In his acceptance speech for the 1st ZIBF Award for Life-Long Contribution to the African Book Industry in Harare on 2nd August 2004, Henry Chakava made these comments, succinctly encapsulating a confident and optimistic view of a future direction for African publishing.

Text of contribution to a panel discussion on “Conditions of Production for Writing and Publishing in Africa” at a postgraduate seminar, Faculty of English, University of Cambridge, 1 February 2006, revised for a SCOLMA seminar with the present title at the Institute of Commonwealth Studies, University of London, 21March, 2006.

Quite apart from claims made for Cyprian Ekwensi as the first Nigerian to publish a full-length novel in “modern English” (that is his 1954 novel, People of The City), it is generally accepted that Amos Tutuola's The Palm-wine Drinkard was the first novel in any variety of English to be published by a Nigerian. That novel was incidentally published in 1952 by Faber and Faber in the UK. Perhaps this has not after all turned out to be a good omen for publishing in Nigeria.

This paper discusses the issue of copyright, especially as it pertains in Ghana. It also examines the extent of literary piracy and its impact on authors and the book industry in Ghana. Remedies proposed to curb this activity include resourcing of the Copyright Office; creation of copyright awareness; and strict prosecution of offenders.

From the very beginning immersion and competence in law and administration were looked on as the sine qua non of the District Officer's work. To all intents and purposes, these twin responsibilities could be regarded as his badge of office. In Northern Nigeria a common Hausa word for the DO was for many years Joji, a corrupted form of “Judge”. When I arrived in Muri Division in 1950,1 was introduced to the emir as Karamin Joji, the “small” or “junior” judge. In East Africa the DC was known as Bwana Shauri, the one responsible for affairs and court cases. Instruction in law (but not, I would emphasise, in administration) was a major feature of the Colonial Service training courses at Oxford, Cambridge and later London.

During the first two decades of the twentieth century, research documents into the historical development of the Jewish community in South Africa were largely the work of individuals. The most notable of these were those of Rabbi Dr J H Hertz, of the Witwatersrand Hebrew Congregation who presented an address on the Jews of South Africa to the first South African Zionist Congress (1905), various papers by the amateur historians S J Judelowitz and S A Rochlin, Louis Hermann's History of the Jews in South Africa, covering the period to 1890 and S A Rochlin and Muriel Alexander's researches into newspaper files, the former covering Transvaal papers from 1892 to 1924 and the latter, Cape papers until the end of 1918.