the African Book Fund at Oxford University in October, but they just didn't have all the details yet. These are five elements of APBF libraries. They have competitions to encourage writers at each stage of their career, from people who haven't written very much, who might have just written a few poems to people who have a few more, to people who have enough for a chat book. Because chat books, even though chat books before were kind of thought of well, you know, they're just they're for people who maybe are not that great in terms of their writing career. They're seen now as a very valid and very important stage. And there will be competitions just around chat books. Writing your own collection as monographs and anthologies, I'm kind of known as an anthologist and I think anthologies are very important, not only in terms of allowing writers who haven't written very much or maybe have just written one good poem to be alongside their literary hero in a book. But also it tells a lot around social context of the time. I think anthologies do. So APBF have been doing a lot of that work throughout Africa at the moment only with anglophone countries but I believe they're trying to expand on that. Those are where the libraries are. In Botswana, Ghana, Kenya, the Gambia and Uganda. That's a photo of the library in the Gambia when we're just putting it together. So there's Kenziab Duller. She's also a publisher in the UK. She publishes Scarf magazine. She's published in English but she's Somalian and she wants to do some more work in Somalian as well. And that's one of our young volunteers there. So Kenzi came on holiday to the Gambia and I said, this is going to be wonderful. Everything in Gambia is a Gambia experience. Wonderful Gambia experience. If you come to the library and help us set it up. So that's what she did as part of her holiday. So this was just another picture as well. So these are just to wrap this all up very quickly. These are just some of the links. So if anybody wanted any of these links I'm quite happy to send them out. I think I'll just leave it there. Thank you. OK, so now we'll move straight to Janet Remington from Routledge. Thank you very much, Stephanie. Can you hear me OK? Right. How's everyone doing just to pick up on Nanjala's queue earlier? Are you also with us? I know it's the end. Oh, look at the response! It's the end. It's heading towards the end of a long day. So yes, I'm going to wear my publisher's hat or put on my publisher's shoes and going to shift the discussion a little bit more towards the academic environment and knowledge production from Africa. And just to briefly mention again so I've been working for about 10 years on the African journals programme at Routledge, Taylor and Francis and this covers all subject areas both multidisciplinary African studies largely based on social sciences and humanities but also moving out beyond that maths zoology, right through to music, linguistics and biological sciences et cetera. So we work largely in partnership with co-pablishers mostly from South Africa but also Eastern Africa in particular Kenya and also with Cadesria in Dacar. So I'm going to touch on two broad areas around opening up conversation around knowledge production from Africa. We all know there's much written about Africa and then also to touch on access to access, research access to Africa and so I'm just going to start off with some context around the global knowledge economy and Africa's place therein and then if there's time to pick up on some findings of some recent analysis that we've done on our co-publishing arrangements in South Africa and beyond. So I just thought it might be a good starting point to start off with this stark reminder of the significant size of Africa which has been reduced and diminished through what we've become familiar with the Mercator projection of the world that was devised in the colonial era and so yeah, it's just a good place to begin as we start to talk more about knowledge production and maybe we should be switching things around and doing things more like this and this is a map of a different kind it is out of date it takes us back some 17 years and it is only one slice looking at science a particular subset of science publications so it's not truly representative but it does point towards the dominance of northern research that has become part of our landscape but things have moved on a bit since then so just to turn into some charts so here we see the overall trend of growth across all regions of the world in terms of academic scholarship and some regions are growing faster than others and Asia is coming up very fast and you'll see this in the next slide in particular we're going to mention China again so you see that exponential growth there and the relative decline of American research output as a percentage of global output so turning now to the continent so growth clearly over some 16 years and South Africa is there represented as a subset because it is the largest producer of research outputs at least as is represented by the web of science measures and African research has grown by a third in this period sorry by around 30% in this period ok and then a breakdown by other top 10 countries just briefly for some information and up until this point I've been talking largely in a quite generalised terms around a whole range of subject areas and I just got the next slide the next slide just looks at one particular study that was done in that was published in African affairs which is often talked about as the top African studies journal the Journal of the Royal African Society at least top in terms of the impact factor and recognition in many institutions so here there's a bit more of a sobering picture at least as far as two journals are concerned in terms of African representation of authors so this is the study showed that the proportion of African authors between 93 and 2013 decreased but this is not the whole picture of course other things are also going on so just if I've got time Stephanie just to reflect on a few findings that we've we just looked at quite recently from our African journals programme and then we'll touch on again about around access issues so just a snapshot of the programme that have been working on for the past years and a number of access and authorship schemes and initiatives I think we'll pick up on some of this in the question time and in relation to I think Helen's presentation so this slide is really looking at authorship at papers published over time within our African portfolio and we've seen growth across or growth of African authors from the whole range of countries on the continent as a subset South Africa and then a rest of world all increasing and usage from those three broad categories too so there's uptake an interaction with the content from countries beyond Africa as well as on the continent and then in terms of citations there's a comparison of citations as measured once again within the web of science analytic universe of between 2012 and 2016 across a range of regions and countries so overall an increase in citations of journals in this portfolio with a huge increase from South Africa but also from elsewhere but we're not seeing other African countries being represented here also just lastly the altmetric and some altmetric outputs and so the research from this portfolio is being picked up in blogs through social media being referenced in Wikipedia and also finding its way to some extent into the policy arena so I think fairly encouraging but obviously some room to go and a brief look at the geography of the altmetric attention fairly widespread coverage obviously some gaps in Francophone Africa Central Asia some parts of South America so yes so the spring is us, yeah so I think there's quite a few things to think about the underrepresented nature still of African scholarship and knowledge production but some increases and some really encouraging aspects and I think the whole areas of social media and engagement beyond the academy is an area that's really growing now we'll move straight to Helen Porter from the cellars repository hi there, so I'm Helen Porter I work in the library and I'm very happy to have this opportunity to tell you about what we do to support open access to SOAS research outputs produced by SOAS academics so this is just a screen shot of the content of SOAS research online so SOAS research online was set up about 10 years ago it's hosted at the University of London Computing Centre we maintain the content at SOAS and as such the idea is that we keep a record of every output produced by SOAS academics but wherever possible we're trying to obviously populate that with full text that will be available immediately for researchers around the world or eventually after embargoes have expired so this is just a screen shot of the Department of Africa languages and cultures of Africa and all of these items when they're added to the SOAS research online repository they are automatically pushed through to the SOAS library Twitter feed through Facebook so we try and promote our research that way the contents of SOAS research online are all indexed in Google and in Google Scholar profile so we're trying to if somebody searches through Google Scholar they have an option to access an open access text if somebody can't get access through journals just to give you some of the stats of SOAS research online so since it was started 15,000 items in SOAS research online and as you can see about 20% of those are full text I'm going to go into a little bit about what's happening in the UK with regard to policies on open access because as you'll see that that's made a significant difference for us in making our research available but as you can see all of our research has been downloaded about 2 million times overall since SOAS research online was started and just to point out here are our top most downloaded items and if you look at the right over there on the screen that's a record of a PhD thesis which is our most downloaded PhD thesis which is the norms of Swahili translations in Tanzania so over 11,000 downloads and our database allows us to see where the downloads are made and as you can see this thesis was downloaded the most in Tanzania when we look at the downloads overall I think it's the same as what Janet said about there's sort of disparity within Africa about where items are downloaded so we can see in some countries materials been able to be downloaded a lot but in others not so much and also another positive development that we're doing this year and next year that should be available is our record of PhD theses at SOAS will all be available on open access in SOAS research online so that's about 2,000 PhD theses so there'll be a lot of studies on Africa made available then as well they're being digitised by ProQuest but will be freely available via SOAS research online as well so yeah as I mentioned sorry the slides it's just tripped off in the formatting there but I just wanted to highlight that one of the most significant drivers for open access to research information in the UK has been the introduction of a policy from HEFGI in April 2016 there was a requirement that all researchers employed at UK institutions have to make their journal articles available in what we call these institutional repositories otherwise that research can't be submitted to our research assessment exercises that happen every seven years and that's had a significant impact on the amount of full text that's been made available so as you can see in 2014 to 2015 from April to April we had 41% full text and that increase sorry it's gone off but 2016 to 2017 there's now 94% of journal articles added to SOAS research online that can be made available so that's really been a positive driver for SOAS because before that although researchers were wanting to make material open access it hadn't happened in that kind of consistent way but obviously from my perspective I think in the UK that this idea of making research available openly has transformed a little bit into a compliance issue and so we're not able maybe to sell the positives quite as much as we should about making research openly available there's also very quite strict requirements for researchers with funding from our grant agency so the research councils UK and the welcome all have quite strict rules on making particularly journal articles available open access as well and that can either be through a repository like SOAS research online but also funders do give money for paid open access to journals to make that available as well so I think for a while what we saw was about this figures of about 20%, 10% full text in these repositories and there was a feeling I think that open access was a good thing to do but it wasn't I didn't see as much evidence of it growing in these kind of institutional support frameworks but I think that that's definitely changing now and what I've just shown on there is I think that there are repositories across Africa that use the same software as SOAS research online does so there's a growing number of repositories to support open access and also there's initiatives like Cielo which is a South American repository for the whole of South America so there's definitely growth in that area this search engine here CORE you can search all open access content across the world and as you can see there's 77 million open access articles that you can find within that database so there's definitely a lot of academic research being made available and I've just sorry done some very crude searches just by country to show the amount of material that is available in that database on the right you can see there's lots of innovation now happening around open access so lots of software companies are thinking creatively about what they can do so this open access button is something that you can search and if you have the identifier or the URL for a particular article you just enter it in it's called a DOI into the search engine and it will find any open access text available online so it means that you don't have to pay for that and I think that they're thinking that this service could be used in services such as exchange of information between libraries so interlibrary loans so that we could exchange open access information more easily when researchers need it or members of the public so this is a really good development so I've put in some challenges of what I see about from my perspective of working and supporting open access at a UK university is on the top left there's a diagram that was done I can put the link in the slide it basically maps out the different policies that all intersect with open access so what we have is different publisher policies agreements on open access different funders have different policies and so when you're working to support that that can be a challenge and for researchers of knowing what the rules are in making material open access so it isn't always the most intuitive easy thing to do especially when researchers are very engaged with services like academia.edu and research gate which are fantastic for making research available and networking but also we've seen that these services are being bought or are owned by commercial companies and have private investment and I think academia.edu is increasingly becoming a little bit more closed so you need a login to be able to get the information and that isn't really truly I don't think the spirit of open access so we're watching those developments quite carefully on the top there there's a bills list of predatory journals and publishers because I think I've read some articles that have suggested that these predatory journals are taking advantage of funder money in order to offer publishing without proper peer review etc etc so these lists of publishing that will help us to kind of academics don't publish in those journals but that's a thing that has developed a market for these kind of journal publishing and also just that publishers have been very good at allowing researchers to make a version of their article of Able on open access but there's still quite long restrictions on when that can happen so for a lot of research that might be quite current you might not be able to get access to it openly for a couple of years after publication so that's something I think is still in shift but we still see quite long and bargo periods placed on articles for open access and then just this is a screenshot of a database I use to check journal policies and at SOAS we have quite a lot of diverse scholarship and a lot of people that publish in quite small journals and they might be in parts of the world that haven't developed open access policies in the same way as big publishers have and so it's not clear sometimes to us if we can make a version of an article of open access and with the new ref rules I think there's been lots of discussion about where researchers should publish and I think that all these policies although they've been very good increasing open access they're also changing the way academics approach publication because if they're required to make something open access in some senses they might be ruling out supporting smaller journals and that could be something that can be quite detrimental to countries that haven't got these policies in place yet but there are some new models of open access that I think are meeting some of the challenges that we're facing so open library of humanities is based at Birkbeck and what they've done is they've taken a model where libraries go into partnership with them and SOAS is a member of open library of humanities and what it allows is for them to sustain a platform where academics can submit journals for free and readers can read them for free so there isn't these APC charges so that's the open library of humanities they're also transferring some journals are transferring over to them so Glosser used to be called Lingua and it was published by Elsevier and the editorial board decided to move over to the platform Open Library of Humanities to kind of support this model of open access where authors are not required to pay to write because I think that is also a concern equally funders in the UK now are recognising that if they have got these policies where they want research to be made openly available they also need to provide some infrastructure to do that so the welcome have just designed a new platform where researchers that are funded by welcome can deposit any research so that could be data, articles etc and they maintain that and they maintain the cost of that so I think that's another positive development I think the UK policies that I've mentioned before about journal articles it seems that this is going to be something that very much is still pushed for in the UK there's been some indication that Hefge who managed the research assessment in the UK possibly will ask for books to be made open access for the next research assessment and Hefge as well have along with other research councils have also written policies and frameworks now that might require researchers to share their research data or do require researchers in some circumstances to share their research data and that's something it's so asked which is something we want to develop and support but it's a challenge for social sciences and humanities more than it is for the sciences because there are quite strong ethical implications of that as well so that's something that we're developing support for over there I've just put that JISC are developing a shared UK national infrastructure where researchers and institutions can deposit data and I think that's a really positive thing to do because previously we all had separate institutional repositories for universities but a national repository it does make the service a lot more robust so I'm really looking forward to that if it comes out and again the Royal Society have issued a statement on open peer review so making the process of peer review more transparent so that's how things are changing in the UK and I think the UK is very much seen as a leader in these developments towards open access or open research but I'd be very interested to hear your views on whether that's something that is a challenge for the parts of the world so thank you I told we can go until quarter I just wanted to thank can you hear me so I want to thank everybody actually for such high quality and interesting presentations on a range of topics and want to open up to you for questions perhaps we can take a couple of the time the lady here just wait for the mic if you wouldn't mind question Padigia I see you doing a lot of work in Gambia and I wanted to know if you're aware of Calabash in Jamaica yes and I want to know if you are doing any links there I mean I'm from the Caribbean I'm Jamaican and I'm into Pan-Africanism and I'd like to see the Caribbean linking with Africa more and I go to Calabash every other year that it's on and it's such a beautiful thing held in Armsent Elizabeth in Jamaica where it's not talked about but we have all the best writers that come there mainly from America but I would like to see more African writers speak to Kwame I will I will you know yes that would be good but I don't know what influence you have that you could speak to Kwame okay Cam, thank you very much are there any further questions from the audience the lady at the back in the red thank you for some very really exciting presentations I especially enjoyed yours my name is Mary Anderson and I've been involved in educational publishing and I'm really interested to know whether you or anyone else or whether you're aware of any developments in educational publishing not in the research sense but actually for primary schools in African languages thank you and the woman sitting next to you hi maybe just to follow up on that not so much in academia but educational publishing and you were kind of touched upon fiction coming out of I think you said Kenya do you see a value in what's currently developing with audiobooks for example especially in light of enabling stories to be told in different languages and also given the particular oral history or the history of oral literature in Africa do you see that developing in the future okay I think that's probably enough for Katija could I just add something else there there's been no mention of African story book which is one of the big platforms for publishing stories for children in African languages is that the one in South Africa it's with I can't remember the acronym but yes it's South Africa and the University of British Columbia Vancouver okay can we just take the question down here recently I've been involved in fostering development of writing of stories for a primary school programme but also extra to the school for children and I struck the problem that teachers head teachers national trainers of teachers didn't have any concept in their own language of writing children's stories which were amusing like English children's stories taking magic carpets to places or animals being personified and I think it was Rebecca's talk this morning maybe wonder if maybe I was beating the wrong drum that the kind of stories that people tell in Africa would be the appropriate thing for children in Africa and not what I thought was appropriate for them but let me just add that I was a bit concerned that the stories were mainly about daddy beating mommy because she gave him maze for dinner instead of meat and maybe none of you would think that was appropriate it's just a question I'm just at the beginning of this at the very micro level do you speak first? Yeah I'm aware of Calabash festival and the magazine in fact when I did my first festival in Gambia 2007 I actually copied their format having that long weekend because you can go to Gambia for a long weekend so I actually actually worked it's interesting because Kwame is the editor for poetry at People Tree and I also work with People Tree and I know and Calabash has changed format a bit etc etc and now it's every of the year there have been changes but it's very much up to who they want to program etc you know and there's like so many writers even at People Tree but he hasn't necessarily invited a lot of people from there I mean there's a lot of things going on it's hard to do a festival and keep cost low etc and I mean there's a lot of things involved sorry I'm just trying to say an etc a lot because I know we haven't got a lot of time but we can talk about it afterwards the interesting thing about what's going on in the Gambia and it goes back to what somebody was speaking about this lady about Diaspora we don't in Gambia they're not called a Diaspora and we've got a group called the African Homecomers Collective so no matter where you're from outside of your Homecomer you're not a Diaspora and you're a Homecomer and a lot of them are very involved in what's going on in Gambia and culture a lot of them are very involved for example in the library so part of one of our volunteer groups for the library are the African Homecomers Collective we make sure for example if we're having poetry events that there'll be some from the Homecomers and there'll be Gambians as well and that's what we're trying to continue for example with the festival in January so we are trying but yeah and I've got some advice I can give you about the festival in terms of children educational books and children's books in African language I mean it's so different obviously from country to country and it depends on how and how wealthy those countries are as well but I'm also a member of the African Literature Association and we do know that a lot of the times governments don't actually support writers who write books for children in African languages you might be able to write them and they're not going to help you get them distribute them through the schools because they want to have the work want the children to have the work in European languages so that is also their challenge I mean there's also another challenge a little bit in terms of not only the type of stories but the illustrators I mean especially in terms of the children's books for African children that are printed outside of Africa definitely most of the illustrators are white that's also it to me that is just as big an issue as the story itself so you know so there's these different issues but really there are people who do want to write those books in home languages and they do happen but it's just depends on what the publishing is like in those countries and sometimes it's very difficult and then we end up as I mean some of you know work in the education area at the end of the day they just get photocopied sometimes the writers don't mind I would run writer Tijan Salo and one of the the book shop in Gambia said well look the kids are using this poem in schools but they can't get it and he said just photocopy it, I don't mind if they're using it in schools let them photocopy it so that was in English those are different things that people are trying to do because a lot of writers on the ground whoever they're writing in English or home language do realise that the local languages do need to be in the schools but sometimes it's not the writers with the issues with, it's with the government that's Nandala's going to say something more on the Kenya context I think which would be great Not even specifically the Kenya context I think it just goes back to the slide that Janet put up about how big Africa is because a lot of the things I personally used to believe very much in this myth that people aren't publishing in African languages and then you realise Swahili is an African language and people in Tanzania are publishing many many I have a copy of The Little Prince in Ki Swahili they publish in children's books in Swahili it's a massive industry but another country that people always ignore is Somalia and Somalia has an extremely robust publishing industry they publish academic journals in the Somali language I went to the Hargeysig International Book Fair last year no, year before last I would say probably 80% of the titles that were available were all in the Somali language and it was packed it was absolutely jam packed with people it is the single largest social event in the Hargeysig's calendar people are literally building their whole year around being in Hargeysig for the book fair Mogadishu has a book fair Garoe has a book fair and the 11 year old boy I think one publishing prize in the first Mogadishu book fair for his children's book in Somali which is targeting other young people I think when we think about publishing and this goes back I think to a point that I think Stephanie has made this point in the beginning that what we think counts as publishing is also part of the problem and what we think counts as a publishing industry is part of the problem so people in Somalia are not publishing their academic journals through the formal journal system they are distributing them at the universities outside my hotel in Hargeysig I think I counted six different universities and they are distributing these publications within those university networks and they are doing research and all this stuff because Somaliland is very much outside the formal systems and structures that are out there so what we think about when we think about what is publishing what counts as publishing what is an African language what counts as an African language I think is also part of the understanding issues and to ask that I'm also very surprised by this idea about there not being children's stories I grew up on children's stories in Swahili Kakasungura and Mze what's his name there's a whole pantheon of publishing of children's books in Swahili children we study literature in Swahili in school mandatory all through the 12 years again what's different is how this information is consumed and part of the challenge that we have is that in Kenya at least writing in Swahili publishing in Swahili does not have the prestige factor that publishing in English has and so if I leave my office and walk downtown to River Road and downtown area I'll find things that are printed and a printer, photocopies stapled, distributed sold for 50 shillings in Swahili but I'm not going to get that in a bookshop I'm not going to get that at a book fair and so then there's this whole thing well, Kenyans don't read Kenyans don't publish books but there is a large market for these things it just does not exist in the structures at least in Kenya and maybe this is a difference between the countries that I know the literature that I know well Kenya, Tanzania, Somalia and perhaps other parts of Africa and Ethiopia, I'm Harig because they have so much literature publishing a language that isn't spoken anywhere else and that's a policy that is in place a state policy that is in place you can get publishing in Amharic you get publishing in Oromia you get publishing in all of these languages that isn't legible anywhere else and then we say well Ethiopians don't read or don't publish but they do, they're just not publishing for us great, that's brilliant can we take can I take the guy at the back who had his hand up yeah, no, oh sorry okay, brilliant and then the lady at the front, please and then Frediwica so the person at the front with the blue hat I think it was you, ma'am I think it was her sorry that I would like to sorry I cannot remember your name because I was looking the programme I cannot remember your name sorry I'm not sorry I just kind of snuck in today so about the African books in the Caribbean, I would like to add that it's also could be good in the rest of Latin America because in Latin America is a lot of African influence also from Spain too so these relations could be stronger, could be good if I can just we noticed when I was at the last conference, the African Literature Association a couple of years ago we had people for example come over from Brazil wanting to find out more about what we were doing and telling us what they were doing and there was a great exchange and I know for example Africa World Press they now started doing their book stands in conferences focused on Latin American literature and they said they had an amazing response so we realised that there needs to be more connections there any other final questions Federica I had just a comment in the morning session Amidu Sunny mentioned a Jeremy writing and there is a flourishing publishing industry that is widely overlooked and it's completely downplayed in the western academic literature where it's always kind of swept aside as oh yeah there's a little bit of religious literature left over but it's not true there's a flourishing publishing industry all across the zone of influence of Islam and then Lutz mentioned the market literature in Hausa there's also a huge in formally not recognised publishing press in Nigeria and Cameroon both in Boko and in Najemi in major languages so I think we really need to widen our horizon a little bit when we talk about publishing and for whom Thank you are there any final questions or comments I come from Ethiopia and I just want to compliment what the speaker has said earlier I'm hurricane upon a Roman two of the biggest languages in Ethiopia there's a lot of knowledge production both focusing on primary education children, media but the sad thing is almost all the universities Ethiopia has been investing a lot of money in higher institutions in the past decade and a half and we used to have two universities 20 years back now we have around 40 and all of them are using English so there is a missing link between people have people learn science geography and history and the other time some hurricane upon a Roman but as they progress to high school and when they join the university the language of knowledge production would change it mostly and it's pushed by the availability of more sophisticated most of this production is mostly focusing on elementary education there are some attempts to produce scientific journals in these two languages but it's not that strong I just want to highlight that thank you very much can we have the final point from Amidu, a friend I just want to say that this idea of publishing there is what we call the market editions of certain works usually done by individual authors whose disciples will now get the transcript and then publish for the own consumption that is one so that is an area secondly this builds a list of publication I think it's a very serious problem in the sense that you cannot exhaust if they think it's on growing and growing that you cannot actually catch up with it so I think it's more or less a cash and carry kind of thing that people find as very easy to publish quickly you pay on Saturday you get to publish on Monday and I think it's sort of a program or mechanism put in place to guide because that's created a lot of problems from African universities now people can start about 10 publications within the year and then you can say well I've published this much and this many so I deserve to be promoted so there are no mechanism to be put in place one to assist universities maybe through interlibrary something to let them know what is actually there and what is not there and secondly to guide academics young and old in this regard Thanks very much Can we have Nandalo and then any final points from the panelists and then we'll thank you and round up I really just wanted to restate and underscore the point that I made about Somalia because I think Somalia and Somaliland are a great example of what is possible outside the traditional constraints of publishing and what is considered good publishing and especially because I think that one of the biggest gaps in academic publishing is the gap between what African researchers think is worth researching and what the journals think is worth publishing and I can give the example of myself I published my first academic article probably about eight years ago just straight out of undergrad and I couldn't get anything else published after that and I kept wondering what was happening I'm doing exactly the same kind of research and one of my professors when I was in grad school said to me well this isn't really that what is it called there's a phrase that they use basically it wasn't interesting and this research that I've been doing with social media I've had kind of a similar response because it's not about war it's not about starvation it's not about poverty it's not about AIDS so then how is it African I've had those responses and it's wonderful to be working with people who are actually thinking outside those limitations and saying let's think about these things differently but when I went to Somalia the first universe that I visited they were doing research on the Somali there's a navigation system because Somalia is a seafaring nation there's a navigation system that's based entirely on the stars and these three young men had been doing this research for almost a year for their master's thesis writing elder's knowledge on how to navigate the Indian Ocean using the stars and they had produced they've produced a document about it they've recreated the Somali calendar which predates the Julian calendar and the Gregorian calendar and they've done all of this with no support outside Somalia and no one outside Somalia is going to read it so there's this idea of we as African researchers we want to write more we want to get published more but there's a gatekeeper system that makes it very difficult for us because I don't want to change my idea of what is interesting in order to be accepted I don't want to change my interests in order to gain acceptance into the academy there has to be a rooming academy for people who have ideas that don't necessarily conform to the dominant narratives and that's great Helen did you want to come back on anything particularly the point about predatory publishing or any other point I think I didn't maybe mention that in the same way we talk about open access that there's a lot of informal sharing of information that goes in networks that kind of isn't really accounted for and also the kind of models that you're describing that are happening in Africa I mean in some ways you can see them emerging more in what's called the mainstream the idea of academic self publishing et cetera et cetera and trying to maybe look at alternative ways of getting information out there that isn't so tied in I suppose with the traditional peer review model so that was really interesting to me and with regards to the predatory journal sorry so my understanding was that you wanted you thought that there should be more guidance around that so I didn't put up that there are some websites available to kind of for researchers to make decisions about that, about whether or not a journal that pushes something out very quickly if that's a good thing to do or not so there is although that's a list of journals there is advice around that as well but I agree I think there's been some discussion about that list about how do you classify what really is a predatory journal and what should be on there or not so I think that was a good point very brief from down until just to really to acknowledge what you're saying about the growing need to provide some support and guidance and tools for authors and researchers it's an ever more complex landscape and the rise and these predatory or scam publishers fake publishers the numbers are staggering the new outfits being created as we speak and they're getting cleverer and cleverer and they pot you with your money before you even realise it and it also just raises the questions the bigger questions around recognition within institutional environments that publication does count for so much and they are studies to show that researchers in institutions and African elsewhere mostly end up paying from their own pockets and some of them it's a few months salary just to pay for some what end up being predatory journals but it's their ticket to promotion and within our portfolio within our office based in South Africa we get so many requests from universities from organisations lonely societies saying please come along and do workshops and provide materials because there's so much confusion around this landscape and predatory publishers so it's just acknowledging what you're saying and it's particularly tough on the early career scholars OK great and final word don't be brief I just wanted to kind of add and kind of take from the ordinary lord poetry is not a luxury for Africans as far as I'm concerned African publishing is not a luxury it is important for the sense that a lot of African publishers and when I'm talking to African publishers again I'm saying I'm talking publishers here it's not just for profit we're actually activists as well and you're doing work in the community and that is equally as important as the publishing which is being done and we have to remember that so even coming back to your point you don't want to have to change what you're writing to suit that market that's what African publishers will do that because we have to we need to John LaRose who's publisher for New Beacon he had a dream to change the world that's what he came to England to do a dream to change the world and that dream started from the basis of publishing to educate our community was starting with the publishing and that's why African publishers are awesome it's nice to end this discussion sorry I gather we