The Vision: Twi Comic Book

Those of you who have followed our organization for a while know that our mission and activities arise out two core, married ideas from the co-founders, Kaitlyn and myself. For Kaitlyn, it’s about storytelling as a means of healing (hopefully you’ll hear her talk about that more in the future). For me, it’s about the empowerment and revalorization of indigenous languages which, through colonialism and tyranny, have been suppressed, outlawed, and branded as inferior or “primitive”.

Why a Twi comic book matters

People around the world have been denied the right to learn and express themselves in their heart languages so that European languages like English, French, and Spanish could enjoy hegemonic privilege and dominance. For instance, in Ghana—where we built our first language arts center—there are approximately[1] 81 languages, yet English is the official language, despite the fact that it’s a mother tongue for virtually no one there[2]. Only 11 languages are recognized for educational purposes, and those are only the medium of instruction through 3^rd grade—from there, it’s a hard switch to English. Ghanaian languages are taught only as a subject after that (only helpful if you’re lucky enough to have one of the 11 as your mother tongue). Most Ghanaian languages have nothing published in them except the Bible, thanks to funding from international missionary societies. The vast majority of publishing is in English for the textbook industry.

It was always my plan to publish various media in the languages spoken by the communities operating Untold language centers if it was something they wanted. For the village of Asisiriwa, that language is Asante Twi. There’s considerable desire for entertainment and informational media in Twi, but a number of obstacles keep them from being developed and published (something I could write a whole blog about).

For my master’s thesis, I—along with our Untold friends Quist, Kumi, and Mary—conducted a questionnaire survey of rural Twi speakers in the Ashanti Region and Eastern Region in Ghana to gauge people’s interest in a Twi literary magazine, gathering 536 responses in total. 85% of respondents said that they would be interested in reading a magazine in Twi. Perhaps even more interesting, 226 people said they would be willing to pay 5 cedis (the second-highest multiple-choice option) for such a publication, indicating that they assign significant value to the idea.

Why opt for a periodical or serial publication?

Okay, so people want published material in their language, and it sucks that they don’t have it. “That’s great, Brady. But why a magazine?” Short answer? We have to start somewhere. We would love to do all kinds of things, from radio dramas to video games, but we operate a language arts center that teaches literacy skills and having printed material would be beneficial for us and the schools we support (By the way, we asked the people and 83% of them said they would prefer a printed booklet over reading on their computer or smartphone).

Within the category of printed media, a serialized publication makes way more sense for this context than a novel, for instance (you can check out my previous blog post on the novel in Africa if you want). Here are some advantages that serial publications (also called periodicals) yield:

1. They allow for the publication of more authors and more voices (many authors you’ve heard of were first published in magazines—they just got famous on their novels[3])
2. They’re more affordable to people with little disposable income[4]
3. They’re shorter, as are most Ghanaian folktales and stories
4. They’re timely and can reflect on the world people are currently experiencing
5. They’re regionally bound and can reflect on the experiences of people in one small area (like local newspapers in the West)
6. They provide a space for community involvement like “talking back” to the editors (huge for traditionally oral cultures)[5]

Why would we create a comic book?

While researching my master’s thesis, I was assuming that a literary serial publication would be a literary magazine with short stories and poems like the landmark Black Orpheus magazine out of Nigeria or the lesser-known Ɔkyeame from Ghana. However, I came to realize that magazines like this were (and are) predominantly consumed by an educated elite. That’s not the demographic of Asisiriwa. The realm of popular literature[6], read as entertainment by students and everyday citizens, tends to be highly visual. As I explored the ideas visual literacy and comic books, I found some wonderful advantages that could apply to our context:

1. Comics are popular and get people reading. Elizabeth Anderson, at a conference on African publishing, said, “In South Africa, City Press which is a Sunday newspaper has introduced a comic strip about soccer. Their sales have soared since this strip was introduced. We need to look at what people want”[7]
2. Getting people to read is good. I feel like I need to throw that out there because so much dialogue about literacy and cultivating reading focuses on what people should read (“literally literary literature”) and not what people want to read. In the West, we give kids picture books to encourage new readership, but we give new readers in Africa The Old Man and the Sea and instruction manuals on proper hygiene or preventing HIV/AIDS.
3. Comics are a gateway to literacy. New readers can “read” the panels of a comic book (or “view pictures” as the kids in Asisiriwa call it) and get the basic story. This encourages them, because they didn’t just run into a brick wall of text and give up. They can then go back and read the speech bubbles and text boxes to get more of the story as their textual literacy advances. The Ethnologue estimates that Akan literacy (the language group to which Twi belongs) is between 30% and 60%, so many readers would benefit from the extra support illustrations provide.
4. Comic books, and graphic narratives generally, level the playing field and allow people of all backgrounds and reading levels to access a story. As Esther de Bruijn puts it, pictorial narratives “are an inherently democratic genre, appealing to mass audiences, across class categories”[8]. Both the cocoa farmer in Asisiriwa and the PhD student in Kumasi are able to access a Twi comic book’s story and get something out of it.

How you can help

So that’s why we want to publish a comic book in Twi. There are obviously a lot of other details—like content and style—that I’ll save for later. In order to move forward, however, we need funds. I’ve drawn up a publication model based on African publishers’ experience[9] and Twi-speakers’ ideal sale price of 5 cedis ($0.87 at the time of writing). We will hire a local staff of 4 people: a writer, an artist, an editor, and a salesperson. We will invest heavily in marketing and distribution (the most common bane of publishing on the continent) to get the books in the hands of rural readers.

Here’s a breakdown of our estimated expenses for the project:

1. Staff (4 people): $6,700 per year
2. Production: $0.30 per unit; $3,000 for 10,000 units per year
3. Marketing: $2,000 per year
4. Distribution: $2,000 per year

Our total estimated expenses for the comic book per year are $13,700 (assuming a conservative starting print run of 10,000 copies). I would like to secure funding for at least five years because that’s the length of time it will likely take to become self-sustaining, which would make an estimated total cost of $68,500. All profits from comic book sales would go back into the project.

This is clearly the most ambitious project we’ve undertaken as an organization to date, but—as you can see—we’ve done our homework and we’re not going in blind. I will also be studying the reception and impact of this comic book among Twi speakers for my PhD dissertation, so I’ll be able to keep you informed on the cool things that are happening with it in the Ashanti Region.

If this project excites you or just tugs on your heart a little bit, please consider becoming an Untold Dollar supporter, which means setting up a recurring donation of just $1 a month and telling all your friends who like comic books, literature, or African culture to do the same. If you want to give a larger amount, the eager readers in Asisiriwa and I won’t stop you.

Thank you so much for reading this entire post. I know it was a lot of information, and just by getting to the bottom of it, you’ve proven that people care about empowering readers in their own heart languages. If you’re already an Untold Dollar supporter, thank you from the bottom of my heart. I would also like to pass along a message from the people of Asisiriwa:

Enam wo so na yɛnyaa asuaeɛ yi. Yɛda wo ase.

Through you, we got this learning place. We thank you.

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Notes & Works Cited

[1] I say “approximately” because every count of languages in a geographical area will vary depending on the linguist’s definitions of “language” and “dialect”. Linguists use the term “splitting” to refer to the paradigm of splitting all dialects into their own languages, and “lumping” for the paradigm of lumping dialects together into bigger languages. The number of languages in Ghana ranges from 46 to 81, depending on whether you’re lumping or splitting.

[2] Eberhard, David M., Gary F. Simons, and Charles D. Fennig (eds.). Ethnologue: Languages of the World. Twenty-second edition. Dallas, Texas: SIL International, 2019. Online version: http://www.ethnologue.com.

[3] Bulson, Eric. Little Magazine, World Form. Columbia University Press, 2017.

[4] As Mariètou Bileoma-M’Baye put it, “How does one talk about literature when those who can read and write don’t always have the means to buy a book?” (“Is Literature a Prerequisite to Democracy and Development?: A Francophone Perspective”. Indaba 2001: Changing Lives, Zimbabwe International Book Fair Trust, pp. 201-206.)

[5] In my surveys of African literary magazines, I’ve found that the most popular ones included some kind of “letters” section where people could make their opinions heard and interact with a community of readers.

[6] I’m indebted to Stephanie Newell, Esther de Bruijn, Karin Barber, and Wendy Griswold for their excellent research on popular literature in West Africa.

[7] Anderson, Elizabeth. “Strategies for Targeting Readers: The Rewards of Reading”. Indaba 2001: Changing Lives, Zimbabwe International Book Fair Trust, pp. 219-224.

[8] De Bruijn, Esther. “Sensationally Reading Ghana’s Joy-Ride Magazine”. The Cambridge Journal of Postcolonial Literary Inquiry, vol. 4, no. 1, 2017, pp. 27-48.

[9] Chakava, Henry. Publishing in Africa: One Man’s Perspective. East African Educational Publishers, 1999.