AYU selected for incubation in Afrique Créative
Five minutes. That’s all we had. Five minutes to fit our hopes, dreams and grand ambitions for our As-Yet-Unnamed Commune into a compelling pitch for the jury. It still feels daunting even now, a few weeks after finding out that we succeeded, that AYU is one of the 15 projects across Africa selected from a pool of 30 candidates and many more applicants for incubation in the third edition of Afrique Créative. It’s daunting—but exciting.
The pitch
In the weeks leading up to 13 May, pitch day, we’d gone over it many times—with support from the incredible team at Tshimologong Precinct, our host in the pre-incubation phase and with whom we’re continuing during incubation over the next 12 months. We had the answers to the key questions the jury wanted to know:
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We are building a democratic, equitable and self-sustaining community around the work of African authors. We’ve started in South Africa with 16 writers-in-residence and our outlook is Pan-African. Guided by the African philosophy of ubuntu, we see the books our authors are working on as not only products but also as opportunities to pursue more harmonious, and therefore more equitable, relations among those who make each book’s existence possible.
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Because the dominant commercial publishing models do not work for us. They put the burden of producing publication-ready manuscripts on writers yet do not offer equivalent reward nor support. In our society, where resources and opportunities are distributed unequally, the result is that countless potentially important stories go unwritten and unpublished. And of those that are being written and published, too few are afforded the resources needed for them to be produced and marketed well enough to do justice to the story, its author and readers. So written-word contributions to archives of human knowledge and experiences have become the domain of elites along the lines of class, race, gender, nationality and similar historical sites of unjust accumulation. This is inexcusable and needs to change.
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We’re not waiting passively in hopes that fresh, high-quality stories will emerge. We are going out to find them where they are and we’re bringing them out into the world. We’ve done our homework. Several other initiatives are trying to do something similar. We admire and have learned from them. What we do is different and makes a difference in two vital ways. First, we work across the entire book value chain—from ideation through to producing, publishing, marketing and distributing books to readers. Second, our publishing model is designed to share the risks and value created equitably among our multi-stakeholder base of author, worker and reader members, as determined democratically by them. These members are the community with whom we work to pool our resources, intellect, skills and talents to breathe life into books that might not have existed otherwise. Through collective action and sharing, our authors have access to resources needed, including support from publishing workers, to produce creative, high-quality work readers find interesting, engaging and within reach.
The doubt
The pitch was the tip of the proverbial iceberg of conversations we’ve been having since convening the initiating members of AYU about a year ago, with support from the Atlantic Fellows for Social and Economic Equity programme based at the London School of Economics. During the pre-incubation, we distilled and refined these conversations—with feedback from experts such as Arthur Attwell of Electric Book Works and Muzi Khuzwayo and Phumi Mashigo of Ignitive—as we prepared for the pitch.
But no matter how many times we went over it, no matter how well we felt we’d condensed it into something short and sweet, no matter how compelling we tried to make it, the pitch was just that: a call into the void begging for a response. The outcome was out of our hands.
Now imagine our delight when we heard that we’d made it, that our call had elicited the response we had hoped for.
The months ahead
While waiting for a response, we reminded ourselves that we were going to continue with AYU anyway regardless of the outcome. The work we’d done during the pre-incubation had redoubled our faith in the project and we were happy to walk away with just that. But things will certainly be easier now that we are in an incubation programme offering creative coaching, opportunities to learn from experts and our peers, and a grant to supplement our own funding toward our goals.
With these resources, we plan to produce and publish four of the books our writers are working on, expand our membership base from our group of 16 authors to include publishing workers and also readers who care about the future of African writing. By Spring 2025, we envision having established the foundations of our community, which will carry the other books in our existing pipeline—and hopefully new additions—into the hands of eager readers.
We can’t wait to share more soon, including how to join us and support our work. If you would like to follow our journey, don’t forget to subscribe to our Working Draft newsletter.