How Do You Compete With Free?

Deborah Ahenkora is a publisher based in Accra, Ghana. "We don't live in silos," she says. In this interview with journalist and radio show host Nahlah Ayed, Ahenkora talks about her childhood reading, the challenges faced by publishers in African countries and her wake-up moment after reading Nancy Drew and confessing to well-meaning adults that she'd decided then and there to become a detective.

Dreams, ambition, reality, and the magic of escaping into a book, all interwoven with a reading of Bahiya, the Little Zebra, a picture book from Tanzania and Egypt, written by Nahida Esmail and illustrated by Randa Abubakr. (African Bureau Stories)

Ahenkora speaks of a book famine in Africa. She asks:

What would the world look like if young Canadian girls were growing up reading about a little girl living in Harare?

And when the marketplace is flooded with free book donations from the developed world, all glossy and beautifully finished, how can local entrepreneurs hope to compete? In 2008, she founded the Golden Baobab Prize for African writers of children's literature in 2008 — when she was just a 19-year old university student.The interview raises great questions and showcases the voice of a woman with an important and necessary vision.