‘The Call to Duty’: OUP in East Africa

Abstract

The first manager of the Eastern Africa branch of OUP, Charles Richards, wrote in his memoirs of the sense of vocation that inspired him to go to work in Africa: the desire to help ‘those countries towards the development of literature through which the peoples of those countries could express themselves’.¹ Richards had worked in Nairobi initially as a Church Missionary Society bookseller and publisher from 1935 to 1948, and his rhetoric is heavily reminiscent of the nineteenth-century civilising mission — in Edward Said’s terms, ‘a “duty” to natives, the requirement in Africa and elsewhere to establish colonies for the “benefit” of the natives’.² Richards then went on to manage the East African Literature Bureau from 1948 to 1963, still inspired by a faith in the transformative power of books in Africa:

I believe in what Churchill once said — ‘Books in all their variety provide the means by which civilisation can go triumphantly forward’…. I took on this work in order to help in the development of all aspects of the provision of the printed word.³