Photocopyrights

Photocopyrights, originally uploaded by mozifoto.

At the school where I’m lecturing most of the textbooks are photocopied. And there is no perception that this is illegal. Last year I selected a big fat reference book from the library for a fourth year student and he wanted to photocopy the entire book so he could take it with him when he left school. Our library now in excess of 2,000 titles just in Portuguese is almost entirely from Brazil. Hand-carried, sometimes in suitcases through one person’s Sisyphean goal of outfitting a library in the middle of nowhere.

Photocopy is actually a viable method of mobile media. The machines are ubiquitous throughout the continent of Africa as far as I’ve seen. One copy of a book may be photocopied hundreds of times and sometimes the copies are bound with a nice looking cover and sold on the street.

A friend of mine gave someone a rough draft of a brief grammatical description of a Makhuwa dialect. He was pleased to discover “bootleg” photocopies for sale on the streets of Nampula within a week’s time.

I don’t wish to imply that the violation of copyright is not a problem. Instead, I just want to highlight the reality here in Africa and ask if perhaps we shouldn’t be capitalizing on it as a production/distribution option.

Since Bibles, for an example, are so difficult to obtain but are highly prized, why not release photocopy-ready originals “into the wild” that are easy to copy and distribute?

Schools in the north of Mozambique are using large numbers of vernacular materials, sometimes with Biblical content because the organization that produced it made it easy to be reproduced. Compare that to the beautiful full color dictionary produced by an international publisher that was edited by a friend of mine at the Universidade de Eduardo Mondlane. Only 5,000 copies were printed and by the time I saw a copy it was the last copy my friend owned and he didn’t know where any others could be found.

The photo is from our school’s copy center.