2024/09/20 by Mills, David, Kitchen, Stephanie, Sidi-Hida, Bouchra
paper · doi:10.57832/zzej-em42
More than 75 years since independence, African academic journal publishing is at an uncertain crossroads. This was not how Nkrumah envisaged Africa’s scientific modernity. Speaking in 1964 at the laying of the foundation stone of Ghana’s Atomic Reactor Centre, he offered an expansive postcolonial vision for an African science “that cannot afford to lag behind” (Nkrumah, 2007). The Reactor project was cancelled three years later. Some hark back to a supposedly “golden age” of an emergent African academy in the early post-independence years, replete with scientific congresses, dynamic research departments, vibrant literary journals and new university presses (Yanney-Wilson, 1961; Eisemon, 1979; Sharp, 2019). Whilst there was significant progress in African independent and academic publishing prior to structural adjustment-enforced austerity, some of this nostalgia may be misplaced. Caroline Davis (2020) has shown, for example, how the Central Intelligence Agency CIA-funded front organizations promoted “new literary hubs being created across Africa that promoted local management and local literary production”. Many of these journals, from Drum to Black Orpheus, were indeed commercially successful, creating “an illusion of the creation of a decentralised, avant-garde small-press culture” (Davis, 2020).