Chakava’s birthday present: I am offering him a new job

Early next week, Henry Chakava, the iconic publisher, joins our exclusive and distinguished Active Septuagenarians Club (ASC). In other words, he turns 70. I must admit I was rather startled by the realisation.

I had always taken him as an age-mate, and finding out that he was all of two years younger than me was, well — a pleasant surprise. He seems to have been there with us as far back as I can remember.

My children and his were schoolmates, if not classmates, at the same institution just off James Gichuru Road. He even played tennis, like me, although an attack of whitlow got him off the courts before he had the fortune, or misfortune, of facing me across the net.

Professionally, most of us academic workmen and women, especially in the Humanities, easily and readily regard Dr Chakava as our colleague, although his involvement with campus teaching has been minimal, especially in East Africa. The reason is that he and his publishing ventures have given us the most vital tools for our trade, books.

SYNONYMOUS WITH EAST AFRICAN PUBLISHING

For it is a truism to say that Chakava is almost synonymous with East African publishing. He might have been rather young when we were flirting with the early players in the industry, like the faith-based imprints such as Kabgayi in Rwanda or Marianum in Uganda, and the pioneer indigenous entrepreneurs, like Gakaara in Karatina.

He was not there either at the arrival of the early overseas operators in the field, like Nelson, Macmillan, Longman and the Oxford University Press. Nor would he have submitted competition manuscripts, as we did, to the Eagle Press, the publishing arm of the East African Common Services Commission, a precursor of the current Kenya Literature Bureau.

Chakava entered publishing in the early 1970s, soon after graduation from UoN. Though apparently cut out for an academic career, the empirical philosopher in him seems to have prevailed over the “English” romantic (he read Philosophy and English/Literature) and persuaded him to join a more lucrative trade than academics were ever going to be.

But it appears he ended up enjoying the best of both worlds. While paying better than most of the scholarly jobs of his campus friends, publishing seemed to give him as many challenges and as much job-satisfaction as any of the teaching or research slots in which he might have ended up at the university.

Moreover, he had an advantage over those of us who went into pure academics. Instead of narrowing down into dubious specialisations, knowing more and more about less and less, Chakava broadened out into a vast multidisciplinary knowledge field, comprising everything from cultural studies to the physical and applied sciences for which he had to publish books.

SINGLE-MINDED PERSISTENCE

Most importantly, however, Chakava has earned his laurels mostly through his single-minded persistence and adherence to his publishing vocation. At his level of operation and with his colossal managerial experience, there was no shortage of offers and temptations to move into other, more glamorous and more remunerative posts. But Chakava would not succumb to any of these. He seems to have decided long ago that he was born to publish.

Indeed, his unspoken motto seems to be: publish ye first the text and all these other things shall be added unto ye. Not that it has been easy. It never was, and it still is not. Publishing in Africa is a shaky and risky business, as Chakava points out in his own book, Publishing in Africa: One Man’s Perspective, and only the totally committed can survive in it as long as Dr Chakava has.

I remember mentioning to a pleasant young student in York, England, in 1966, that I was reading African Literature at university. His innocent reaction was, “Oh, it hadn’t occurred to me that people write books that part of the world.”

Ten years into uhuru, just about the time Chakava embarked on his career, attitudes and perceptions had not changed much. The assumption was that books were published abroad and only sold to the few Africans who cared to read them, or had to read them, like the school kids.

I personally heard on the grapevine in the early 1970s that Bob Markham, who I believe hired Chakava at the Heinemann Educational Books Nairobi office, was more of an accomplished book seller than a publisher. The man from Vokoli can thus rightly claim as his own achievement the long journey of that office from H.E.B. Nairobi to present-day East African Educational Publishers.

But even the eventual breakthrough in the late 1960s and early 1970s was not a bed of roses.

The dawn of the post-uhuru tyranny, when academics and writers were viewed as subversive enemies of the state, did not make life easy for publishers like Chakava, who had published most of the work of such authors as Ngugi wa Thiong’o and Micere Mugo. Chakava does not say much about his survival tactics in those difficult times, but he must have had to tread very carefully to avoid a fatal slip and fall.

Then there is the current cut-throat and sometimes fratricidal competition in the industry. We all — authors, publishers, book sellers, teachers, educational administrators and the like — seem to be caught up in an endless book war. It is not easy for people like Chakava, who might remember operating in a relatively saner world.

I have myself had confrontations with Chakava, about my works published by him. But I never fail to realise that today’s world is very different from that of over 40 years ago, when we entered the arena.

Anyway, for his efforts, and for his staying power, I am offering him a new job as a birthday present. It is something to do with the recognition of all our authors, both living and gone, most of whom he has published.

Happy birthday, Dr Henry Miyinzi Chakava. Get ready to start working for me.

Prof Bukenya is one of the leading scholars of English and Literature in East Africa