Paperback publisher Penguin has just celebrated 75 years of publishing. The ethos of publishing inexpensively produced books – they started out at sixpence a copy - that anyone can own is still very much what this company is about. I am sure that most British readers will have battered old copies of the orange-spined Penguins on their bookshelves. 2010 however also sees the end of a collection of Penguin publications called Great Ideas. Read the editor of the series signing-off here in this weekend’s Guardian (28 August.) This 5-part series of £4.99 little books enables readers to have unadorned extracts of 100 of the most important world-changing political, philosophical themes and ideas of the past 4,000 years. While the series includes Marcel Proust, Virginia Woolf, Georges Eliot and Orwell, Thomas Paine, Leon Trotsky and J.S. Mill and many others, readers of this blog will, I am sure not be surprised by the Euro-centricity of that list of names. The only Africans on the list are African-American W.E.B. Du Bois with extracts from his The Souls of Black Folks (originally published in 1903) entitled Of the Dawn of Freedom, probably the most important text of the struggles of black people in the US; and Nigerian Chinua Achebe’s 1974 lecture An Image of Africa, his riposte to the racism of Joseph Conrad and his novel Heart of Darkness. The Achebe book was published last week as part of the fifth and final series of twenty Great Ideas books and also includes his essay The Trouble with Nigeria (1984).
Penguin also has a series of twenty books called Great Journeys. In this collection you will find an extract from Olaudah Equiano’s autobiography, The Interesting Narrative and Other Writings (1789) entitled Sold as a Slave. It isn’t quite the same kind of ‘journey’ as some of the adventurers, explorers, and travel writers on the list, since of course Olaudah was first kidnapped and used as a slave in his African homeland, before eventually being shipped across the Atlantic to the US and the Caribbean, but I do have to admit it is nonetheless a ‘Great Journey’ as it became a crucial campaign document for the British opposition to the slave trade. There is also an extract from the Polish journalist Ryszard Kapuscinski’s collection of articles The Shadow of the Sun: My African Life, (2002) which is called The Cobra’s Heart. Finally, if you’d like to read about west Africa from the perspective of an English Victorian lady researcher/explorer, you might also like to pick up a copy of Mary Kingsley’s extract entitled The Congo and The Cameroons.
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