Obituary: Keith Sambrook 1925-2019

Summary

Keith Sambrook, who died on 1 January 2019, was a transforming publisher in the period when the countries of the South secured their independence. He and Eldred Durosimi Jones saw the need for the journal which became African Literature Today.

Keith Sambrook found the manuscript of Ngugi's Weep Not, Child on his desk when, on 1 January 1963, he started work for Alan Hill at Heinemann Educational Books in London. A month earlier Chinua Achebe had been appointed as Editorial Adviser to the African Writers Series. The first thirty titles they selected were to lead to the launch of African Literature in English. Keith Sambrook and Chinua Achebe shared two ambitions; they wanted students in African schools and universities to be able to read imaginative work by their fellow Africans; and they were determined to introduce African writers to an international literary audience. The demand for the Series inside and outside Africa surprised everybody. Ngugi said this year, ‘I have always associated my becoming a writer with Keith. Not only me. He had similar impact on many African writers … Africa needed this literature to heal the wounds wrought on the continent by a century of colonialism. The African Writers Series contributed to the soaring of the soul of a free continent, and Keith Sambrook was part of it.’

Keith Sambrook established Heinemann companies for both distribution and publishing in Nigeria under Aigboje Higo and in East Africa under Henry Chakava; they brought in new authors and contributed to the effective marketing which was needed to turn a good idea into the equivalent of a Penguin Books for Africa. At the same time he built up Heinemann companies in Hong Kong, Singapore, Malaysia, India, the Caribbean and the United States. He took on the first titles in the growth area of English Language Teaching (ELT). The company he established with John Watson in New Hampshire was to be crucial in continuing publishing of new titles in the Series when the sales disappeared during the ‘African Book Famine’ of the late eighties and early nineties. In 1985 James Currey, who worked with him at Heinemann for seventeen years, set up his own imprint to publish academic titles on Africa.