Bibi is co-founder and publishing director of one of Africa’s leading publishing houses, Cassava Republic Press and the co-founder of Tapestry Consulting, a boutique research and training company focused on gender, sexuality and transformational issues in Nigeria.
She has worked as a gender and research consultant in the public, private and development sectors for the BBC, Unifem, Actionaid, eshekels, Central Bank of Nigeria, the European Union and others. She has a PH.D in Women and Gender Studies from the University of Warwick. She has published many academic papers and regularly presents papers at academic conferences. She sits on the editorial board of a number of influential journals and is the chair of board for The Initiative for Equal Rights, the largest organisation in West Africa devoted to LGBTQ issues. Bibi is also a Yale World Fellow, a Desmond Tutu Fellow and a Frankfurt Book Fair Fellow.
Bibi Bakare-Yusuf was born in 1970 in Lagos, Nigeria. At thirteen, she was sent to private school in England, and later studied communications and anthropology at Goldsmiths, University of London. She went on to do a masters and a PHD. in gender studies at the University of Warwick. Bakare-Yusuf’s thesis explored cultural preservation and memory with an examination of embodiment and agency in the black diaspora. In addition to publishing in numerous trade journals, she is a regular presence at academic conferences and sits on the editorial board of several influential journals. In 2003, she returned to Nigeria to take up a research fellowship at the Centre for Gender Studies of Obafemi Awolowo University.
Bakare-Yusuf says that writing has been a thread running through her entire life, from faithfully keeping a diary as a girl and young woman, to her participation in writing workshops in London. She cites as a significant source of inspiration the books of Bessie Head, considered Botswana’s most important writer.
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According to international literature festival Berlin, Bakare-Yusuf read Head’s books in one go and has said in an interview that it was then she realized that it was possible to still the chaos in her thoughts by writing. She said that her interest in the relationship between culture and memory lends itself more to an academic than a literary style. She gave up writing poetry when she realized that there were other poets who could express what she wanted to say better than she ever could. “So, I stopped writing creatively, but intensified my reading of poetry and fiction,” she said.
In 2006, she co-founded Cassava Republic Press, which has since become one of the leading African publishing houses. A committed feminist, the publisher sees her life’s work as helping to transform African societies with the production of alternative narratives. In keeping with that, Cassava publishes stories by and for Africans at affordable prices, with the goal of fostering African literature, as well as rebuilding a culture of reading and writing on the continent. Some of the books present a subtle challenge to the UN Millennium Development Goals with regard to sex roles, among other issues, and several of them have been incorporated into Nigeria’s school curriculum. Among the authors published by the house are literary heavyweights such as Helon Habila, who won the 2015 Windham Campbell Literary Prize for fiction.
Cassava Republic Press was founded with the aim of bringing high quality fiction and non-fiction for adults and children alike to a global audience. They have offices in Abuja and London.
Their mission is to change the way we all think about African writing. They believe that contemporary African prose should be rooted in African experience in all its diversity.
They also believe that time has come to build a new body of African writing that links writers and readers from Benin to Bahia. For them, it is the right time to ask challenging questions on African writing.
