Dumping Knowledge: The reality of large-scale book donations to Africa
As soon as Wendy Saul heard that one million books would be arriving at a huge warehouse in Monrovia, Liberia she started to picture the sight straight away. One million beautiful new books, perfectly chosen for children that resemble the students she taught, all stacked up for her to see in one large room – how glorious. With this in mind, Saul excitedly makes her way to the warehouse just in time to see large boxes labeled ‘One Million Books’ being transferred from trucks into a warehouse containing large sorting tables. But Saul’s excitement quickly diminishes when she sees the nature of the books.
Earlier on that year, George Bush announced that he would be donating 1.2 million textbooks and school furniture to the Liberian Government that would be distributed to public schools and libraries. And now, Saul was looking at the fulfilled promise. Originally from America, she was living in Liberia to start up a literacy program through the Canadian organisation, CODE, who was working on the global development of literacy. The program was in desperate need of books but these one million books were not going to solve Saul’s problem. Instead of finding new textbooks, the boxes were filled with dog-eared, old and used books that had no relevance to the children she had been teaching. She mentions seeing books to help students do their LSATs in Spanish, and books for microwave cooking. She remembers seeing CDs as well, ‘I mean this was at time when kids were sitting under street lamps to do their homework because there was no electricity at home. The idea that people would have CD players at home for educational CDs from Scholastic was so weird ’. It was clear to her that these books had not been carefully selected.
The one million books were shipped through an organisation called Books for Africa and belong to a larger ecosystem of books donated to Africa each year by similar organisations. Books For Africa has shipped over 43 million books to 55 countries in Africa since their start in 1988. Last year alone they sent 2.3 million books and raised $2.2 million dollars to do so. They are the largest of these organisations but not the only one. International Book Bank between 1987 and 2016 sent over 30 million books, Library Projects have donated 2.6 million books since they were founded in 2005 while Book Friends have sent 180 000 books since 2004. In the United States, books are donated by individuals and publishers – who are donating their excess stock – and stored in large warehouses in port cities. They are then loaded into 20 to 40 foot containers that hold between 40, 000 to 80,000 books accordingly. These containers are shipped to various ports in Africa where a local organisation is then expected to take over. According to International Book Bank, the books take about 1 week to pack, 4-6 weeks on the water and 1 week to deliver to the organisation in the country.
This is clearly a colossal process but each organisation emphasise in their mission statements how it contributes to the must needed move towards solving the illiteracy problem that plagues Africa, which is commonly referred to on these organisations’ websites as the ‘book desert’. The specifics of where in Africa is often never addressed and serves to be confusing when thinking of countries such as Zimbabwe, Libya, Botswana, South Africa, Equatorial Guinea, to name a few that all have high literacy rates. But the way Africa is homogenised and often misrepresented on these sites is not where the problem ends, because for African countries that do indeed have very low literacy rates and are in desperate need for reading material, these book donations from the US could be doing more damage than good.
Angered by what she saw at Bush’s warehouse, Saul decided she wanted to change how these organisations were donating books. She decided to get involved with a book organisation started by CODE called International Book Bank. She knew they were struggling, and was sure the books they were sending over resembled the state of books donated by Bush. Saul remembers her first visit to the IBB warehouse in Baltimore; she says ‘the books they were receiving were junk and the warehouse was dangerous.’ With Saul’s help, they started making changes. They moved to a new warehouse and developed a system to sort books, and a program that allowed them to input the books they were receiving so that organisations in Africa could select what books they needed before they were sent over. Saul’s goal was to get the right books to the right children. Doing it this way became very costly however, and eventually IBB wasn’t able to fund it. They sold their warehouses, and eventually used the money they made from this to start working with local publishers in Liberia to develop a series of children’s books that would be culturally relevant.
International Book Bank is the rare example however, and as shown, there are still a number of book donating companies who are still using the old model of donating large containers of unsorted books, making the process a lot cheaper for the organisations. Although not made obvious on their websites, these organisations are also charging either the local organisations receiving the books or another entity funding the donation for the shipment and handling fees. Books For Africa’s home page brags in their first line that they have:
A simple name for an organization with a simple mission. We collect, sort, ship, and distribute books to students of all ages in Africa. Our goal: to end the book famine in Africa.
Similarly Bookfriends International’s mission ‘is to provide hope to secondary school students and teachers in Africa who lack books, through the donation of new and used quality text books, library books and educational materials.’ That these are companies acting as essentially a carrier service is never made obvious. Books For Africa will even charge more for shipments of books that have been sorted beforehand.
There are also benefits for the publishers donating books. In Booking in Iowa, author Joseph Michaud, explains how the cost of setting up print presses to print books was so high that publishers would rather print large quantities at once and store the excess in warehouses. In 1979, the US government passed a tax law that stated that publishers would be taxed on books that were stored in warehouses after a year of being printed. Publishers, however, worked out that it was still cheaper to do large print runs and risk the possibility of them being left with excess copies than have to do reprints. If a book was not selling, they would donate these books to organisations such as Books For Africa and could even charge a small handling fee. This of course means, that the books being donated are books that have already proved to be unpopular amongst US readers. Saul further tells me how many US companies would fund large shipments of books because of the tax breaks on them. Even though, these books were coming from remainder stocks, and often donated with only a small handling fee, they could record it at the full sale value of the books. Saul, says for example, that an organisation could order a shipload of $20 000 worth of books from IBB to ship to Africa, but could write it off as $140 000.
But even though people are making money it should not matter if it means children are receiving reading material when previously they had none but unfortunately, as Saul has shown, a lot of what is being sent are not even in the right languages or at all relevant to the context where they are being received. This begs the question, what is happening to the unreadable material. We know that in the US, most of this material being donated was heading to landfills, this is a fact made obvious by many of the organisations. Better World books for example state that two billion pounds of books go into American landfills each year, they continue by proudly saying their donations divert these books instead to places in Africa. It is clear that these organisations are not blatantly telling people to rather dump their books in African landfills. Instead, they are saying why not donate your books rather than throw them away but it is hard to imagine that LSSAT and microwave cooking books are ending up anywhere but landfills once shipped to Liberia.
In 2012, AllAfrica published an article questioning the whereabouts of the 1.2 million books that were donated by George Bush. It had been four years and various public schools and libraries that were supposed to benefit from the donation remained empty. When asking Saul, she couldn’t say where the books went either. AllAfrica say there is suspicion that they were sold in the private sector, a common occurrence of donated goods that come from the US to parts of Africa. Andrew Brooks’ study on clothes being donated to Africa highlights how clothes are more often sold in informal market spaces than freely distributed. If you hit the streets of Johannesburg, South Africa you will find a variety of books by American authors that journalist Griffin Shea believes are coming from the large containers of excess books from the US.
The discrepancy of availability and prices of American and British books versus local material in the African informal and formal book markets are astonishing, even in countries with prominent local publishing industries. Locally published books are still always harder to find and cost a lot more on average than a book imported by foreign publishers or through informal passages. In a TED Talks, Chimamanda Adichie speaks about growing up and only being able to read British and American books, because those were widely available while African novels were scarce. Adichie says: ‘the unintended consequence was that I did not know that people like me could exist in literature’. Adichie, who knew she wanted to be a writer at a young age, found that all her characters and places she wrote about were foreign; they were not like the people and communities she grew up around:
All my characters were white and blue-eyed. They played in the snow. They ate apples. And they talked a lot about the weather, how lovely it was that the sun had come out... We didn't have snow. We ate mangoes. And we never talked about the weather, because there was no need to.
She thought it was these foreign elements that defined what it was to be literary until she was introduced to writers like Chinua Achebe and Camara Laye, who taught her that literary characters could be people like her. Saul, further points to how a lot of the time, even when the books are in good shape, or targeted for children, and end up in the places that need them, the stories are not culturally appropriate especially in the Young Adult genre. Saul says that often books that are age appropriate for American children are often not for children of the same age in other cultures: ‘children in America are comfortable with topics like sex, ghouls and goblins, but things like this would be considered very verboten for children in Liberia she says.
Adichie and Saul highlight the importance of the development of local publishing in both areas where the industry is almost non-existent as well as in places such as Nigeria, Ghana and South Africa where there is a strong industry but the cost of publishing is still inhibitive. Saul through International Book Bank has been funding publishing projects in Liberia where publishing is almost non-existent but there is a rich culture of storytelling. They are using Ghana’s existing industry to try help with the printing and production of the books.
Saul and IBB have also developed an intellectual property course that is free online for publishers to encourage collaborations by different African publishers so that books published from local perspectives in local languages can be translated and modified to serve other communities around Africa. IBB believe that often issues of copyright and intellectual property transfer impede these mutually beneficial arrangements.
The money spent on shipping large amounts of books from America could further be given to existing local publishing companies, to print larger quantities of books. Theses books could be bought and donated to communities that need them. This would in turn decrease the cost of production per book allowing local books to be sold for cheaper, and therefore making them more widely available.
It is clear, that the old donating structures still widely used today are out-dated and not useful and highlight how countries in Africa are still greatly misunderstood and misrepresented by powers in the West. These organisations and the discourse around donating books to Africa undermine the rich wealth of literature coming from the continent, as well as the authors and publishers producing it. These contemporary African books are doing work in representing the African experience in robust, authentic and contemporary ways that resist reductionist stereotypes of the continent. It may be time that Africa starts donating their books to the West.