Growing up in the U.K., Sylvia Arthur did not read one African writer throughout her school years, even up to university. “That was a while ago. Things may have changed slightly, but not much,” she tells OkayAfrica in an interview.

“There are African writers who go way before Chinua Achebe. None of those people and our literature are generally acknowledged in the global literary canon,” she says, adding “When we celebrate our literature, we celebrate our writers, their work, and their stories.”

She decided to do something about that. In 2017, she founded the Accra-based Library of Africa and The African Diaspora [LOATAD]. The cultural institution is home to over four thousand books and is dedicated to collecting, preserving, and disseminating literature by writers of African descent from the late 19th century to the present day. It also has spaces for writing residencies, workshops, film screenings, and live music shows. Recently, Ghanaian artist Black Sherif shot a promo video at the library.

Last December, the literary curator was named the 2023 Brittle Paper Literary Person of The Year for her “outstanding work as the founder of LOATAD,” joining the ranks of previous winners like Nnedi Okorafor and Kwame Dawes. “It was a nice surprise,” Arthur says.

Arthur is a 2022 National Geographic Explorer who is currently working to document the stories of African women aged 60 and above in an expansive oral archive and preserve them in history. She’s a Creative Activism Award Recipient and an Africa No Filter Narrative Champion.

In this interview, Arthur speaks about her work and the mission of LOATAD.

The interview transcript below has been edited and condensed for length and clarity.

OkayAfrica: What do you mean when you say the library is private but with a public mission?

Sylvia Arthur: It is a private library in that most books are mine, and it has a public mission of opening the collection to the public. I saw a real need in Ghana for access to these types of books that resonate with people and have some kind of cultural meaning and significance to those reading them.

Unfortunately, what happens with a country such as Ghana is that, well, first of all, there are a few books, but those books are from Western donors. These books are irrelevant to somebody reading them in Ashaiman, Teshie, Accra, or Kumasi. I saw that kind of gap, not just a literary one, but a cultural, mental, and educational gap. That's where the public part of the mission is. It's about giving people access to their history and culture through literature.

What are some of the projects the library is championing as a knowledge-producing institution?

We've done a lot of work, for example, around African futurism, what it is, and what it means for the African public imagination. We're also working on a women's oral archive, supported by National Geographic, which is about gathering stories of women living along the coast of Ghana. The reason we did that is that libraries in Africa are seen as quite elite spaces.

Literature is often seen as only written, but Africa is primarily an oral continent, and that's how our history and stories are passed down. So, creating this archive is how we’re trying to incorporate the oral history into the traditionally written space of the library.

Our writing residencies are one of the main focuses of what we do now. We have five bedrooms at the library, and writers from Africa and the diaspora spend at least a month living there, working on a long-form writing project. We've posted over 40 writers since 2022. We have a specific program, the West African Writers Residency Programme, supported by the European Union [through the ACP-EU], where we invite 18 writers from 16 West African countries who are eligible to apply.

Starting this February, we’ll host the Black Atlantic Residency, where we have people from all over the diaspora, including Brazil, the Americas, and the Caribbean, be in residence with us for a month working on various writing projects supported by the Hawthornden Foundation.

You describe yourself as a cultural institution builder, narrative changemaker, and social impact creator. Is there pressure to always be on the move?

Yeah, definitely. And the pressure is more internal than external. I have people who work with me. I don't think we have anything to prove to anybody. I think everybody was looking for us to fail, not necessarily because they’re bad people but because they thought it's a library and what crazy person would open a library in Ghana and expect it to succeed? We've been here for six years now.

They're still waiting for us to succeed. And so it's like, how many years do we have to go before people accept that we have succeeded? I don't measure success by how many years we've been going. I measure it in terms of how many people we've impacted and how many minds we've helped to change or to focus in a way. We have three school and community libraries: in Ashiaman in the Greater Accra Region; Kumawu in the Ashanti region; and the main one in Nsutem in the Eastern region, an eco library built from scratch through a collaboration with Hive Earth and ArchiFair, an Austrian architectural NGO.

And so I think we've done a lot more than we should have done in a sense because, essentially, we are two people. I founded it, but I have a colleague, Seth Avusuglo, who runs it. I think we've done a lot more than many organizations bigger than us have done in the time we've done it.

What would you say is a validation of your work?

Over the last six years, our work has been validated by those who come to the library from Ghana, Africa, and worldwide. And the kind of feedback we have always had is that people have a transformative experience when they go there. We are not just a library, and if we were just a library, it would be enough, but we're not just a library.

It's almost like a state of mind in a sense because of what we represent. What we do is to bring together all of Africa and the diaspora through literature. People connect to that because obviously, Ghana has this image of being a party country because of Year of Return, Detty December, but some people are looking for a more meaningful, deeper experience and connection, and they often find that at the library.