Meanwhile, the popularity of such heroic tales as Edgar Rice Burroughs’s Tarzan of
the Apes (1914) continued to portray Africa as a land of jungle, inhabited mostly by
animals. The many stories of Rene Guillot (written in French in the 1950s and 1960s but
widely available in English translations) are factually correct, since he lived in Africa for
over twenty years, but still perpetuate the atmosphere of savage beasts, witch doctors
and naked warriors.
Almost the only genuine indigenous African story-telling to reach European readers
was in the field of animal legend. There still remains a world interest in quaint folk-tale.
So the Ashanti tales from Ghana by Peggy Appiah (for example, The Pineapple Child
(1969)), the Nigerian folk-tales retold by Chinua Achebe (for example, How the Leopard
got his Claws (1972)), and the Swazi, Zulu and Xhosa tales collected in southern Africa
by Phyllis Savory (for example, The Best of African Folklore (1988)) have retained their
popularity—as well as capturing in print some products of the dying oral tradition.
Africa of the AfricansThose working with African children today can be in little doubt of the need for relevant
local material. If books reflect a world that is foreign to children, then the concept of
reading (and enjoying) books must also be foreign. Sheer ‘book love’ is not the only
target of African authors, however. The Kenyan author Asenath Odaga emphasises the
point that ‘In Kenya, one of the writer’s tasks is to decolonise the thinking of his
readers.... He tries to make them discover and recover their dignity and honour which
they had lost during colonial suppression’ (Odaga 1988:32).
But hard economics are often against such noble intentions. If so few people buy books,
there is no profit in either writing them or printing them. Only in countries whose
education system guarantees sufficient sales does local publishing thrive. (Many of
those education systems are heavily controlled by the state, with a resulting pressure on
authors to toe the official line.) This results in the oftrepeated cliché that in Africa
books=school. At the IBBY Congress of 1984, devoted to children’s book production and
distribution in developing countries, a whole day was devoted to Africa. Francis Nyarko
from Ghana emphasised: ‘Most children in Africa see and handle books for the first time
only in the classroom... In most African countries the only books young people have
access to are textbooks’ (Nyarko 1985:53).
The production of imaginative indigenous fiction, divorced from the textbook or school
reader field, has emerged in appreciable quantity only in Nigeria, Ghana, Kenya,
Zimbabwe, South Africa and (very recently) Namibia. Efforts there have begun to be
supplemented by international publishers who produce an ‘African’ series of stories
featuring black boys and girls in genuine localised adventures. Such series as the
Heinemann Junior African Writers Series (JAWS) or the Macmillan English Language
Teaching Services (MELTS) offer the advantage of an Africa-wide readership to
indigenous authors. In this way, a young reader in (say) Kenya can meet stories about
children in west or southern Africa. The difficulty in marketing books with a small print-
run to a huge continent has been solved to a certain degree by a sponsored, non-profit
organisation African Books Collective (in Oxford, England) which warehouses and
publicises books from Africa. Among the children’s section of their Catalogue No. 4,
788 THE WORLD OF CHILDREN’S LITERATURE