A book acquisition trip to Paris for the African Library

From Friday 14 to Sunday 16 March 2025, the Halle des Blancs Manteaux, in Paris' Marais district, was the scene of the fourth edition of the Salon du Livre Africain de Paris. Some 120 publishers, mostly from francophone African countries and France were represented at the fair, with Cameroon as guest of honour and Brazil as special guest. Every year, the fair attracts more visitors, particularly from the African diaspora in the Paris region. The fair is a vibrant meeting place of publishers and writers with their audiences, an event that clearly responds to a need in the diaspora and gives African publishers and authors an opportunity to reach audiences abroad.

As guest of honour, Cameroon is prominently represented and easy to find: when the doors open to the public on Friday at 3 pm, I walk right into the stands of Cameroonian publishers. First purchase for in my wheeled suitcase (with which I go easily up and down between the fair and my nearby hotel): the first issue of the scholarly journal Nouvelle Pensée Africaine : Revue Internationale des Sciences, Cultures et Patrimoines / New African thought International Journal of Sciences, Culture and Heritage officially launched only a month earlier at the University of Yaoundé 1.

I am at the fair to buy books for the African Library and I plan to focus mainly on books that are more difficult to obtain from the Netherlands. Three days at a fair seems ample time, but really, it isn’t, there is so much to discover. Publishers and booksellers enjoy talking about what they have to offer, as do the many authors from African countries and diasporas who are present to explain about their work and sign copies. Fortunately, I have a list of participating publishing houses and bookshops so that I can make a plan. Even so, I could not find all publishers I selected, although at least some of them were indeed present, as I discovered to my surprise on social media afterwards.

Print outs from our library catalogue organised by publisher make it relatively easy to check whether or not a title is already available, though occasionally a title slips through the net. Coeur du Sahel, from 2022, by Djaïli Amadou Amal turns out to already be in our collection after all, in an edition from another publisher. It is a novel about a 15-year-old girl, Faydé, who leaves her village in the far north of Cameroon, an area struggling with climate change and attacks by Boko Haram, to do household work in the town of Maroua. She and her friends have to fight another battle to survive and build a future there.

Fiction is well-represented at the fair, in a variety of forms and genres: literary work, romantic novels, thrillers and detectives, books in the fantasy genre, folk tales, historical novels, comic strips and still others. In fictional and non-fictional work a variety of topics are addressed, new and old: Post mortel by Doris Kélanou is about cyberbullying; La dernière page by Ferdinand Kadjané about sexual abuse of schoolgirls by their teacher; La traversée à trois by Josiane Deffand Govoei about polygamy.

Ngiuvula ti mvutu makumi tatu na mosi ya kutendula kindundu, a booklet written in Kikongo ya leta (Kituba) by Protais Yumbi, addresses folk beliefs and prejudices against people with albinism and the novel Azétòs, les accusées by Laetitia Sédégnan tells the story of an independent-minded grandmother, her daughter and her granddaughter, a child that has prophetic dreams, who find themselves accused of witchcraft.

Studies on society, politics, history, economy, archeology and law are there as well, but insofar as they are published in France, which is relatively often, they are not what I am focusing on.

Children’s and youth literature at the fair is abundant and colourful. Since our colleagues from the African Library, Elvire Eijkman and Gerard van de Bruinhorst, more or less stumbled upon a children's book fair during a book-buying trip to Rwanda a few years ago, a modest collection of this genre has been built up. In Paris, there are folk stories in Malagasy and other African languages with French translations and with lovely illustrations made by children, and there are colouring books about heroes and heroines aiming to make children aware of African history and proud of their African descent. Other children’s books address issues of tradition and modernity: a girl plays football in Yasmina joue au foot ! by Fatou Keïta, and in Mais lâche ta tablette by the same author, a boy from France who has come to discover the village of his family in Africa, sees nothing, hears nothing and gets on everybody’s nerves because he cannot put his tablet down!

Prizes were awarded at the fair as well. On Saturday, Cameroonian author Hemley Boum was awarded the Grand Prix Afrique 2024 (for French-language writers) for her novel Le rêve du pêcheur and Senegalese author Felwine Sarr the Grand Prix Afrique de la Nouvelle 2024 for Le Bouddhisme est né à Colobane. The Prix du Beau Livre Africain, a prize for the most beautiful ‘beautiful book’ on Africa in the field of art, culture, architecture, design, photography, cuisine and fashion is awarded on Sunday. Winner is Pathé'O, published by Swiss publisher Éditions Patrick Frey, about fashion icon Pathé'O, who was born in Burkina Faso and lives and works in Côte d'Ivoire. A special prize for most beautiful book published in Africa is awarded to La tresse africaine — richesse ancestrale, a book about braided hairstyles by Suzanne Kouamé. Publishing house Patrick Frey did not participate in the fair, but Éditions Éburnie from Côte d'Ivoire, publisher of La tresse africaine, did. However, I missed their award-winning book. But as luck would have it, Gerard recently came across it at the Salon du Livre Africain in Conakry, so this omission could quickly be rectified!

Heleen Smits