Heinemann launched the African Writers Series in 1962 with a reissue of Chinua Achebe's Things Fall Apart. The premise was distribution rather than discovery: paperbacks priced for African students and schools, sold within the continent instead of exported to it. Achebe served as founding editorial adviser.
By the time the series slowed in the 1980s it had published several hundred titles and had become, for a generation of readers, the shape that African literature in English arrived in. The orange-banded covers are among the most recognisable in twentieth-century publishing.
The OlongoAfrica Library holds 8 titles, spanning numbers 1 to 183 — from the series' first volume to a poetry collection issued two decades later. One is an advance review copy rather than a trade edition.
