Initially, Nigeria was not on Berkhout’s radar. Nor were books, for that matter. In 1955 Berkhout moved to Bahrain to work as a clerk for a shipping company. From Bahrain he went to Tanzania, then Tanganyika. There he was offered a job in a bookshop. It turned out to be the beginning of a lifelong love affair with books. ‘Joop was married to the book business,’ remarked Bookcraft publisher Bankole Olayebi, who started his career under Berkhout. ‘That’s where he got his kicks from.’ 

Berkhout’s high book sales in East Africa got noticed at Oxford University Press all the way in the United Kingdom. They head-hunted the Dutchman to come work for them, first in Zambia, which he enjoyed, and then in rainy Oxford, which he hated. Being back in the European cold was not his idea of a promotion. So when British publisher Evans Brothers offered Berkhout a job as managing director of their newly incorporated Nigerian arm, he jumped at the opportunity and moved to Ibadan, back then the centre of the country’s academic and schoolbook business. This is how, in 1966, Joop Berkhout landed in the sunny country he never left. 

‘Joop Berkhout was to the Nigerian publishing world what penicillin was to healthcare,’ Dotun Oyelade proclaimed at Berkhout’s memorial service in Ibadan. The Oyo State commissioner of information had worked for Berkhout for three years in the late eighties. By that time, the Dutchman had left Evans Brothers and started his own publishing company, Spectrum Books. 

Spectrum quickly grew to become a well-known publisher in Nigeria, and many schoolchildren over those years saw the company logo on their textbooks. Apart from money-spinning academic titles, Berkhout also published literary lights such as Wole Soyinka and Kole Omotoso, whose 1988 historical novel, Just Before Dawn, made a splash in Nigeria upon its release. Berkhout also referred to former Nigerian presidents Olusegun Obasanjo and Muhammadu Buhari as ‘my authors’, because they had both, at one time or the other, published their autobiographies with Spectrum. 

In 1998, from his Ibadan base, Berkhout published Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s second book, at a time when she still went by the name Amanda N. Adichie. The play was called For the Love of Biafra. Years later, Adichie would deem it ‘awfully melodramatic’, but her Spectrum publication did already focus on the theme of the later novel that would become her international breakthrough, Half of a Yellow Sun.

A shrewd businessman with a passion for books, Berkhout was said by many to be one of those who introduced the phenomenon of lavish book launches in Nigeria, where the author’s cronies—often political allies and business partners—would buy piles of books in an effort to outdo each other in support of their friend. It made for guaranteed publisher’s profits, but not necessarily for great literature or even enjoyable reading. ‘A big man does not have to be a great author,’ as Berkhout once told me after such an event in Ibadan in 2016. ‘Oga just has to have a lot of sycophants.’ 

In the era of Nigeria’s military rule, when freedom of speech was limited, Berkhout’s Spectrum Books introduced its streamlined vision of vanity publishing, author-financed books. He developed this line of publishing as a business plan B, an alternative to its academic titles. The book-flogging Dutchman convinced many in his extensive Nigerian network of the rich and mighty to publish with him. In fact, almost every person at the memorial service whom I spoke with and who was close to Chief, as they called him, would recount how he would always greet them by asking: ‘When are you writing your memoirs?’