Pearl’s parenting manual reached African markets via informal photocopy networks
Evidence
The third channel is the informal market. Across Lagos, Accra, Nairobi, Kampala, and Kinshasa, the outdoor bookseller networks that operate adjacent to Pentecostal churches carry a mixed inventory of photocopied and officially printed parenting manuals. Michael Pearl and Debi Pearl’s To Train Up a Child — first published in 1994 and initially distributed through Amish and Old Order Mennonite networks in the American Midwest — reached West African informal markets by the late 1990s through a chain that is not fully documented but almost certainly ran through American mission-agency workers who carried personal copies and distributed them to Nigerian and Ghanaian colleagues. Ogbu Kalu’s fieldwork, documented in African Pentecostalism, found Pearl material circulating in Lagos Pentecostal household-ministry networks as early as 2001. — , The Rod and the Child, 4579