Africa has been characterised as the ‘silent continent’ because so little of what Africa has to say has, in the past, reached beyond limited local audiences. Building on a long career in scholarly and academic textbook publishing, my interest is in tracking the rapidly changing environment of scholarly communication in a digital world. I explore the opportunities that this offers Africa to break out of the scarcity model of expensive print resources, which has proved dysfunctional in this context, to the more abundant world of open and collaborative online communications. And, most particularly, what publishing and communication models work for Africa, rather than reliance on global communications models and traditions that are not geared to African needs,