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No Carpet on the Floor: Extracts from the Memoirs of Charles Granston Richards, Founding Director, East African Literature Bureau

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  25 April 2022

C.G. Richards ,
Anthony Olden ,
Sidney Hockey  and
David McD. Wilson
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Extract

Most of the issues that relate to information, publishing and libraries in contemporary Africa go back further than is generally realised. Summing up the proceedings of a conference on textbook provision and library development that took place in Manchester in 1991, an Overseas Development Administration spokesman said that ‘the obvious and immediate needs are to develop the skills of indigenous writers, build vibrant local publishing industries, and allocate more funds overall to providing textbooks and library books.’ Yet this is what one organisation - the East African Literature Bureau - had been attempting to do from its inception in 1948. Speaking at a Unesco seminar at Ibadan in 1953 the Bureau's director said its fields of activity included: ‘(a) textbooks for schools; (b) general literature and the tutoring of African authors; (c) the publication of a magazine; (d) the development of libraries; (e) the establishment of a business section with a publishing fund to develop the sale of the Bureau's publications and assist in the general development of bookselling.’

Type
Articles
Information
African Research and Documentation , Volume 71 , 1996 , pp. 1 - 32
Copyright
Copyright © African Research & Documentation 1996

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References

Proceedings of the Conference on Textbook Provision and Library Development in Africa, Manchester, October 1991 (Manchester: British Council, 1992), 24.Google Scholar
Richards, C.G., “The work of a literature bureau', in Development of public libraries in Africa; the Ibadan Seminar (Paris: UNESCO, 1954), 88.Google Scholar
CMS figure cited by Ndegwa, John, Printing and publishing in Kenya: an outline of development (London: SCOLMA, 1973) 14.Google Scholar
[Richards, C.G.] ‘Books in the service of the church: address to the Cathedral Committee [Nairobi], 16 April 1945’, PP.MS.12/9b, Richards papers, School of Oriental and African Studies, London.Google Scholar
Diana, Bryant Rosenberg The colonial state and the development of publiclibraries in Kenya prior to 1965, Fellowship thesis, Library Association, 1984, 139-40.Google Scholar
Kaungamno, E.E. and Homo, C.S. Books build nations. Vol 1: Library services in West and East Africa, Vol 2: Library servies in Tanzania (Dar es Salaam: Transafrica Books Distributors, 1979). See also Struan Bell, Library development in Africa: a study of its foundations and administrative policy in Ghana, Nigeria, Sierra Leone, Uganda, Kenya, Tanzania and Zambia (Librarianship Diploma thesis, University College London, 1967).Google Scholar