Debating Ideas reflects the values and editorial ethos of the African Arguments book series, publishing engaged, often radical, scholarship, original and activist writing from within the African continent and beyond. It offers debates and engagements, contexts and controversies, and reviews and responses flowing from the African Arguments books. It is edited and managed by the International African Institute, hosted at SOAS University of London, the owners of the book series of the same name.
British colonial publishing expanded in East Africa post-independence in the 1960s and 1970s. But the publishers Henry Chakava and Walter Bgoya established an African industry. Postcolonial Kenyan governments inherited strategies of censoring free publication from the British too. But progressive and radical publishers continue to challenge such restrictions. This blog draws out some lessons from Chakava’s legacy in the struggle for publishing autonomy today.
Colonialism in Kenyan publishing
British publishing companies had profitable enterprises in East Africa during the colonial period. At independence in 1963, there were no Kenyan publishers. The British publishers expanded their presence post-independence in the 1960s and 1970s. Heinemann, publisher of the African Writers Series, was the most significant of the British publishers. Moreover, British publishing continues to profit from the series today, that is mostly published by Bloomsbury.
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Henry Chakava was the founder of East African Educational Publishers. Chakava excelled as a student of literature and philosophy at the University of Nairobi in the early 1970s. A temporary job with Heinemann Educational Books became a life-long commitment. By the age of 30, Chakava was running the Kenyan branch of the British company. Heinemann Educational Books was renamed East African Educational Publishers and indigenised to full Kenyan ownership in 1992. It has since become one of the largest publishing companies in the continent.
Chinua Achebe has described Henry Chakava as ‘one of the most pivotal indigenous publishers in Africa’. Chakava’s crucial intervention was to strengthen publishing in Kenya, severing its dependence on the multinational textbook publishers, and laying the foundations of independence for African publishers.
In his autobiographical works Chakava wrote at length about the problems for independent publishers in Kenya, confronting both the multinationals and the Kenyan state. He concluded that there were many reasons why indigenous publishing did not take off in the years after Kenyan independence. The most important explanation was the state’s willingness to allow multinationals to operate in the market without any conditions or restrictions. This insight extends well beyond postcolonial Kenya to the continent’s publishing today that is enmeshed in global, commercial, extractive models.
Chakava acknowledges the strong influences of Tanzanian publisher Walter Bgoya, and Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o. Through his publishing life, Chakava valiantly supported Ngũgĩ’s contention that ‘free circulation is absolutely essential to any quest for truth and knowledge’. This stance led to Chakava agreeing to publish controversial works such as The Trial of Dedan Kimathi by Ngũgĩ and Micere Mugo. Chakava accepted the ‘dangers’ of publishing Ngũgĩ’s work, whether these were ‘political or commercial’. He supported Ngũgĩ’s later strategy to publish his works first in Gikuyu, a language associated with the Mau Mau resistance and liberation, although Chakava himself did not speak it, despite the difficulties with both sales and translation.
Censoring progressive publishing
From the time of independence, Kenyan publishers, particularly progressive, radical and left publishers, have struggled with censorship. And they have resisted it. By the early 1980s, Shiraz Durrani documents how ‘the underground opposition to the KANU-Moi regime penetrated every field of activity … the history of publishing in Kenya is a history of struggles’.
Like the colonial publishing legacy, censorship was inherited from the British and their imprisonment (and hanging) of the Mau Mau people in their anti-colonial struggle. The British sought to undermine the Mau Mau’s own publishing industry and networks of presses in ‘liberated areas’, described by colonial commissioners in 1946 as ‘a grave menace to the future of the Colony’.
Ngũgĩ discusses Kenya’s inheritances of censorship from the colonial regime:
‘These [KANU] regimes have literally tried to take the colonial measures and practices a stage further. Where, for instance, in pre-independence Kenya there were several newspapers and magazines in African languages, these regimes ensured that for more than twenty-five years, there were hardly any meaningful newspapers or magazines in African languages.’
Discussing the publishing struggles of the trade unionist and historian, Makham Singh Durrani points out that the government didn’t outright ban books, rather operated ‘more subtly by creating fear among the publishing industry’.
Commenting on radical publishing in Kenya, Durrani writes:
‘it is not the lack of printing and publishing facilities that prevented … publication in the earlier period, nor … a lack of readership. There are powerful political and social forces in Kenya (and other African countries) that prevent the publishing of certain types of books … considered dangerous by those in power …. Among subjects which come to the immediate “attention” of those in power are books with a progressive perspective on history, particularly on people’s resistance…’
Durrani wrote to me in the summer of 2025 about ‘three failed attempts’ to publish his edited manuscript ‘From Mau Mau to RutoMustGo’, a collection of essays set in a radical historical context. Durrani writes that ‘it is now clear that there is no publisher in Kenya who can publish this book. If these three [progressive, independent, community] publishers can’t do it, then I don’t think any other publisher will go near it.’
Such self-censorship by progressive publishers operating in Kenya with very limited democracy – no free trade unions, for example – would doubtless have been familiar to Chakava and Ngũgĩ.
But this story has a hopeful ending. The radical Uganda-based publisher Editor House has agreed to publish the text. Durrani describes this as ‘a great victory for progressive/socialist aspiration of Pan-Africanism as political boundaries are wiped out in extending support from Uganda to Kenya’. Progressives in East Africa are resisting censorship and attacks on their academic and political freedoms.
Autonomy and endogenous capitalism
Henry Chakava advocated for autonomy for the African publisher, for ‘an autonomous institution … responsible to itself … owned and controlled by Africans themselves …situated in Africa’. But he acknowledged too the limits on that autonomy under capitalism: ‘our model publisher will not be free to do whatever his likes; his Board, his shareholders and his financiers will be there to ensure that his freedom is exercised within limits’. Chakava had experienced navigating the commercial strictures of a British educational publishing company. He had circumvented the limited options available to finance his authors locally, remaining dependent on sales by the British ‘parent’ company elsewhere.
No wonder then that Chakava accepted that to be independent, always his first priority, publishing had to be a business, an endeavour that needed to be viable and profit-making and requiring of significant capital. He wrote in detail about the considerable levels of investment he judged to be necessary for an African publisher in the 1980s. He did not wholly reject the involvement of ‘foreign publishers’ but rather advocated for the development of an Africa’s own publishing industry.
In the era of liberalisation in the 1980s and 1990s, Chakava implemented commercial practices to expand the market for African books, whilst arguing for economic development. He believed that the state should restrict itself to developing the infrastructure to support publishing at national and regional levels.
Publishing beyond Kenya
Chakava’s advocacy for African publishing extended beyond Kenya. He made continental contributions to distribution and training through his roles in the foundation of the African Books Collective and the African Publishers Network (APNET). He endeavoured to change World Bank policies for African publishing in the 1990s that emphasised ‘book provision’, in line with the World Bank’s prioritisation of funding school education – at the expense of support for endogenous publishing and higher education. Chakava believed that with the right kind of support, African publishing industries could become independent and self-sustaining. He argued for a ‘more far-sighted policy … to enable publishing industries to take off’. But that has still not happened.
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The publishing situation in the former French colonies shares similarities today with East Africa in the 1980s-90s. Chad is an example. There were heated discussions at the 2025 CODESRIA conference on academic freedom about the appropriation of publishing on the continent by the French commercial publishing companies Hachette and Harmattan.
Conclusion
The continent’s writers and publishing structures continue to be adversely affected by multinational dominance, state, and donor policies. They are being undermined by censorship and lacking, or compromised, academic and political freedoms.
A 2025 UNESCO report points to a ‘trade deficit’ in books publishing of 76%, with the continent importing an estimated US$597 million, whilst exporting US$81 million, worth of books. Other UNESCO data illustrates the gap between the continent’s 17% share of the world’s population versus its 2.6% contribution to global scientific publications.
Durrani posits that ‘the key challenge in Kenya (and Africa) is publishing as a business and publishing as political activism. Can the two be reconciled?’ This dilemma is familiar well beyond Africa.
Chakava’s legacy is to recognise that the first crucial step in dealing with the enormous, seemingly intractable, challenges – of establishing and financing publishing, of subverting colonial influences and censorship – was to take control. There are many lessons we can learn from his work, as writers and publishers everywhere seek to exercise autonomy in increasingly censorious conditions.
Stephanie Kitchen is Managing Editor at the International African Institute, hosted at SOAS University of London, including of its journal Africa. She is a co-director of the African Books Collective.