Abstract
Peterson, Hunter, and Newell set an ambitious task in this volume, attempting to cover the histories of print cultures across Africa for the twentieth century. This ambition was always bound to leave coverage gaps both topical and geographic. Despite this, overall the book succeeds admirably in ploughing new ground in the study of print and print cultures for Africa, and its relevance extends beyond the continent. Its most important contributions include opening new ways to use elite print media to better understand how broader reading publics came into being and changed over time, and how interdisciplinary work bridging history, literary analysis, and cultural studies can bring more nuance to our understandings of these histories.
The book resulted from a series of meetings that took place at Oxford University and the University of Michigan, as well as a conference at the University of Birmingham (UK). Despite its title, then, the collection does not have a single overarching narrative and is instead a collection of cutting edge scholarship that is both more limited in geographic scope and reach, and simultaneously more ambitious in rethinking the study of print culture more broadly across disciplines. Most of the chapters focus on Yoruba-speaking regions of Nigeria, other areas of Anglophone West Africa, and Swahili-language newspapers in Kenya and Tanzania.
The opening essay by Peterson and Hunter entitled ‘Print Culture in Colonial Africa’ is crucial reading for those looking for a broader pan-African survey of print and publishing. However, even this essay tends to focus more on publishing in English-language presses and in vernacular presses in British colonies across the continent. Thus, there is still a need for similar works to examine the deeper histories of publishing in non-British colonies, and in a variety of vernacular presses outside the British orbit.
The editors challenged their contributors to treat newspapers as historical actors, and the divergent ways that the authors tackle this task is the central strength of the work. In the ‘Afterword’, Newell notes that the contributions make the study of print more than simply an examination of the elite, largely male world of publishers and writers. Their work gives readers ‘a sense of the ordinariness and everydayness of textual production’ that provides a lens into the construction of and changes in everyday life across the continent through the twentieth century colonial period and even into the independence era (p. 426).
The book is divided into four sections: ‘African Newspaper Networks’, ‘Experiments with Genre’, ‘Newspapers and Their Publics’, and ‘Afterlives’. The first section focuses heavily on colonial Nigeria in the 1920s and 1930s (works by Pratten, Jones, and Adebanwi). The Nigerian pieces are enormously detailed and provide an in-depth look at a variety of presses and individuals. The one broader work, by Leslie James, examines how George Padmore built a network of anti-colonial newspapers by sending articles with a global Pan-Africanist message to editors across West Africa, North America, and the Caribbean. ‘Experiments with Genre’ takes detailed looks at everyday Swahili poetry (Askew), private entertainment magazines in socialist Tanzania (Reuster-Jahn), Yoruba photoplays (Gbadegesin), and literary experiments in Yoruba newspapers (Barber). The strength of this section comes from the long, detailed translations that the authors make, while leaving the vernacular originals in text for the audience to see and read for themselves. Through examining ‘popular’ genres, the authors all explore how elite publishing can be deployed to reveal new insights into the creation of communities involving a reading public in each of these settings.
Similarly, ‘Newspapers and Their Publics’ presents new ways to conceptualize communities created by and around print cultures. Analysing regional newspapers from the colonial period (Hunter and Oduntan) and the role that newspapers play in shaping dialogue in the ‘people’s parliament’, or Kamukunji, in Eldoret, Kenya (Omanga), this section is the most innovative in the book. All of the pieces push the envelope for utilizing sources to move beyond the study of print as an elite endeavour. The contributions both illuminate local practice, and raise questions about how similar practices have played out in other areas of the continent and beyond. ‘Afterlives’ is the shortest section, containing the only offering on southern Africa (Mokoena), as well as a piece on how obituaries were deployed for political and satirical purposes in West Africa (Newell). Both pieces explore how writers utilized memory for the memorialization of individuals, as well as for political purposes.
The editors acknowledge the shadow that Benedict Anderson imprints on their analyses, and it is in this context that the volume might plausibly expand its readership beyond its Africanist audience. Rethinking how elite print production can inform our understanding of broader publics is useful in many contexts, but especially in situations where multi-lingual populations and/or limited literacy might seem to undermine the broader impacts of print. In its African context, the volume ploughs new ground in persuasively supporting the claim that shifting print genres and styles are representative of larger changes taking place within communities and societies, in a variety of African contexts throughout the twentieth century.