Bibi Bakare-Yusuf

Bibi Bakare-Yusuf Hon. FRSL (born 1970) is a Nigerian academic, writer and editor from Lagos, Nigeria. She is the co-founder of the publishing company Cassava Republic Press in 2006 in Abuja. Bakare-Yusuf was elected an Honorary Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 2019, as well as having been selected as a Yale World Fellow, a Desmond Tutu Fellow and a Frankfurt Book Fair Fellow.

Quotes

• It is not enough for us to say we must tell our own stories if we don’t equally think or talk about the enabling infrastructure that supports the generation of those stories, the infrastructure that enables the circulation of ideas and the flow of knowledge.
  • [1] Bibi Bakare-Yusuf speaking about the need to not just write stories but also make sure it circulates.

• It is publishers who take stories from their raw state and turn them into food, food that may nourish or poison us. We have to talk about and acknowledge the unseen infrastructure that ensures that books are in circulation, because books, unlike print media or blogs, offer us some of the densest, extended, and interpretive conversations we can have about the world around us.
  • [2] Bibi Bakare-Yusuf at the 2018 Abantu Book Festival speaking on the importance of publishers

• It is also through books that some of the most enduring and pernicious images about Africa and black people persist. Yet, books also have a redemptive potential and plenitude. It is through books that we come to learn and read about each other as Africans across our differences and continue to have a reason to gather…
  • [3] Bibi Bakare-Yusuf speaks about Books.

• The African literary space is most likely the only artifact of culture in this neo-colonial moment that has yet to cut loose from its colonial mooring.
  • [4] Bibi Bakare-Yusuf speaks about how African literature is still copied from the West.

• What I am interested in is how we create what I am calling the African archival future which will then form part of a global archive. Publishing for me is therefore essentially the work of archival creation and a potential tool of power and control, a tool that helps to shape how we view ourselves and make sense of the world.
  • [5] Bibi Bakare-Yusuf on diversifying the voices of African literature

• We need to produce our own data in awesome, saturating quantities so that our own archives come to drown out the noise and the interpretive bias of the excessively confident outsiders who have little regard for our multi-tongued, polyrhythmic, polytheistic and metaphysical horizon.
  • [6] Bibi Bakare-Yusuf speaking about the completely inaccurate representation of our culture by outsiders.

• Perhaps the biggest challenge of publishing in Nigeria is that it’s close to impossible to find a consistently reliable local printer. After several disastrous experiences, we made the decision to print overseas.
  • [7] Bibi Bakare-Yusuf on the struggle at home on publishing

• Digital innovation is likely to have an even stronger impact across Africa than in the West, simply because of the historic lack of access to books... Digital innovation is allowing us to build our audience base through social media. And because we have a single platform for markets —Nigeria and the rest of the world–audiences are able to interact, connect and engage each other in a way that they would not have previously done.
  • [8] Bibi Bakare speaking about the impact of technology on easing the business of publishing and circulating books.

• ...In the age of new socializing media, who can deny that a book as a material object is infinitely richer and more meaningful than any of the arts? This is because, through the thick description they enable, all the other artifacts of civilization (music, fine arts, film, science, etc) can be folded and compressed into that singular object. In the book, worlds, cultures, emotions, and habits of being are collected, dissected, and revealed to us so that we can have different voices to converse with, in that quiet moment of aloneness or to whip out to stimulate debate, dialogue, or foment a revolution.
  • [9] Bibi-Bakare on archives and publishing books.

• There are some infrastructure challenges but they are challenges that I see as opportunities. In Nigeria and across the continent, you have a publisher, who is also the distributor, who also warehouses the book, who is also doing the bookselling as well. But that is an opportunity because it means that we also have a direct relationship with consumers.
  • [10] Bibi Bakare Yusuf speaking about the Cassava Republic and the rise of Nigeria’s publishing Houses.