Every few months, the same headline resurfaces somewhere on this continent: Africans don't read. I have heard it in policy meetings, donor briefings, and from booksellers explaining slow sales. It has been repeated so often that it has hardened into accepted fact. ALSO READ: Who will truly lead our national book policy? But after years of running a bookshop, curating reading campaigns, and now building a publishing house, I began to wonder whether we have simply been asking the wrong question. ALSO READ: Artificial intelligence, books and jobs Perhaps Africa does not have a reading problem. Perhaps it has a book ecosystem problem. That distinction changes everything about where we look for answers. ALSO READ: Where are books in Rwanda's budget? I ran a bookshop for years, and one thing quietly troubled me: I sold far more foreign titles than African ones. Not because readers preferred foreign stories, but because those were the books that reliably arrived, in the right quantities, at prices that kept a bookshop viable. African titles, when I could find them, often came in small, irregular print runs that made stocking them a gamble. I was not choosing against our own writers; the ecosystem was choosing for me. ALSO READ: The book industry: An overlooked engine of job creation I have also curated reading campaigns that I believed in deeply—campaigns that filled classrooms with energy for a season and then quietly disappeared once the funding cycle ended or the champion behind them moved on. I do not think this happened because readers stopped caring. It happened because we kept building enthusiasm on top of systems that were too fragile to sustain it. Every society reads what is available and relevant. Walk through any African market and you will see people reading—on their phones, studying for examinations, or reading scriptures. The question I keep returning to is a gentler one: What books are actually available to them, and can they access them affordably? A book's journey begins long before a reader opens it. Someone writes it, edits it, finances it, prints it, distributes it, and shelves it. I have worked at nearly every point in that chain, and when one link weakens, the whole system feels the strain. Financing publishing remains difficult. Paper is largely imported, keeping printing costs high, while small print runs make local books expensive before a single copy is sold. None of this is the fault of any single actor; it is simply how young book economies function before the missing pieces are put in place. Distribution is where I have felt this most personally. I have produced books that travelled no farther than the city in which they were printed—not for lack of interest, but because our distribution networks remain thin and many communities have no bookshop nearby. Transport costs eat into already narrow margins, and a book that cannot travel might as well not exist for the reader waiting three towns away. Technology is beginning to change some of this, and that is encouraging. Digital marketplaces can, in theory, put an African title in front of a reader without the need for a truck or a border crossing. But digital access still depends on affordable data and devices, and until that gap narrows, technology alone will not solve what physical distribution has struggled with for decades. Libraries could help enormously if we invested in making them vibrant again—places for storytelling and community, not simply storage. A child should never have to own a book to become a reader, and a well-run library can do more to foster a reading culture than any single campaign I have ever curated. Local languages deserve more of our creative energy, too, so that children can see themselves reflected in the books they read. It is easier to fall in love with reading when the first stories you encounter sound like the ones told in your own home. I raise these issues not with despair but with curiosity. I believe Africa already has the ingredients—talented writers, growing literacy, and genuine institutional will—to build something remarkable if we continue strengthening the systems around them. So, the next time someone tells me Africa does not read, I ask a different question. What kind of ecosystem have we built for readers to thrive in? Readers do not appear by accident; they emerge from ecosystems that we choose, together, to build. The writer is an author, publisher, and market systems expert.
