The importance of the African voice in (international) writing cannot be understated — especially as a weapon to combat the one-dimensional narrative Western authors employ when writing African characters.
In 1962, British publishers, Heinemann recognised the nascent growth of the post-colonial African publishing industry and created the African Writers Series(AWS) to ensure an international voice to major African writers making the first advisory writer, the late Chinua Achebe who became one of Africa’s most famous writers.
The African Writers Series is a series of books by African writers including Chinua Achebe, Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, Steve Biko, Ama Ata Aidoo, Nadine Gordimer, Buchi Emecheta, and Okot p’Bitek.
The AWS allowed African writers to address the colonial bias which was prominent in the teaching of literature, and provided texts that African universities could use to teach about colonial and postcolonial injustices and now the classic AWS books are now available for download for as low as N150 on OkadaBooks.
The Nigeria-based book retail company, OkadaBooks is a book reading/publishing platform for anyone who’s looking forward to publishing any written content or reading published works. The platform has over 200,000 users and over 1 million book downloads.
Photography Credits: GoodBooksAfrica, OkadaBooks