Those who set out on entrepreneurial ventures in contexts very different from their own often cite “inspirational” books (adventure stories, essays on development, foreign poetry). Is there a book that pushed you to go, or that made you feel part of a narrative closer to your own ambitions? I don’t think there’s a single book […]

Mkuki na Nyota is an independent publishing house, founded in 1981 in response to the absence of quality local publishing in Tanzania. We put a series of questions about the independence of African literature to the head of the publishing house. Four decades on from its founding, what are the main lessons you’ve drawn from […]

Amazon knows what you’ve read, what you’ve bought, what you looked at while scrolling through social media. An independent bookshop, by contrast, is perhaps the only place where a book can still surprise you: does that function have economic value, or is it a cultural battle fought “at a loss”? Independent bookshops fight exactly this […]