HUMA–LASPAD Publishing Africa Seminar Series

Speaker: Walter Bgoya (Tanzania)

I shall discuss a few issues pertinent to African publishers from my 49 years in publishing. I shall speak on African publishers’ paralysing dependency on textbook publishing; and unethical practices and domination of the textbook industry by multinational corporations. I shall make a few comments on Scholarly publishing and why money is not the only problem. I shall, self critically address the narrow perspectives of the industry of most African publishers; why African private publishers’ appear to have neither the support of the states nor of the people; and finally why the prospects of the African publishers in the near term appear bleak.

 

Walter Bgoya Biography

Walter Bgoya is the Managing Director of Mkuki na Nyota Publishers in Dar es salaam, Tanzania, which this year celebrates 40 years of publishing under the watchwords, “Relevant Books, Beautiful Books, Affordable Books”. Over the years it has strived to live by this philosophy, meeting head-on what often appear to be insurmountable challenges, and more often than not being able to produce significant works in Swahili and English. Its most recent and major projects have been the 9 volume SADC Hashim Mbita Project, Southern African Liberation Struggles,1960 - 1994: Contemporaneous Documents; My Life, My Purpose, an autobiography of Benjamin W. Mkapa, Tanzania’s third president; Mzee Rukhusa, Safari ya Maisha Yangu, an autobiography of Ali Hassan Mwinyi, Tanzania’s second president; Development as Rebellion, a 3 volume Biography of Mwalimu Julius K. Nyerere, by Professor Issa G Shivji, Saida Yahya-Othman and Ng’wanza Kamata. Walter Bgoya has always looked to adopting new technologies and admits the company might not have survived to achieve what it has achieved without the arrival on the scene of the computer and internet. Mkuki na Nyota is the only private publishing company in Africa that owns the Expresso Book Machine, and which is exploring other IT-based avenues to address present limitations in editorial, marketing and distribution functions, as well as strengthening human resource capacities. Walter Bgoya is one of the founding members, and Chairman of African Books Collective; Chairman of the NOMA Award for Publishing in Africa. He is the former head of the state-owned Tanzania Publishing House from 1972-1990.

More about the HUMA-LASPAD Publishing Africa Series