Two traumatic events have characterised the Kenyan creative space in the past few months. These happened despite President Uhuru Kenyatta’s apparently genuine efforts to transform the country’s cultural industry.
The more recent occurrence was the death and forcible burial at night of Abenny Jachiga, the ohangla singer from Kisumu County.
But the first, which concerns me here, was the April 10 death in interesting circumstances of the Kenyan writer Prof Ken Walibora. Our media made it impossible for President Uhuru Kenyatta to see the late writer’s death as an opportunity to institute reforms in the book publishing sector.
Our media is still skewed against the Kenyan writer even if it occasionally tries to act as a neutral arbiter in the poisoned relationship between the writer and the publisher. In Walibora’s case, for instance, the media did well to report that he and his publishers were fighting over long-drawn money issues. But they ruined it by suggesting that such writer-publisher disagreements are ‘normal’ in Kenya. Of course they are not.
The only sense in which one might claim that Kenyan writers are expected to quarrel with their publishers is if we mean that the President was wrong to have listened to similar cries from Kenyan musicians, which prompted his attention to the bodies that circulate our music. Kenyan writers deserve the President’s intervention because they face worse forms of inhumanity in regard to royalty payments.
The writers’ plight begins at the level of the royalty rate, but that can be put aside for now. The rate is as low as 8 per cent of the selling price per book copy. The Kenyan writers’ old misery – which publishers often falsely misconstrue as writers demanding a higher royalty rate – is that this 8 per cent is rarely ever paid.
We can use Jomo Kenyatta as evidence of the modesty of what the ordinary writer earns from the sale of their book. Jomo could barely survive on the royalty of his 1938 book, Facing Mount Kenya, despite Harvill Secker then being a British publishing house of repute. One therefore easily understands Jomo’s weak financial circumstances when he returned to Kenya in 1946. This is the same poverty that dogs the footsteps of the Kenyan writer.
The main reason President Uhuru Kenyatta should help writers is simple logic. It follows from the position our publishers often state as their golden rule when they reject a manuscript — that ‘publishing is strictly a business’; the company cannot risk taking up a product that will not sell – which is a sensible argument.
Yet the above argument is also every publisher’s acknowledgement that all the manuscripts they accept sell after publication. This humorous contradiction makes inaccurate a publisher’s recent comments here that books do not sell because Kenyans avoid fiction.
In both theory and practice, the publisher initially accepted the fiction manuscript only because they and their editors were sure that the fiction book would sell.
If writing is strictly a business, then the vast majority of Kenyan publishers might be dishonest business people by virtue of their author-publisher contracts not declaring beforehand the number of copies of books that the publisher intends to run at any given time. Failure in this basic test of honesty, in my view, should be curious to even the President.
Most Kenyan writers would probably have no problem with publishers organising tea-taking before royalty cheques are issued. However, such parties would be merrier were writers able to verify the royalty amounts contained in the cheques. The amount does not become empirical merely because the publisher served tea; it does by the writer and the publisher both knowing how many copies of the book were initially run, how many were sold, and the remainder.
We should, however, acknowledge that our publishers are sometimes not wholly guilty.
Past media reports on the pervasive nature of book piracy in Kenya point to the need for us to also appreciate the uncertainties of publishing.
Still, the Kenyan State can handle these challenges within their varied contexts. What we should be reluctant to accept is the Kenya Publishers Association’s predictable reliance on
TV to push the inaccurate narrative that publishers do not pay their writers due to piracy.
It is also possible that Kenyan writers are partly to blame. Their own sense of extreme individualism has made them unable to form a counterweight pressure group to the Kenya Publishers Association. The Kenya Writers’ Guild, formed in 2014, might be a noble effort, but its heavily audio-visual framework is a limiting factor.
We also have three past winners of the Caine Prize for African Writing who prefer isolationism to a professional literary body that President Uhuru might want to listen to the same way he does the Kenya Publishers Association. A special kind of self-inflicted misery is what I recently read on these pages, where some of our writers assume that peripheral strategies of book marketing such as social media and making friends with bookshop attendants outweigh the author-publisher contract.
My whole point here has been that our publishers intentionally refuse to pay their writers. This publisher impunity is so rife that it invades the creative privacy of both the obscure and the famous Kenyan writer. Many well-known Kenyan authors (such as the late Walibora) suffer in silence because they have a name and an image to protect. State House remains unaware of this injustice because of the skewed nature of our media in reporting book piracy. Kenyan media almost exclusively concentrates on reporting piracy from the perspective of the publisher.
One might, therefore, challenge the government to explore this uncharted territory. The Ministry of Sports, Culture and Heritage can invite the media to carry out anonymous surveys on the interesting financial relationship between writers and their publishers. Simply request writers to say whether they are aware of the number of copies of their books the publishers print.
Find out if publishers inform them when the printer runs additional copies of books. Ask the writers when last they were paid, and if at all, then how much. You can then cross-check your findings with records from the publishers.
Class is often a weak lens to use in analysing some of Africa’s intractable problems. Kenyan publishing houses are today headed mostly by young men who probably grew up in rural areas. Today they pretend not to know what poverty and exploitation are. President Uhuru can, and should listen to the cry of the Kenyan writer.