Bibi Bakare-Yusuf PhD
Nigeria
Occupational Information
Job Title: Founder & Publisher Cassava Republic Press
Professional History
Bibi Bakare-Yusuf is a publisher who co-founded. Cassava Republic Press in 2006 and is the Publishing Director. The company is focused on publishing quality African writing at an affordable price. Cassava Republic is a social enterprise, driven by the dream to re-develop a reading (and writing) culture in Nigeria, as part of the bigger project of re-imagining Nigeria. She has said that stories carry great significance in culture and that narratives in books give shape to the people they represent as they find voices like their own in their country's literature. She has articulated this in a TEDx talk titled Diversifying the Voices of African Literature. Bakare-Yusuf has won several awards for her disruptive work in publishing, including one by the International Excellence Awards 2018 in conjunction with The Publishers Association in London for Inclusivity in Publishing and the Brittle Papers African Literary Person of the Year. In 2019, Cassava Press also published Making Futures: Young Entrepreneurs in a Dynamic Africa written by Sangu Delle, a 2019 Tutu Fellow. Her PhD thesis explored the relationship between embodiment and memory in the African diaspora, examining structures of retention found in New World cultures. In 2020, she was named to The Africa Report's Top 50 Disruptors.
She was Board Chair of TIERs, an LGBTQ rights and advocacy organisation for ten years.
Qualifications
BA Hons in Anthropology and Communications from the University of London
PhD in Gender Studies from the University of Warwick
Program
2008 Archbishop Desmond Tutu Leadership Fellow
