Margaret Busby: how a pioneering Ghanaian publisher put African women’s writing on the map

Margaret Busby in 1971 at her desk at Allison and Busby publishers.& Evening Standard/Hulton Archive/Getty Images by Phillippa Yaa de Villiers, University of the Witwatersrand Published in 1992, Daughters of Africa is a groundbreaking volume of writing by women of African descent. It was followed by an expanded second edition, New Daughters of Africa, in 2019. The mind behind the books is pioneering Ghanaian-born publisher, writer and editor Margaret Busby. She became the first Black female publisher in the UK at 20 when she co-founded Allison and Busby in 1967. The company was first to publish a number of significant writers during her two-decade tenure. Busby has continued to nurture new generations of writers, academics, editors, publishers and critics. In May she was in South Africa to give the keynote speech at the second Johannesburg Festival of Women Writers. I took the opportunity to talk with her about her publishing journey. Phillippa Yaa de Villiers: It is a significant achievement, in editing Daughters of Africa, to bring such a large and diverse body of women together and keep them together. How did you manage that? Margaret Busby: I do what I can do. What I can’t do, I can’t do....