About ACB
The mission of African Comb Books Ltd (ACB) is to publish relevant materials for readers of all ages that can help communities to live a progressive and meaningful life within the modern storm of both imported and imposed cultural demands sweeping across the continent.
The modern African is caught up in a radically confusing path of cultural transition whereby modernity is critically questioning traditional values, leaving many people thrown into confused and cultural dilemmas. As it were, the communities are challenged to practically review its traditional values. There is no better tool for helping them in this search than the book.
The biggest question for majority of African is how far from their cultural roots they can go towards adopting new values enforced upon them by the long period of colonial administration that had been determined to kill any culture its administration did not understand.
Those challenges can only be answered by publishing literature that helps communities to evaluate and interpret their cultural values using the yardstick measurement of the imported values. They are forced by circumstances to adjust, deconstruct-in-order to construct and redesign their cultural values with
which to address their future living obligations.
The development of reading culture cannot be complete unless published materials reach the wider part of the community. Unfortunately language and readership are the two sides of the coin of modern knowledge. The foundation of mother-tongue, the ship that carries the cultural treasures of the community and one that bears the bulk of the population, has been fiercely damaged by the imposition of foreign languages over the reading class. Today the reading class is using only the language of leaning in school, in which they use they sit for examination. Finally, the learning language has also been adopted as official language. Consequently, nearly all published materials are delivered in that language only to benefit the few who are able to master the language. The mother tongue has been rendered culturally toothless. Those who cannot read in the exam language are doomed to retire into
the world of ignorance and become building blocks for poverty of knowledge.
In order to cater for that disadvantaged class armed with nothing else but their mother-tongue tongue, the ACB has taken an ambitious step to publish in as many mother tongues as it is possible. The acquired readership from that project will help the literary wretched in becoming part and parcel of the building blocks of culture and educating the mass.
How-to books
The challenges of developing reading culture in the present communities is principally linked to addressing the thirst for “how-to-live” in the modern complex world, which is appreciably delinked from traditional oral culture setting. Reading for luxury takes a secondary position. This service background forms the ideology of ACB’s publishing business. ACB African Comb Books Ltd.