Poda-Poda Stories interviewed Professor Miriam Conteh-Morgan, Acting University Librarian at the University of Sierra Leone, to shed light on how Sierra Leonean literature has been archived, and accessed, especially in a world where technology and digitization has become very important.
Thank you for granting Poda-Poda Stories this interview. Please tell us a little bit about yourself: your academic background and your current work.
I am Miriam Conteh-Morgan, currently Acting University Librarian at the University of Sierra Leone. In that position, I coordinate the professional activities of the libraries of the three constituent colleges that make up the University. Each college library has its own head, and I head the one at IPAM. I came into librarianship 21 years ago after 18 years pursuing my first career.
After graduation with a BA (Div II) from Fourah Bay College in 1981, I taught English and history at the secondary school level, first at my alma mater, St. Joseph’s Secondary School and then at Albert Academy. During this period, I took two study leaves, first to do a Diploma in Education at FBC (1984) and then a master’s in Linguistics and English Language Teaching at Leeds University in the UK (1987). In 1989, I joined the Linguistics Department at FBC and left three years later for the United States, in 1992. There, I continued teaching English (mostly writing courses) and African Literature at various universities in Ohio and also English at Harvard University during the summers of 1996, 1997 and 1998. However, after so many years of teaching, I was ready for new challenges, though I preferred to stay in academia. So that’s why I chose librarianship, and completed a Master of Library (and Information) Science degree in 1999, with a specialisation in academic librarianship.
In December 1999, I was hired by The Ohio State University (OSU), the institution where I had been teaching African Literature, as a reference librarian. That proved to be a very stimulating and academically rich experience – it is a top tier research institution – and there I grew intellectually and professionally, published articles and books and was promoted Associate Professor in 2005. For personal reasons, I resigned to return home in November 2013, back to University of Sierra Leone, but this time in a different capacity at another constituent college, as head of the IPAM Library. I like to quip that the hills and valleys of Sierra Leone echoed their cry in my heart!
What an impressive journey, and well done for coming back home. What do you currently do at the University of Sierra Leone?
I love my job at the University of Sierra Leone! In the 6-plus years I’ve been here, my main focus has been to enhance the teaching, research and learning experiences of our faculty and students by a) modernising the library collections through the acquisition of recent research print and electronic resources, b) enriching the delivery of library services using information and communication technologies and c) creating electronic pathways through which research from Sierra Leone flows much easier into the global space.
And I wear other hats. I am also the Assistant to the Deputy Vice-Chancellor of IPAM (deputy head of campus, that is); I serve as chair or member of numerous campus and university decision-making bodies and committees, supervise dissertations, and when time permits, I teach a course in either Communication Skills or Information and Knowledge Management.
From your experience in academia and research, do you think accessing Sierra Leonean literature has become easier recently, and what are some of these channels been used?
Let me start off at the continental level. African literature has exploded in terms of its creative energy and global reach in the last 20 years, I would say, and this is mainly due to factors among which are greater writer mobility, more publishing options and the accompanying higher visibility, and the teaching of African works in World Literature courses in the US and Europe. In other words, more African writers live, work and travel more widely within and outside Africa; there are now multiple pathways for publishing outside of the gatekeeping multinational outfits of previous decades (think Heineman’s African Writer Series or Longmans) – self-publishing, online outlets, co-publishing agreements between African and international publishers etc; and what some critics think is a “whitening” or “lightening” of themes and genres that pander to non-African sensibilities. All of these have made writing from Africa more global and easier to access, and consequently studied increasingly in universities around the world.
So having said all this, the question now is seeing how Sierra Leonean literature fits into that nexus. We would need to first take a closer look at its production. The traditional route of print publication is still patchy in Sierra Leone. There are really no real publishers to speak of except, perhaps, for Sierra Leonean Writers Series, for which its founder, Professor Osman Sankoh deserves high praise. With its mission “[t]o identify, encourage and support writers of Sierra Leonean origin and to publish and disseminate their works in Sierra Leone and in the world at large” (https://www.sl-writers-series.org/index.php/en/about-slws, accessed April 24, 2020), SLWS has single-handedly changed the direction of Sierra Leonean creative writing with publications in all literary genres, though poetry and novels dominate their list. Acclaimed and prolific writers such as Syl Cheyney-Coker and Lucilda Hunter have appeared under this imprint, as well as emerging ones; others have launched their writing careers there, having gone on to publish multiple titles with SLWS. There are other publishing houses that also put out titles (Gbanabom Hallowell, for example, who has been an SLWS author has also published his later collections under the SierrArts imprint) but I am not very sure about their staying power. Time will tell.
The next issue to examine is the writing itself. Are there enough writers in Sierra Leone? I really cannot answer that question but I can hazard a guess that not many who have the talent or who need to hone their skills are getting discovered and nurtured. This leads to more questions: what can we do to encourage more creative writing? On whom does the burden lie? Again, I don’t know, but I can offer a thought or two.
Maybe targeted publishing could be a propellant for emerging Sierra Leonean writers. By targeted here, I mean catering to a specific group of writers by creating a safer zone into which they can step and grow. I’m thinking of examples such as the feminist publishers in East Africa and South Africa, Femrite, and Modjaji respectively, which have done a phenomenal job of bringing more women’s voices into the African literary space. Edwidge-Renée Dro’s Abidjan Lit Collective has pulled together such books by Black women writers into what she calls a ‘feminist library’ so as ‘unearth’ their stories.
We may also need to look beyond the book publisher to create a wider space for showcasing literary works in Sierra Leone. Literary magazines are another avenue. It is common knowledge that many award-winning writers around the world first published their short stories, excerpts of full-length works and poems in literary magazines. As far as I know, none exists in the country. So what are we waiting for?
For now, a couple of major roadblocks to accessing Sierra Leonean literature in print in the country are the mere physical unavailability of books there, and the low return on investment for both writer and publisher. Writers put their time and energy into creating the works and publishers finance their production; however, there is hardly a bookstore in the country where the books can be sold and bought. And even if there were, reading has become such a dying pastime that I wonder how many people will want to buy a book for leisure reading, assuming, of course, that the book is even affordable. There’s much work to be done here. And as we know of course, book piracy remains the bane of writers and publishers. Respect for copyright is a problem in Sierra Leone, as evidenced by the multiplicity of pirated books on sale in street-side book stalls.
Luckily, there are other options that writers can pursue that may be worth their while. And that is, harnessing the power and reach of new technologies. Indeed a few, especially budding poets, are taking advantage of them to reach online audiences via social media. For example, there is Samuella Conteh who shares her beautiful, evocative poetry on Facebook (I don’t know whether she has a collection in print) and a young lady going by the Twitter handle @the WriterAdeola who tweets about her poetry performances. So even if some of these new writers may not have yet marked their voices in print, which would meet a very limited national audience anyway, they certainly have a bigger advantage in using electronic platforms, bearing in mind, on the other hand, of course that social media is itself limited to one’s own circle of friends or followers. Nevertheless, it could be more helpful than waiting for one’s work to appear in print, if ever.
The one digital medium that I don’t see being exploited much by Sierra Leonean writers, though, is podcasts. When in 2006 I started researching authors for the electronic research database I was developing at The Ohio State University, The Literary Map of Africa (https://library.osu.edu/literary-map-of-africa), I was amazed by the number of podcasts of radio and television interviews and readings by authors that I found. So I think this is one avenue that could help with discoverability and accessibility.
Also, I am not sure if the full potential of YouTube is being actively explored. There may be a few creatives with their own channels, or at least who are part of other groups’ channels. Vicky the Poet on the UNFPA SL channel comes to mind. This is an international organisation showcasing her, and they might have other platforms where her work lives. If so, that’s great. But use of global platforms over which one does not have total control could be of short-lived advantage. I mean, the platform could change from free to paid, for example, and many of our writers may come to lose their content if they cannot subscribe. Or worse still, the site could be taken down before one realises it – the impermanence of online resources is not a secret. And sometimes, the rules of engagement of hosting platforms stifle creativity; here I am thinking about, say, their rules on the use of profanity, even if the writer believes s/he is covered by poetic licence.
Another option not yet seen at all, let alone exploited, in Sierra Leone is the audiobook. I met a young lady at a conference in Ghana last year (2019) who had started that country’s first audio book digital platform a few years ago, whose reach is now worldwide. I follow Akoo Books (http://www.akoobooks.com/) keenly because I think that while the concept of audiobooks is pretty novel, they are simply modernising the ancient mode of storytelling, so it would be interesting to see how it evolves.
Do you think digital is the future for archiving Sierra Leonean stories, or do we have a long way to go for that to happen?
The exploitation of digital options in a country that has a dearth of book publishers can well be the lifeline Sierra Leonean literature needs. These could be online magazines, digital repositories and multimedia platforms where creative writings and related productions (podcasts, videos, music, art etc) could be archived. I definitely can see a revitalisation of and boost for our oral literary culture in the latter – - archived live storytelling performances, can you imagine?
These outlets, however, need to be home grown, I would argue. Local ownership is very important for some of the reasons I mentioned earlier. But first, there needs to be visionary Sierra Leoneans with the deep desire to believe in and start up such ventures, like Professor Sankoh did for print publishing. With regards to digital magazines, there are examples on the continent that can serve as models for us here: Jalada (https://jaladaafrica.org/), Kwani (http://kwani.org), Saraba (http://sarabamag.com) and Afridiaspora (https://www.afridiaspora.com/ ). So how about throwing a challenge to Poda-Poda?
With wider internet penetration in the country, cloud computing, coupled with a growing tech-savvy youth population, I foresee digital literature growing as well. That would certainly bend the arc of our literary culture. But whether or not Sierra Leoneans are ready for e-reading is another matter altogether. We’ll see if “build it and they will come” will work.
But while waiting, writers should step out of the cocoon to explore what’s happening in other African countries and submit their works there for publication. Perhaps they themselves are the future of Sierra Leonean literary production that we all have been waiting for.
