Walter Bgoya
Walter Bgoya is a Tanzanian publisher, author, and Pan‑Africanist intellectual known for his leadership of public and independent publishing initiatives in Tanzania. He served as General Manager of Tanzania Publishing House from 1972 until 1990 and then founded and managed his own company Mkuki na Nyota Publishers Ltd, established in 1981 in Dar es Salaam.
Distinguished as Chairman of the Noma Award for Publishing in Africa and Publisher of the Year in 2024, Bgoya and his promotion of literary and non-fiction books in both English and Kiswahili have been repeatedly acknowledged by the African and international publishing industry.
Life and career
Early life and education
Bgoya was born in the north-western town Ngara in colonial-era Tanganyika Territory and received his schooling in a Christian mission boarding school. His parents came from a peasant background but owned significant land, with his mother overseeing the fields and frequently hiring people from the community who were less well off. In a region where few people had access to education, his father was among the few who had received formal schooling. He earned a living as a teacher and was known for his leadership.Bgoya's early fascination with reading began in the 1950s and his worldview was shaped during the 1960s—amid the wave of decolonization, Pan‑Africanism, and Ujamaa socialism promoted by President Julius Nyerere. From 1961 to 1965, Bgoya studied with a scholarship at the University of Kansas. During his time the United States, he encountered racial segregation and participated in the civil rights movement—experiences that influenced his intellectual and political convictions.
Back in Tanzania, Bgoya spent seven years at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, helping African liberation movements through the Liberation Committee of the Organization of African Unity. During this time, he collaborated with liberation movements in southern Africa and provided support to anti-imperialist causes worldwide.
Publishing in Tanzania
After independence, African governments prioritized economic growth over cultural development and promoted national parastatal publishers such as Tanzania Publishing House. Publishing books is both a commercial undertaking as well as a contribution to education in Tanzania and to its cultural development. However, governments provided little support for cultural industries, treating culture mainly as folklore to entertain political leaders or visiting dignitaries. Copyright infringements and weak enforcement of copyright law as well as inadequate public libraries pose further challenges for publishers. As books are often too expensive relative to their income, few Tanzanians are reading for pleasure as opposed to buying practical books such as dictionaries or required reading for education.Another challenge is the use of English as language of instruction in secondary schools and universities. Kiswahili, which is spoken by the majority of Tanzanians, is only used as language of instruction in primary education. The transition from Kiswahili to English in secondary schools largely results in students not being able to understand books written in anything other than basic English, and the same has been said about universities.
As of 2021, Tanzania counted over 11.1 million students enrolled in primary schools and, in 2018, more than 2,140,000 in secondary schools. In the face of these numbers, schoolbooks in both Kiswahili and English are the most reliable and stable market for publishers.
Tanzania Publishing House (TPH) (1972–1990)
A few years after independence in 1961, Tanzania set up a local publishing sector to supply school and cultural books in Kiswahili and English, leading to the creation of the parastatal Tanzania Publishing House and the East Africa Publishing House. Their locally produced publications were aligned with Tanzania's socialist ideology known as ujamaa and the national educational curriculum. The new publishing houses absorbed several smaller printers and regional publishers, creating a nationwide network for editing, printing, and distribution.During the 1960s and 1970s, Dar es Salaam had become a lively hub of ideas and debate. The University of Dar es Salaam played a central role, fostering innovative scholarship that questioned established thinking, particularly in development studies and economics. Its Department of History gained international recognition as the "Dar es Salaam School of History". The state-owned publisher, TPH, supported this intellectual trend by releasing influential works that reflected and advanced the movement. Together, they established Tanzania as a leading centre of progressive African thought.
In 1973, Bgoya was appointed as general manager of Tanzania Publishing House. With no political restrictions by state supervision, he prioritized works by African scholars and authors, ensuring that the majority of TPH’s catalogue reflected Tanzanian history, culture, and socialist ideals. He called this "publishing for the people—publishing books that are of immediate benefit to them as well as works of literature with roots in our culture". An example for this was a series of books for vocational education titled Vitabu Vya Ufundi. These books contributed to create a national technical language by introducing new terms in both English and Kiswahili.
In line with Tanzania's ideology, TPH also released influential anti‑imperialist works such as Walter Rodney's How Europe Underdeveloped Africa, Agostinho Neto's Sacred Hope, Samora Machel's Establishing People's Power to Serve the Masses, and Issa Shivji's Class Struggles in Tanzania. Under Bgoya's leadership, TPH further published dozens of primary and secondary school textbooks, as well as monographs on local languages and development studies.
Another book that Bgoya wanted to publish was a manuscript of a novel by Tanzanian writer Aniceti Kitereza. It had originally been completed in 1945 in Kitereza's mother tongue Kerewe, but because no publishing house wanted to finance a novel in that endangered language, Kitereza translated it into Kiswahili himself. Almost 30 years went by until, in April 1974, Bgoya received a copy. After reviewing the manuscript, he agreed that TWP would publish it. First, Kitereza's manuscript was carefully edited to remove outdated and regional expressions and to cut repetitive sections. The book was then printed in two volumes in China, with the costs covered by the Ford Foundation. Unfortunately, advance copies of the novel, later translated into English in two volumes as Mr. Myombekere and His Wife Bugonoka, Their Son Ntulanalwo and Daughter Bulihwali, only arrived in Dar es Salaam in 1981. Shortly before this, however, Kitereza had died. More than another twenty years later, in 2002, Bgoya was also able to publish an English translation through his own company Mkuki na Nyota.
By the early 1980s, Tanzania entered a period of economic crisis. Structural adjustment programs, rising costs, limited resources, and weakened institutional support led to the decline of parastatal publishing. In this context, Bgoya left TPH in 1990, seeking to continue his mission independently.
Mkuki na Nyota Publishers (1991–2024)
In 1991, Bgoya founded his own Mkuki na Nyota Publishers Ltd in Dar es Salaam. He created this publishing house to fill a void in independent scholarly and literary publishing, producing books in both English and Kiswahili, including children's literature, schoolbooks, fiction, political and development studies. With support from western donors during the early years of the company, MNP's children's book initiative produced around eighty titles in five years, including several written by Bgoya.In 2000, after the United Nations adopted the Millennium Declaration, publishing, higher education, and teacher training were excluded from donors' primary development goals. This poverty reduction strategy led to a decline in funding, networking and marketing for African books, including for events such as the Zimbabwe International Book Fair and the Zimbabwe Publishing House that Bgoya advised in their early days.
Despite facing tight finances, volatile printing costs, and limited distribution, Bgoya persisted. To reduce the company's dependence on donors, he adopted print‑on‑demand technology by the mid‑1990s and outsourced production to reduce costs and expand output. His focus on socially relevant and innovative titles also helped his company weather a 2014 government reversion to state monopoly for the important textbook market.
Bgoya also co‑founded and acted as Chair of the Council of Management of the African Books Collective, enhancing global distribution of African-published works. This cooperative owned by more than 150 African publishers was mainly funded by Swedish and Norwegian development agencies until it became self-financing in 2007. Foreign donors contributed by providing funds, organizing regional training courses, and sponsoring international book fairs. With this support, independent African publishers could build networks and expand their markets. Using distribution channels of the ABC, Mkuki na Nyota has published as many as 30–60 titles per year, further strengthening the publisher's role in promoting Kiswahili literature on the continental stage.
In 2022, Mkuki na Nyota published the first translation into an African language of a work by Zanzibari-born British writer Abdulrazak Gurnah. Paradise, one of Gurnah's earlier novels, set in historical East Africa, was translated into Kiswahili after Gurnah had been awarded the 2021 Nobel Prize in Literature. This award spurred interest in his work among readers in Tanzania, and the publisher has announced the translation of more of his works. Further, several of the company's books have been distinguished with the Safal Kiswahili Prize for African Writing.