Publishing the Rebel: Heinemann African Writers Series and the Minoritization of Biafran Voices

Abstract

This paper interrogates the archival and literary evidence for Heinemann’s minoritization of Biafran voices and the politicisation of publishing them during the Nigeria-Biafra war. It argues that significant publisher-author correspondence and unpublished materials reflecting the perspectives of Biafran authors, housed at the African Writers Series’ Archive at the University of Reading, function as research tools for unveiling the publisher’s ambivalent circumstances in publishing the war. Relying on a postcolonial publishing theoretical strategy, and deploying archival literary methodology, the article reads S.O. Mezu’s Behind the Rising Sun (1970) and Elechi Amadi’s Sunset in Biafra (1973) against a selection of archival materials relating to their publication as co-texts. This method of analysing archival and literary materials offers more nuanced perspectives than existing traditional literary criticism on the war has done towards understanding the Biafran question and reclaiming their minoritized voices in the historicization and publishing of the war.