Aristoc Booklex on Kampala Road. The book store, which started selling books in 1991, last month announced it had closed its Acacia Mall store. PHOTO | FRANK BAGUMA.
On February 22, Aristoc Booklex, one of Uganda’s leading bookstores, posted an announcement on Facebook that went largely unnoticed. It got four likes and one share. This was not bad engagement by the bookstore’s standards. Many of its posts on Facebook struggle to get even a single reaction from the followers it commands.
“Fear not, bibliophiles!” the announcement started, “Our doors are closed for a secret mission...restocking with epic tales and hidden gems! We’re on a quest to restock your favourite reads and discover exciting new arrivals. We’ll reopen soon, better than ever!”
The announcement was probably a portent of bad news to come. Last month, Aristoc Booklex, which started selling books in 1991, announced it had closed its Acacia Mall store.
The store closed, said its former manager Alice Mwesigwa, “because of high taxes and high rent.” She declined to give further details to Saturday Monitor in a phone interview.
Aristoc Booklex still runs two stores in Kampala, including the heart of the capital where street vendors sell used books at give-away prices. It also has a store at Garden City, but the closure of the Acacia Mall branch speaks to the challenges of selling written material in a country where millions of people mostly read only textbooks at school.
Familiar problem
The general reading apathy in Uganda is deeply ingrained. There are no reliable statistics about reading, but anecdotal evidence shows that even professionals whose work depends a lot on reading and should be big customers of Aristoc Booklex do not read much.
“A typical journalist in Uganda never reads beyond what they write,” observed journalist Edris Kiggundu in an article marking this year’s World Press Freedom Day he wrote for BBeg Media where he is an editor and founder.
He further disclosed: “It is not unusual to wander into a newsroom at 4pm and you find that the daily newspapers are lying on the table, still stapled.” (Ugandan newspapers are stapled to prevent people reading them free-of-charge).
Some have blamed Aristoc Booklex, which also sells gifts and birthday/greetings cards and does not have a serious competitor, for failing to innovate and move with the times given the trends in technology.
“In this day and age, it still baffles me why @aristoc_booklex, Uganda’s leading bookstore, doesn’t have a website,” posted Francis Wakida on X (formerly Twitter), adding, “Aristoc needs to step up their game and embrace the power of Internet technology. The future of the book industry is online, and they can’t afford to be left behind.”
But even with a strong digital presence and innovative ways of selling books, Aristoc Booklex may still struggle to find customers. Ugandans’ interest in books and football, for example, is vastly different. Aristoc Booklex’s social media posts, even about books authored by popular figures get a laughably small number of reactions from followers.
When Aristoc Booklex posted Golden Memories of a Village Belle by Ms Barbara Kyagulanyi, the wife of National Unity Platform party president Robert Kyagulanyi, aka Bobi Wine, on March 25, it got just two likes. No one shared it; no one commented on it. By contrast, news about the English Premier League is shared avidly, and young Ugandans who cannot identify the UK on the map are particularly knowledgeable about football teams such as Manchester United and their star strikers.
“The challenge is poor reading culture. It has affected us from all angles,” said Tom Tibaijuka, the general manager for Fountain Publishers, a publishing house.
Digital disruption?
Mr Tibaijuka told Saturday Monitor that while the demographic difference between Uganda and Kenya is not big and the standards of living are comparable, Kenyans generally have a better reading culture.
“Some people could have cut back on their spending on books,” said Mr Kiggundu, who has read many digital books and partly attributed Aristoc Booklex’s woes to a shift to those books. “Some can even access these books freely on some e-book websites. [And] they are usually much cheaper than the paperback versions.”
Mr Tibaijuka said the government needs to implement a textbook policy that seeks to evaluate the kind of books and the quality that goes to schools. Although he blames technology and social media for disrupting the business of selling books, he said the government should institute a policy that encourages learners to interact with books at an early stage to foster a reading culture.
Inculcating new habits
That is what Lillian Nakiwala Nyakana is trying to do in her home area, albeit on a micro level. In 2016, she founded Tusome Children’s Resource Centre in Kito-Magere, Gayaza Road. The centre’s name, Tusome, is Luganda for “let us read.” Children aged three to 18 and are either in or out of school are eligible for membership and pay an annual modest membership fee. In all, the centre has 54 members.
“I started Tusome partly out of my passion for books and reading but also out of a desire to promote a reading culture among children, who would later become adults who read,” Ms Nyakana, a parent with three school children, said.
“The idea to start this project was conceived when I worked with the National Book Trust of Uganda between 2008 and 2014. I was in charge of the children’s reading project and visited a number of primary schools, where I observed first-hand a total lack of reading skills among children, especially in government schools under Universal Primary Education (UPE).”
Free education
Echoing what Ms Nyakana said, Mr Kiggundu noted the trend has grown worse with the advent of UPE and Universal Secondary Education, a scheme which enables students from underprivileged backgrounds to get formal education. He said “students just go through the motions of education” and that “many Ugandans will only read textbooks (for exams) or newspapers (for job adverts).”
Mr Kiggundu, who also worked for The Observer, added: “Even the traditional schools hardly inculcate that reading culture in students. They are concerned about performance at national exams.”
A poor reading culture often translates into a poor writing culture. It is hard, for example, to have a sizeable number of books on the 100 Notable Books list of the New York Times from countries where people do not read books.
And countries leading innovation have many people relying on the written word to develop ideas, which partly explains why countries with poor readers tend to lag behind in innovation.
Aristoc Booklex may be promoting a reading culture, but a more effective solution could be something like Ms Nyakana’s Tusome on a massive scale, nurturing a generation of readers.
As British scientist Stephen Hawking once said: “Nothing is better than reading and gaining more and more knowledge.”
