ReferencesThe Quiet Struggle: Libraries and Information for Africa. By Paul Sturges and Richard Neill. London: Mansell, 1990. 172 p. ISBN 07201‑2019‑5. $55.00.
This is a book that covers a wide range of issues connected with “the quiet struggle” for information and knowledge in sub‑Saharan Africa. It is a panoramic, philosophical discussion, rather than a gathering of facts and statistics. There are numerous generalizations, some of which would require fuller evidence to be acceptable, and many intriguing proposals.
The context of reading in Africa is illuminated in the first chapter: widespread illiteracy, the book famine, the state of publishing, government suppression of information. Some of the pictures are overdrawn; in Nigeria, for example, one would not say that “It is a context which can be tragically witnessed by a casual visit to almost any rural primary class, where it is not uncommon to see thirty or more children sharing three or four old and battered textbooks with no additional reading material available” (p. 6). But essentially the situation is well portrayed.
“Planning and development in Africa is being carried out on an imperfect knowledge base” (p. 51). This problem has been stressed in several reports (World Bank, Organization of African Unity), but has not led to concrete proposals or actions. Unfortunately, “Africa’s libraries are, almost without exception, the last places that the serious researcher would visit in order to find information concerning Africa” (p. 56). African grey literature is virtually absent from the shelves, and “the bulk of research on Africa, done outside the continent, is totally inaccessible to Africa” (p. 62). Information technology should be helping, but “as yet there is little evidence that it is contributing any solutions” (p. 63). In addition to improvements in collection of materials, African librarians need to see that decision makers are given access to relevant documents. Librarians have not done this yet, in part, the authors believe, because the library system is based on inappropriate Western models.
The chapter on “the imprint of the West” raises important philosophical issues, particularly about public libraries. As an institution, the public library has been inherited from the European colonizing powers (along with the structure of education). Sturges and Neill argue that Africans have rejected public libraries because they are Western in character and because they are print oriented. Further investigation is needed on this point, for not all Africans have turned away from libraries. A 1980 survey by the National Library of Nigeria indicated that 58 percent of adults saw the public library as an important institution for self education, and 18 percent saw it as important for access to public documents and for research. [1] It is also questionable whether technical service approaches of the West are wrong for Africa, leading to a “gross waste of human time and effort” (p. 80). It is not invariably true (not at all in Nigeria) that the road to full professional education is closed to paraprofessionals. And while the authors believe that the impetus toward creating a library leadership cadre that emerged from the 1953 Ibadan Seminar was “the single most important factor inhibiting the change that is necessary if librarianship in Africa is to survive” (p. 84), it could as well be held that the idea of such pioneers as John Harris and Harold Lancour put librarianship on a solid professional base.
It is indeed true that public librarianship in Africa has yet to reach the large majority in the rural areas who cannot read. But to maintain a theory of librarianship based on illiteracy (“repackaging of information...and delivering it in the form of audio tapes ...”; p. 114) is to assume that illiteracy is a permanent condition. Perhaps a philosophy of library and information work in Africa is desirable, and if so it should be utilitarian. The authors recognize that there are more subtle information needs in the urban areas. Finally there call for “a new library and information paradigm, based on the recognition that poverty dictates a revision of priorities” (p. 121). The blueprint is not given in the book, aside from suggestions like those cited above, because it “will have to emerge from the new generation of Africa’s library and information workers themselves” (p. 157); in the new model “self reliance will be the principal cornerstone” (p. 158).
In addition to a readable, illuminating, and thought‑stirring work, the authors have provided a useful bibliography of about 150 books and articles, many of them recent publications.
1. Library Services in the Metropolitan Area of Lagos, ed. S. B. Aje (Lagos: National Library of Nigeria, 1980), p. 207.
Basil Amaeshi is Director of Library Studies, Imo State University, Okigwe, Nigeria. For biographical information see TWL 1‑1.
© 1993 Dominican University
Citation
Amaeshi, Basil, “Book Review: The Quiet Struggle: Libraries and Information for Africa” Third World Libraries, Volume 3, Number 2 (Fall 1993).