I lost my small finger to Kanu attack dogs

Back in the day when getting a manuscript published was akin to smuggling a gun out of a police station, Mr Henry Chakava did the unthinkable; he published the story of a Kamiti Maximum Security Prison convict who sounded more like a gung-ho man of the underworld than a credible writer.

Despite the risks involved, the book that rolled off the presses, John Kiriamiti’s My Life in Crime, proved a hot cake in Nairobi’s bookshops and remains a best-seller to date.

But Chakava’s dare-devil exploits in his life-long love affair with the written word did not stop at this. In another instance, he lost his finger in the cruel hands of the dreaded State secret agents during the oppressive Kanu days.

He was persecuted for what he later learnt was publishing Ngugi wa Thiong’o, who had been branded an enemy of the state by the Moi regime.

“I had been receiving threats for some time, being trailed by unknown people, but the biggest blow came in 1987 when we published Matigari ma Njirungi (The Return of the Heroes),” says the chairman of East African Educational Publishers. State agents carted away 700 copies of the book and asked him to take the invoice to State House. He never bothered, nor did the State ever pay him.

“Then one day they attacked me on the road, breaking my small right finger. I underwent many operations in Nairobi and London. I know people who went into exile for less than what some of us went through,” he told Saturday Nation at his house in Lavington Green, Nairobi, this week.

Images of Chinua Achebe (who died last Friday in Boston, US), Ngugi and Taban lo Liyong — writers who became legends in their own time — take the pride of place in his study.

The recipient of an honorary doctorate from Oxford Brookes University in the United Kingdom explains what kept him going in those difficult days.

“I would say sheer ignorance and naiveté, though Ngugi would be angry if he hears me say so. But if I had known what I was up against, I would have thought twice,” says the father of three girls.

What is ironical, though, is that Moi honoured his works in the publishing industry with an award.

Despite accepting it, he has no kind words for the award.

“I don’t see the logic in these awards which don’t even have citations. I think I was given the HSC because of my then MP Moses Mudavadi, who was the patron of the Vihiga Cultural Society, which I founded and ran for 10 years.

“The only meaningful award was the Moran of the Burning Spear, which I was given by President Kibaki in 2006 for my work as the board chairman of the Kenya Institute of Administration.”

Mr Chakava has been described variously as a risk-taker, a fabulous editor and a literary revolutionary. But the best adjective to describe this towering Kenyan publisher must be ‘optimist’.  He trod where few local publishers dared, and earned quite a reputation — and a tidy sum — out of it.

“Chakava has been my publisher for over 30 years. His impact on the African publishing industry and on intellectual production in Kenya, East Africa and Africa is second to none. In so many ways he is a visionary pioneer. Without him we would not be talking seriously about the possibilities of publishing in African languages.

“He has done more to ensure that Kiswahili has all the intellectual resources to enable meaningful scholarship: after all he has published the swahili translations of nearly all the African writers on the continent,” said Prof Ngugi on Saturday.

Over the years, he has learnt to balance his needs as a publisher and the demands of authors, though he says some authors are at times unrealistic about their demands.

“Because the author’s name appears on the book, they think that they are the owners, but a book has many players — writers, printers and booksellers.”

He explains the intricacies: “Most of the time, we negotiate for 10 per cent royalties. Authors think we take the remaining 90 per cent, yet we give booksellers up to 40 per cent discount, and when printers take between 25 and 35 per cent, publishers remain with as little as five or 10 per cent profit,” he says.

The problem is more complex when dealing with young authors, he reveals.

“Authors had better accept 10 per cent and sell 10,000 books than insist on 40 per cent and sell 1,000,” he advises.

Mr Chakava has crossed paths with great men of letters like Chinua Achebe, Ngugi and Taban.

“I first met Achebe at the office of chairman Heinemann in 1973 in London, and we thereafter had lunch. What impressed me about him was his simplicity,” he says.

And it’s Achebe who thrust Chakava to global customers.

“Achebe used to introduce me in conferences as the only African publisher he knows who pays royalties.

“In the 1980s, when there was no foreign exchange to import books, I bought rights to publish his books in Kenya, which we do to date.”

He links Achebe to the growth of children’s literature in Kenya.

“At one Zimbabwe book fair, I asked Achebe: ‘why don’t you give me all your children’s books to stir up this genre in Kenya?’ He gave me four or five books, which I published, and invited him here to launch them.”

Yet Chakava is a worried man. He lists four challenges that could choke the  industry.

“The first is the issue of copyright and the advent of the Internet. Copyright has always been used as a means of owning knowledge, but some schools of thought are advocating for creative commons whose aim is to expand the boundaries of knowledge as opposed to limiting it in the age of copyright, and the internet could not have made matters easier for these advocates.”

The other problem is corruption involving government officers who authorise books to be studied in schools.

“Piracy is another. I don’t know how much we lose to this monster, but we often find our books in Zambia, Zimbabwe, Tanzania and Uganda, where they are openly sold in the streets,” he says, linking it to a weak legal system that lets crooks off the hook.

He identifies technology as another threat in the form of e-books and e-libraries.

“We welcome digital books but our state of development cannot absorb them. It will only help to widen the technology gap,” he says.

Even with technology, he says, the publishing industry will not be rendered irrelevant.

“The saving grace is that publishing will not change. It can only mutate. It may take a different form. Even in the West, they can’t do without hard copy.” But successful as he may be, there are pertinent issues that still haunt him. Things that have got to do with his schooling days.

“I really hurt when I am referred to as the man who ran away. And Okot P’Bitek was particularly very insistent on this,” says the 67-year-old entrepreneur. This despite later becoming a self-educated academic with tens of works published.

Some of his books are Publishing in Africa: One Man’s Experience; Private Enterprise Publishing in Kenya, A Long Struggle for Emancipation, Publishing Partnerships between Africa and The North: A Dream or a Possibility? and Dealing with the British.

“You see, I was a very bright young man who everybody expected to get a PhD. But I ran into problems with my Masters in Philosophy Studies when I didn’t get a supervisor,” he says.

Never looked back

His refuge in literature was to no avail as his supervisor advised him to look for a publishing firm to work for as he sought a scholarship for the young Chakava.

But once in the publishing industry, Chakava, the holder of a double First Class degree in Literature and Philosophy, never looked back after he was ‘captured.’

“Three months down the line at Heinemann, I was taken to London for training and from there things moved too fast. I was made a managing director before I was 30, I married, I got a child... I found myself captured.

“It is true I wanted to be an academic or an investigative journalist. But those first five years after college — between 1972 and 1977 — were very difficult. My mind was torn between my studies, which I enjoyed, and the publishing world, into which I was being thrust.”

Then the turbulent days of the 1980s came when there was a clamour in Kenya for the book industry to move from its multinational base to local, home grown businesses.

This checkered shift gave him no little anguish, with taunts coming fast and furious from all directions.

“They would say: look, here is a black man who is going to bed with multinationals. The harshest of these critics at the time was John Nottingham, then head of East African Publishing House. To have been associated then with multinationals was like having a terrible disease.”

Times were hard.

“They were always rigid, and when, for example, I proposed we publish The Trial of Dedan Kimathi, they said they had no space for it yet after I went ahead and published it, they came and bought rights.” The same would happen when he went into publishing in African languages.

This high-headedness would be instrumental in sustaining a company that had been weaned from Heinemann, the mother company in London in 1986 without a coin in inheritance.

In 1984, the company’s publishing portfolio was 90 per cent local, and “that is when I realised I was making money for a foreign company.

“I then started agitating for local shareholding in the company. I pushed for a controlling 60 per cent local shareholding. The Kiswahili course by Zacharia Zani would see the nascent company feed itself,” he says proudly of the late Kiswahili author.

With a self-effacing mien, Mr Chakava seems to enjoy deprecating himself. He insists, for instance, that his long stint at the helm of the Kenya Publishers Association, between 1982 and 1992, split the association down the middle.

“But no one else would accept the position at the time. Here was minister Oloo Aringo driving the state publishing agenda, and then there was the pull and push between multinationals and the local houses.”

Having edited books since the 1970s, does he see any outstanding author in Kenya ready to walk in Ngugi’s footsteps?

“The Mau Mau war of liberation inspired many writers, but we now need to move on. Urban life and modern challenges cry out for writing, but I don’t see a lot of that. When you read Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s work, for example, you see clearly she is a disciple of Achebe, but she has moved on.”

He also sees “a bit of renaissance in Uganda and South Africa, though that is always the case in post-traumatic situations.”

“Perhaps we need something to shake things up here,” he says with a light touch. But, seriously, perhaps Ngugi’s own children could succeed him. We will soon release a novel by Mukoma wa Ngugi. Also, Wanjiku, his daughter, has done an intriguing novel, which falls in the genre of novels I like. These are the ones with a search, movement then denouncement,” says Chakava.

It is the story of foreigners who make girls pregnant and then force them to abort in order to sell body parts.

“I like investigative, detective novels with great attention to detail. I devoured Conan Doyle as early as my high school days at Kamusinga,” says the man born in Vokoli in Vihiga County. He is the son of a businesswoman who brought him up and his four siblings after his father died.

He says while reading Achebe’s latest book, There Was a Country, he noticed he had unrivalled sense of precision, but could not help noticing that the 82 year-old author was scratching the bottom of the barrel.

“I was amazed at his memory, that he could remember the dinners he had several years ago. Even then, I noticed it was lighter than his earlier writings.”

Not surprisingly, Chakava, having been at the top of one of East Africa’s leading publishing houses for more than 40 years, is familiar with almost all the who-is-who in African writing industry, and could not shy away from giving his assessment.

“Taban Lo Liyong’ is revered a lot in Sudan with a road named after him. But I think he is a good accident of history.

“He had American education which prepared him to know something about everything. For this, his knowledge is wide, but not deep.”

On the Nobel laureate Soyinka and why he could have been favoured over Achebe, he says: “Soyinka is easier to link to the Greek mythology and the Western concept of the canon. But Achebe was unique.”

He has only kind words for Ngugi, another literary giant he publishes.

“Ngugi is a wonderful person to work with. If you are his publisher he will never take calls or answer mails from other publishers, but he will mention to you that so and so is chasing him,” Mr Chakava reveals.

The best person he has worked with, he says, is the late Zacharia Zani, author of Masomo ya Msingi.

But as a publisher of longstanding, Mr Chakava has also had difficult times. One of the most difficult jobs in his career, he says was publishing My Life in Crime.

“I don’t know whether we received it on toilet paper or in what form, but reading the small handwriting was very punishing. Yet the author was in jail, hence we could not contact him to clarify names, places and apparent contradictions,” he says.

Another one was the conception of the blockbuster Oral Literature: A School Certificate Course by Kichamu Akivaga and Asenath Bole Odaga.

“I had initially approached my former teacher at Kamusinga, Henry Owuor Anyumba, who dilly-dallied for several months before telling me to take it to someone else.”

But the real nightmare was yet to come. After Akivaga and Odaga had finished their bit, he sent Mr Paul Njoroge, one of his staff, to work on the book at the University of Nairobi.

“After two weeks and when I was expecting the finished book, he told me his car had been broken into and everything, including the manuscript, had been stolen. We had to start over again and even though the book has been a huge success, some of its richness was lost.”

Besides overseeing EAEP, whose prime mission is to provide school texts for primary, secondary and college students, Chakava also serves as chairman of Kenway Publications, which concentrates on biographies of interesting personalities.

And while he celebrates biographies that are illuminating, he has a dim view of autobiographies, which he mostly serve to “cleanse the subjects.”