Book publishers New Beacon Books and Bogle-L'Ouverture Press that were established in the UK in 1966 and 1968 respectively, have recently become more familiar to the public due to the gallery exhibitions ‘No Colour Bar’ at London's Guildhall Gallery andjhe ‘Dream to change the world: the life and legacy of John La Rose’ atlslington Museum, in 2015. Not only have the exhibitions, accompanied by events, opened the windows to the work of these radical Black publishers and their campaigning activities, equally important is that, in the same mode of their ethos of inclusion and community sharing, other Black independent publishing outfits and writers have since benefited from the increased awareness of the work which was produced and the organisations behind them.

This text is about an ongoing research project on contemporary African literature that circulates outside the infrastructures of the global book market. The researchers involved in the project are based at Uppsala University, Sweden, and collaborate closely with librarians at the Nordic Africa Institute where a small collection of ephemeral, often self-published texts is being established. This collection is a part of the book collection at the Nordic Africa Institute's library, but can be accessed as a sub-collection in the library catalogue. The article is co-authored by one of the researchers and two of the librarians and is organised into two main sections: one is written from the perspective of the researchers who collect and study the material. This section outlines the project, its scope, general research questions and how texts have been collected.

In 2013, I traveled to the Khama III Memorial Museum in Serowe, Botswana, to deliver a paper at a conference honoring the fortieth anniversary of the publication of southern African author Bessie Head's celebrated novel A Question of Power. This was my first visit to the museum that houses the author's archives which contain most of her correspondence with literary agents, publishers, historians, anthropologists, literary critics, and other writers - including Alice Walker, Nikki Giovanni, Toni Morrison, and Gabriel Garcia Marquez. They also include some of her original manuscripts, agricultural notes, and publishing contracts.

All the scholars who presented papers on this occasion, except for one, were Africanists who focused on the literatures of the Continent. The outlier who specialised in African American drama delivered a comparative study between Head's short fiction and works by Black Atlantic writers.

In 2013, I traveled to the Khama III Memorial This paper examines archival practice in Malawi and demonstrates that the country has experienced a number of challenges pertaining to preservation and accessibility of literary archives. The country has a considerable collection of literary archives, for instance the huge volume of literary archives held by the family of the late Steve Chimombo that remains unexplored and uncatalogued at his home in Zomba. The Chimombo collection consists of the author's manuscripts and drafts of work both published and unpublished; diaries/ journals; copies of incoming and outgoing correspondence; historical material that documents the author's life such as photographs and family memorabilia; objects of significance like the special writer's desk. This collection is placed in boxes and cartons, filing cabinets, bookshelves, and drawers in his study room at his family home.

It was the early 1980s in Algeria. There had been Protestant mission work in the country for a century. The Christian church was growing and missionaries were being asked to leave. One former member of the small Algiers Mission Band had just had her residence permit renewed for a further two years and so was able to stay longer when others had to go. She saw this as a God-given opportunity to ensure that vital documents got safely back to the UK so that the history of this remarkable group of missionaries, mainly women, should be preserved. To her we owe the preservation of the largely complete archive of the Algiers Mission Band (AMB), the mission society led by Lilias Trotter, which was transferred bit by bit from a flat in central Algiers to the home office in the UK.

Post-colonial literature is the product of nexus between the culture of colonialism and the exigent practice of indigenous values.

Postcolonial theory places more emphasis on the criticality of colonialism and its establishment resulting in neo-colonialism with the accentuation of the power of the west over the colonised (Prasad, 2003:7). Ali A. Mazrui highlighted seven conflicts that have been the main pressing matters among post-colonial writers: clash between the past and the present of Africa, between tradition and modernity, between individuality and community, between indigenous and foreign, between development and self-reliance, between socialism and capitalism, and between Africanity and humanity (Mazrui et al, 2014

Post-colonial literature, therefore, tries to explore the challenges and results of decolonisation of a nation particularly those nations that have been given political and cultural independence and were formerly colonised.

If the recent research in African popular culture has succeeded in dismissing the traditional “binary paradigm” (Barber 1997, p. 2) that keeps compartmentalising the continent's culture into two strands, the literate/elite vs. the oral/traditional, and in asserting the domain of the popular productions as a “third space” of creative production, little has been done so far to study a possible artistic continuity between the genre of the popular and the other two genres. Indeed, while the interplay between traditional verbal arts and the modern development in the novel is extensively investigated by scholars and critics alike, little has been done until now to explore the interactions between popular and elite fictions.