Africa in Canadian Academic Libraries: A Continent's Voices Go Missing

Abstract

Introduction NOW THAT I'M LIVING IN A DOWNTOWN, MIDDLE-CLASS NEIGHBORHOOD AND working in academia, my world is overwhelmingly white. When I recently found myself in a crowd in which almost everyone was black, it was a jolt to remember again the ease, comfort, and pure joy of being in a crowd of multiculti Africans. Of course, white folks invisibly take for granted this privilege of being reflected, echoed, acknowledged, and recognized. Indeed, apart from segregated ethnic spaces, many of which are tucked away from mainstream view, and the odd tokenized add-on, Canada remains a nation steeped in whiteness. This system of white supremacy permeates the public imagination and institutions of the nation: the media, justice system, its arts infrastructure, government, and the focus of this essay, the postsecondary education system. One might wish to interrogate many corners of the university in terms of their multiethnic or multiracial openness or inclusiveness. In this case, I concentrate on the academic library as a possible site of racial oppression. As an African Canadian academic librarian and, more important, a social justice advocate, I wanted to know if my impression that African voices were largely missing from the library shelves was correct. If so, I planned to consider how an entire continent might be missing from a space that typically and proudly pronounces itself to be the record of humankind. What does this omission tell us about the workings of the information landscape in general and Canadian academic libraries in particular? Never far from my mind were issues such as whose knowledge counts and how systems of globalization and white supremacy assign such value. My first task was to measure how many African voices I might hear if I cupped my ear and walked along the library shelves at York University, a large, urban campus in Canada that prides itself on diversity, social justice, and innovation. The size of the collections at York University Libraries (YUL) is impressive, numbering some 2,179,945 in print volumes and 8,127 in journal subscriptions. (1) YUL is among the larger academic libraries in North America. York University houses one of the only African Studies programs in Canada, along with a Centre for the Study of Black Cultures in Canada and a Centre for Latin American and Caribbean Studies, both of which have scholarly ties to Africa. Thus, the academic need for African resources at York would seem self-evident. A foray into the available research literature proved challenging. No directly relevant previous research in this area existed to build upon. Though some papers analyzed diversity in North American academic libraries, they focused on the representations of diasporic communities such as Asian and African-Americans. I surveyed material on librarianship and the book industry within Africa (notable here are Nigeria's African Journal of Librarianship, Archives & Information Science and Hans Zell's work, The African Publishing Companion), but this literature did not consider links to North American academic libraries. Beyond the literature review, I chose three ways to measure the African presence in our collection. First I searched our catalogue for periodicals published in Africa to see how many we carried. Then I compiled a small list of academic African publishers and determined how many of their titles York owned. Finally, most libraries now use approval plans (2) to purchase most of their collections, so I took a close look at our vendor, YBP Library Services, to appraise the number of African publishers in their offerings. The literature I reviewed and the measurements I undertook did not take into account the great linguistic and regional variations found in a continent as diverse as Africa. Such a complex (and interesting) task was unfortunately beyond the scope of this essay. Report of Findings Searching YUL for periodicals published in or about Africa was instructive. …

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