African Literary Metadata and Makerere University's Library

Abstract

While Africanist librarians have often pointed out the inadequacies of the international library classification system for the cataloging of African materials, subject specialists in African literature have paid little attention to the problem of how African literatures are cataloged in the world's leading classification systems. This is so despite the fact that diverse modalities of African literary production (from oral forms, to ephemeral print literatures and pamphlets, to a variety of Web 2.0 forms) sit uncomfortably in existing classification schemes, just as they have troubled hermeneutic and analytical methodologies in the field of African literature for decades. This article provides a case study of the history of the cataloging system at Makerere University Library and discusses how this has come to shape the body of African literature housed there, even to this day. I focus on Makerere University because of its key position in debates and discussions about the politics of Anglophone African literature in the 1960s, as well as the fact that it was the training ground of major African literary scholars, activists, writers, and educators. This makes it the perfect microcosm through which to think about the role of cataloging systems in the structuring of disciplinary and political knowledge. The article focuses on African Literature in the Dewey Decimal Classification system and the Library of Congress Subject Catalogues and then close-reads the library in Ngügi wa Thiong'o's A Grain of Wheat by way of showing how imbricated library classification was in colonial ontologies and how this played out, not only in the placement of literature on library shelves, but also in literary content.