The Mission

I've always loved libraries; they're my favourite place, and a scene of very many childhood and adult memories. Whether it's just the quiet, or the sense of communality as our heads are buried in different texts, or just the sense of joy at picking up one's favourite book or stumbling across a new fascinating one, there's something about the place as a sacred venue of magic.

I grew up with books around the house, faraway in Àkóbọ̀ in Ìbàdàn. They were my parents', my siblings', mine, and others that strayed into the home. They were eclectic, from Shakespeare to Akínwùnmí Ìṣọ̀lá, from Ṣóyínká to Dennis Robins, from Thomas Hardy to Láwuyì Ògúnníran. From the Bible to the Quran, from Lobsang Rampa to the Watchtower Magazines. From Reader's Digest to Prime People, from Ikebe Super to Drum Magazine. From Fun Times to various Nigerian newspapers. From Atọ́ka to Black Orpheus. There was no internet then — thank goodness — so those books, journals, periodicals, comics, and photobooks filled our interminable hours with entertainment, information, and cerebral (and corporal) stimulation.

I've written, in other places, about what those books meant to me, did for me, and how losing access to them as an adult set me on a quixotic path.

In 2025, we at OlongoAfrica received a grant from the Open Society Foundations, and secured rare editions of Black Orpheus journal. We digitized them and made them publicly available, and worked with writers and artists around Africa to engage with its legacy. Not satisfied, we have resolved as a follow-up, to take the work to its most logical conclusion. The aim, after all, was always to find books and literary materials that would benefit readers and scholars of African literature, and make them available and accessible. As I realized during my trip around Nigerian libraries in the fall of 2019, we can't much depend on public libraries and institutions in Nigeria to keep good records, preserve materials in good condition, and be reliable shepherds of accessibility.

While we continue to hope that public institutions improve to become better stewards of the nation's intellectual memory, doing nothing in the interregnum is a waste of precious time. Students and scholars continue to languish around the country with little access to important literary and cultural materials. Sometimes they have to pay for access, yet with no guarantee of success in finding what they're seeking. This is unacceptable and certainly unsustainable.

It's for this reason that we have set up OlongoAfrica Library.

It will be a repository of important literary, academic, and cultural materials we can find from across the world, which will be well-preserved, public, freely accessible, and indexed for researchers, readers, hobbyists, and all those interested in the intellectual record of the nation and the continent.

Thanks to Open Society, our partner, we have acquired a number of new materials to join our earlier materials from 2025, currently hosted at G.A.S Foundation Library in Lagos.

The 2026 collection includes the (almost) full collection of works published by Mbari Publications in Ìbàdàn in the early sixties, and the full collection of Kovave Journal, edited by Ulli Beier in Papua New Guinea after he left Nigeria in the late 60s. It also includes 108 items from Granta, published from 1979, novels from the Pacesetters series published by Macmillan, and the full New Culture Magazines from Ìbàdàn. It also has about 100 volumes of James Joyce Quarterly, and pamphlets from the Onitsha Market Literature, as well as the complete record of Eugene B. Redmond's Drumvoices Revue. But they're not all literary works. There are a lot of scholarly works as well, like Research in African Literatures for which we have 22 items, Odù Journal of Yorùbá (later African) Studies, Linguistic Inquiry, and Studies in African Linguistics. Many more will be added in the coming weeks, including scores of the New York Times Book Review.

We intend this to be a full Pan-African Library, with a focus, of course, on Nigeria. The materials will not be located in one place, to ensure that access is equitable. While G.A.S Foundation continues to be a primary partner, we are partnering with a number of other public and private libraries across the country and the continent. The only requirement is that they commit to the highest standard of protection for the materials, make them accessible to everyone who requests them, and not collect a fee for access.

This website will continue to be a public archive of all the materials as we acquire, purchase, or receive them. In the latter case, about a dozen boxes of scholarly and literary books were donated by retiring Professor Ron Schaefer of Southern Illinois University Edwardsville in the USA, which are now on the way to libraries at the University of Ìbàdàn and University of Benin. Through the OlongoAfrica Trust (registered in Nigeria), we will continue to solicit new materials, especially from academics who no longer need them, and ship them to libraries across the continent where they're put to use.

One of the benefits of the internet today is global accessibility, but that's not the same as preservation. A scanned page lives at the mercy of a server, copyright issues, a virus attack, institutional funding, and many more. And in an age when everything printed has become raw material for machines, institutions that once shared have become wary of what they put online. While we continue to index materials on this website, and scan those materials we can without running afoul of copyright, the physical materials will continue to reside in physical spaces where we expect that humans will continue to find use for them, as it should be.

Please look around the website and click on the collection to see the materials we have, as we continue to add more. If you'd like to donate materials to us, please write to publisher@olongoafrica.com, and we'll be happy to come pick them up. If you need access to any of the materials, please write to library@olongoafrica.com.

OlongoAfrica will continue to engage with writers and other artists to explore aspects of these collections as we go along, with the aim of bringing the materials alive, not just as an item to read, but a piece of history in conversation with the present. The library, after all, is also a cathedral of creative ideas. The result of these engagements, like before, will be published at OlongoAfrica.com and in future books, pamphlets, and anthologies.

Thank you for coming here, and we hope you linger.

— Kọ́lá Túbọ̀sún