African Literature Today

The history of the critical journal African Literature Today which I edited for some thirty-three years should give encouragement to scholars in universities of the developing world where access to publication is often difficult and producing a journal for international circulation almost impossible. Its story therefore, as I recounted it when I retired from the editorship, is worth repeating.

The first number of the journal, which came out in 1968, was the result of a confluence of enthusiasms, mine for the new literature of Africa, that of Heinemann Educational Books which had the largest list of African writers, and James Currey, Keith Sambrook and Alan Hill, who looked after that pioneering list. The journal had been preceded by a much humbler cyclostyled Bulletin of African Literature, which was a direct result of an African Literature conference in 1964, held at Fourah Bay. It was this lowly mimeographed Bulletin that caught the eye of Keith Sambrook. The purpose of the journal was to provide a forum for the examination of African literature, to open the literature to both academic and general readers particularly within Africa itself.