Many Books, Fewer Readers

Creative work has never been in short supply in Nigeria. There is hardly any year that new books do not debut on Nigerian shelves. The credit goes to Nigeria’s growing number of authors who have been dishing out a salad of creative writing.
Over the last five decades, for instance, Nigeria has produced some of the world’s best literary giants whose creative exploits have shot the country to international literary limelight.
Chinua Achebe, Wole Soyinka, John Pepper Clark, Christopher Okigbo, Gabriel Okara, Femi Osofisan, Amos Tutuola, Ben Okri, among others, led the pack of Nigeria’s old literati. Their literary success across the three genres of literature – prose, drama and poetry, has continued to rev up creative potentials in the new generation of writers in the country. And indeed, the likes of Buchi Emecheta, Helon Habila, Sefi Attah, Teju Cole and Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie have kept the torch of literature alight and aglow.
Nigeria’s literary history is so rich such that Achebe’s Things Fall Apart, has been translated to more than 50 languages, while Professor Soyinka remains a trailblazer as Africa’s first Nobel laureate for literature.
The female authors are not left behind. For instance, Florence Nwapa is often referred to as the “mother” of modern African literature, while in the current era, Nigeria boasts one of the world’s best known authors in Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, whose literary breakthrough has been accentuated by her commentary on socio-political issues, especially feminism and African politics.
Ironically, despite this rich history and increasing visibility of Nigerian books on book shelves around the world, the market for books appears to be dwindling. The reality on the ground is that demand for literary fiction in Nigeria is getting poor and low.
In 2011, academics from Lagos State University released a paper titled “Poor Reading Habits Among Nigerians”, which cited the benefits of reading for self-improvement and mental and emotional health. The paper further hypothesized that Nigeria’s reading culture had suffered from widespread poverty, corruption, deprioritization, and a dearth of dedicated quiet reading spaces like libraries.
“A reading nation is an informed nation,” the dons asserted, adding that “Nigeria can not be regarded as a reading nation because the younger generation of Nigerians does not consider reading a leisure activity”.
Many literary minds are troubled by this trend. One of such is Wale Adetula, the founder of The Naked Convos, one of Nigeria’s popular youth-oriented blogs. He, sometime ago, conducted an online poll surveying over a thousand users of his site on their reading habits, and found out that many educated Nigerians only read one book a year.
The results of the poll inspired him to launch the TNC Stories app, which carries the disconcerting tagline, “Reading is dead”. This app allows contributors to create and share stories using text video, audio and music, a non-conventional method to inspire reading habits in most Nigerians.
“The reading culture in Nigeria is poor”, Adetula affirms. “Forget the number of books you see being sold in traffic and our global acclaim for excelling – Nigerians read only when they have to”, he says.
Adetula believes a culture of reading is not being written into Nigeria’s education system. According to him, “Students see it as some sort of necessary evil. And it becomes harder when you have to deal with the many distractions and challenges that come with being an adult and living in a country like Nigeria”.
Another mind troubled by Nigeria’s poor reading culture is David Dia, a writer and author. Dia attributes the poor reading culture in Nigeria to a number of factors including access to books and printed materials, poor quality of teaching and teachers churned out from a dysfunctional education system.
“But most importantly is the arrival of the digital age upon us, which has not only provided a veritable platform for the dissemination of multiple and diverse information in all fields, but has gradually made hard copy books cumbersome and obsolete”, he says.
He also partly blames the trend on publishing constraints in the country, which, according to him, has resulted in most indigenous writers engaging foreign publishers whose focus is on profitable markets in developed climes.
Ironically, Dia says the digital reading culture is quite healthy and robust, particularly on social networking platforms where both formal and trivia information, supported attractively with memes, emojis, GIFs and other instructive graphics and optics are copiously deployed and utilized.
Customer support representative, Karo Oforofuo, shares Dia’s thoughts. He notes that Nigeria has a limited number of bookshops, and that printing books domestically is a difficult and expensive process. E-books are easier to distribute, as people only need the app to download as many books as they want, Oforofuo says.
He believes Nigerian reading culture will get better by the day, given the computer age and advent of e-books”.
Another writer, Fareedah Abdulkareem, provides an insight into what may have made Nigeria’s reading habit so low and poor in spite of an avalanche of books in the market.
She says it’s unclear if it’s about people not wanting to read for leisure, or in fact not having access to fiction.
“Books have become increasingly expensive in the country as bookshops have shuttered, and with an adult literacy rate of 51%, it’s not surprising that some supporters of literature in the country are concerned about how novelists might fare once their books are published”, she says.
She quoted a senior editor of Farafina Books, an imprint of Kachifo, and one of the country’s most popular publishing houses, as saying that most of the sales for the publishing house come from religious or educational texts, not fiction.
Abdulkareem also recalls that Okada Books, one of the sponsors of the Dusty Manuscript contest, also makes much of its money selling educational, self-help, and motivational titles.
However, with the interest expressed by some private institutions and multinationals, the Nigerian literary canon has the potentials of expanding and developing.
In the last one decade, for instance, a number of literary prizes have helped support Nigeria’s literary fiction circles. They include the 9Mobile Prize for Literature, backed by 9Mobile telecommunications company formerly known as Etisalat, the Nigeria Prize for Literature, sponsored by the NLNG gas company, and the Miles Morland grant, which supports authors working on a novel for a year.
While these prizes are geared towards pepping up upcoming writers and providing a vista of opportunities for them to sell their work, it’s important to ask what kind of market their books will be entering.
Abdulkareem says this effort won’t get far if it doesn’t spread to the offices of elected representatives, or if people don’t view reading as a enjoyable hobby.
She believes, however, that if new genres continue to be supported, books redistributed and reoriented as multimedia content, and the government takes an active role in the refurbishment of existing libraries and the redesign of the school curriculum, some things might change.
Until that time, we can only urge the players in the small, but growing industry to keep fighting to keep reading alive.

By: Boye Salau