A far-reaching, interconnected set of questions runs through the contributions to this volume: if newspapers in nineteenth- and early twentieth-century colonial contexts provided spaces for literate locals to experiment with different forms of public address and new genres of writing, as Emma Hunter and Leslie James persuasively argue, after Karin Barber, to what extent did newspapers also propel new kinds of public into existence?Footnote 1 How did the public spaces generated by printing presses in colonial settings overlap with existing genres of public address? Did print, especially in the form of newspapers, “create the social space through which it move[d],” and if so, were these social spaces the same in different colonial times and places, or were they irreducibly specific to local contexts of production, irregular and incomparable from one colonial setting to the next?Footnote 2
A shared conception of a world made possible by print is integral to the media analysed in this special issue. Local newspaper editors and contributors in the colonial era—and perhaps also readers—believed in the capacity of printed material in one place to reach potential readerships near, far, and wide, and to produce new constituencies who would identify transregionally and simultaneously with one another in the manner of Benedict Anderson's “imagined communities,” sharing textual knowledge while remaining unseen and unknown to one another in their diverse global locations.Footnote 3 Newspapers were imagined as a kind of glue to which remote readers stuck in a community of feeling.
The simple fact of being the reader of a newspaper did not, however, automatically place one colonial subject in the same “embryo” of a national community as a “fellow reader,” to use Anderson's terms.Footnote 4 Leigh Denault, Rudolf Wagner, and Lara Putnam argue strongly that, while the nation might have been (or become) an imagined community, newspapers in the colonies articulated networks and identifications that were more personal, on the one hand, sharing a “deeply intimate” and “conversational . . . discursive space,” and more global on the other hand, stretching well beyond what later became postcolonial nation-states.Footnote 5 In contexts of linguistic, class, religious, and regional difference, newsprint did not necessarily produce national solidarities. These contributors show that Anderson's compelling ideas about how national communities are forged through (news)print are insufficient to describe the movements of newspapers around multilingual public spaces in colonial contexts. In order to understand colonial print cultures and reading publics, we must therefore move “away from the assumption of print communities as being coterminous with the national.”Footnote 6 Indeed, rather than only producing national or regional solidarities, local print media were, in Denault's account of the Indian-language press in northern India between the 1860s and the 1900s, “part of a fluid, volatile and entangled ‘blurry’ network in which different, ambiguous senses of identity overlapped, and for which the frame of reference was almost always global, comparative, and historical.”Footnote 7
From the earliest days of newspaper production described in this volume, editors imagined the circulation and impact of their newspapers in global terms. Through newsprint, they asserted, locally situated colonial subjects could address international networks of political solidarity and support. They conceptualised the communications networks made possible by newspapers as totalities that articulated but transcended the “local.” Even though life was neither egalitarian nor consensual for the majority of colonial subjects and access to print was constrained by multiple factors, not least income and education, right up to the Second World War editors and other media producers voiced utopian definitions of the capacity of newsprint to reach readerships of all classes, nations, and language groups beyond specificities of place. One Nigerian editor in the late 1920s, I. B. Thomas, repeatedly insisted that his newspaper “reache[d] into all four corners of the world,” even though in practical terms the impossibility of his claim is illustrated by its appearance in Akede Eko, a newspaper that was published in Yoruba as well as English.Footnote 8 While shared by a diaspora of speakers along the historical slave-routes between West Africa, Latin America, and the Caribbean, Yoruba could not credibly claim global literacy.
Thomas's vision of a world rendered paper-flat by newsprint conjures up the four corners of the page as much as the circumference of the planet. The impossible reality of this flattened, disembodied globality is interesting because, as a world-making gesture, it reveals a great deal about the operation of colonial power across the uneven spaces of different European empires, and the political possibilities offered by newspapers to local elites who had access to print but whose lives were “precariously suspended” in close proximity to colonial power, their authority riven with the “unease and constraints” of their status as educated colonial subjects.Footnote 9 Whether in the press-rooms of Lagos in the 1920s, the columns occupied by Māori letter-writers in the 1850s and 1860s, or the letters pages of Kenyan magazines during the Second World War, one repeatedly gets the impression that for colonial newspaper publics, “their world was in flux, politically, economically, and culturally, and they sat at the edge of the European ‘civil society’ rather than as part of it.”Footnote 10
To what extent does the central role of men in controlling local print networks have implications for how we conceptualise “publics” and “public spheres” in the colonial era? The newspapers examined in this special issue remained in the hands of well-educated and well-travelled men who had a “passionate relish for public life.”Footnote 11 They occupied existing public spaces as men, and created new spaces of their own as men to participate in civic and political life, and to shape local and international opinion. While they claimed, in their columns, that the medium of print allowed texts to be disconnected from the writing body, they were visibly gendered as public intellectuals and political activists who wielded “bold articulate tongues and powerful pens.”Footnote 12
The omission, by contributors to this volume, of detailed attention to the gender positionality of these newspapermen as producers of knowledge about colonial experience might appear strange were it not so consonant with editors’ own reiterated, shared belief that print was neutral because it was disembodied. As Putnam states, this was a “space of disinterested self-presentation, of claiming the right to speak in a disinterested way for a collective.”Footnote 13 Without apparent irony or consciousness of the hierarchies and exclusions produced by processes of acquiring literacy, not to mention the gendered power imbalances in colonial societies, editors and contributors insisted repeatedly that their printed material was factual and dispassionate, that their writing was depersonalised in order, in the words of one pseudonymous writer for the Gold Coast Leader, to “call a spade a spade—whether it be a Governor spade or a Subject spade.”Footnote 14
Were these editors deluded, Barber asks of their disembodied vision of print?Footnote 15 Were they disingenuously or self-deceptively lying about their detachment in order more effectively to claim power by shaping and interpreting public opinion? Whether or not one endorses the editors’ transcendental conceptualisation of print, the absence of gender—and other forms of identity politics—from their commentaries on the role of the press points to a distinctive feature of newsprint as a form of public address, and offers an important explanation for editors’ disavowals of subjective bias. Divorced from the pen-holding hand, the printed page seemed to take on an activist subjectivity of its own in the minds of newspapermen. In removing themselves from the printed page as named individuals with personal opinions, editors and correspondents could position themselves instead as mouthpieces for colonial subjects in the absence of electoral systems and democratic representation in governments. Manifesting as typefaces rather than embodied subjects, they could use newsprint to ventriloquise across gender, race, and other core colonial subject-positions under a range of pseudonyms, keeping open a diversity of possibilities for authorship and attribution.Footnote 16 In so-doing, they articulated otherness, played with identity, and undertook polyvocal crossings through a wide variety of subject-positions. Through such strategies, as Rachel Leow shows in her study of Chinese-language newspapers in the 1830s, the uniformity of print made possible an unbinding of state-controlled subjectivities, giving writers platforms to deconstruct the hierarchies separating locally circulating knowledge from “official” and “expert” knowledge production. While this by no means removes gender bias from the content of their columns, newspapermen's slippery, pseudonymous cross-identifications do indicate the ways that newsprint subversively enabled a “queering” of identity in colonial contexts of power.Footnote 17
The imaginary world communities and multifarious subject-positions local writers produced reveal a conceptualisation, not of the world per se, but of the possibilities of communication in a world mediated by newsprint. Newspapers offered a genre that, on the one hand could enter political spaces that would otherwise be closed to colonial subjects, and on the other hand undermined the rationale of the imperial project by demonstrating the capacity of local people for self-expression, learning, expertise, independent critical thinking, and, by implication, rational self-government of a type recognisable to the colonial powers. Often using the humanistic logic of antiracist discourse alongside the language of press freedom, these newspapers demonstrated local elites’ mastery of the logic of post-Enlightenment rationalism as well as their own ability to use European alongside indigenous languages to comment fluently and critically on social and political developments. As Putnam points out, “rights claims made within this register have a particular weight within the Western tradition, and [newspaper contributors] . . . claim that and they own it.”Footnote 18 Local editors insisted on this point, holding colonial authorities accountable “for their failure to uphold the proclaimed liberal values of free speech and freedom of the press.”Footnote 19 For editors throughout the colonial world, the press was regarded as “the only medium for the people to express their grievances” in political systems where, as the editor of the Gold Coast Leader put it in 1902, “we have not the instrument that cries halt! to tyranny, oppression and wrong.”Footnote 20
From the perspective of hardline European administrators, indigenous newspaper production posed a major threat to imperialist ideology. Simply by existing as vehicles to carry colonial subjects’ commentaries on government to the rest of the world, newspapers had the potential to erode colonialism, either in the language of the dominant power or in indigenous languages.Footnote 21 With cosmopolitan identifications and publics being fostered through print, it is not surprising that literate locals in colonial contexts attracted suspicion from government officials like no other category of colonial subject, particularly when they were members of newly educated classes, regarded by those in power as “semi-educated” troublemakers whose aspirations for self-expression and political representation far outstripped their qualifications and abilities.Footnote 22
Men in what might be called the “official sphere” of government—where gazettes, reports, and memoranda were produced, circulated, and archived—repeatedly noted the audacity of their interlocutors in the local press who produced commentaries that paralleled and rivalled material produced in the official sphere of government. Over and against editors’ claims to a shared field of disinterested expression, colonial officials and loyalists frequently dismissed local newspapermen as politically illegitimate, dangerous social upstarts. Allan Octavian Hume, founder of The People's Friend in Hindi and Urdu in 1860, accused the local press of “stir[ring] up rebellion by lying calumnies or shameless misrepresentation.”Footnote 23 George Grierson, in his 1889 survey of Indian-language literature, complained that “every scribbler can now see his writings in type or lithographed for a few rupees, and too often he avails himself of the power and the opportunity.”Footnote 24 Time and again, high-ranking colonial officials expressed venom towards local writers as shapers of public opinion through which, in their view, vulnerable illiterate and semiliterate colonial subjects were made susceptible to incendiary printed media designed to inflame anti-colonial emotions.
Local print cultures, and the readerships they generated, created environments for the circulation of political opinions that challenged not only the tenets of European colonialism, but also the traditional structures of political authority through which the balance of power was maintained in the colonies. In a report to the British secretary of state for the colonies in 1900, the governor of Lagos Colony, Sir William MacGregor, described how the Bale (Yoruba traditional ruler) of Ayésan:
complained loudly of the presence of a “writer” that had settled in his village. This scribe is one of a class of young men that has been created by the educational establishments of Lagos. They take up their abode in native villages to write letters for people for hire, and to act as correspondents for the ill-informed and mendacious newspapers of Lagos. The Bale declares that the one then living in Aiyéssan was trying to stir up the people against him; that he would not come to the Bale when he sent for him; and would not obey him in any way. The Bale wished for advice, which I gave him to the effect that he should order the “writer” to depart, and if he did not do so then to expel him by force. At certain other places I heard of people of this class thrusting their presence on native councils when sitting with the object of concocting contributions thereon for the Lagos Press.Footnote 25
MacGregor's draconian recommendation for the banishment of the derisively named “writer” highlights the threat posed by “people of this class,” not only to colonial administrators but also to the customary authorities whose loyalty the British secured through power-sharing arrangements, backed by threats of forced removal if they became unmanageable. His report reveals the centrality of educated local elites to any discussion of the relationship between print and public spheres in colonial contexts.
For the Bale of Ayésan, as much as for MacGregor, the danger of “the ‘writer’” was his access, via Lagos, to a world of readers made possible by print. Contemptuous of locally negotiated processes of governance under colonial rule, educated men such as this asserted their destabilising presence, not as legitimate political actors in the view of those in power, but as a new class whose opinions and utterances were always en route to print in “the ill-informed and mendacious newspapers,” and thence into a public space where their criticisms would “stir up the people” against indigenous rulers and disrupt delicate imperial relationships between rulers and largely illiterate colonial populations. Hume's, Grierson's, and MacGregor's comments draw attention to the potentially transformative impact of locally controlled print media on readers, and illuminate colonial bureaucrats’ interpretations of the dangers of uncensored mass-reading.Footnote 26 In their view, indigenous newspapers offered loud-hailers for opinions that would reverberate through uncontrollable public spaces to come back, loaded with criticism, into local political domains.
It must be emphasised that this was not simply a binary contest between white colonial officials and the “native press.” Conservative local newspapermen, such as the editor of the Nigerian Pioneer, Sir Kitoyi Ajasa (1866–1937), and his fellow Nigerian gradualist on the topic of decolonisation, Dr. Richard Akinwande Savage (1874–1935), also regarded the “great unofficial public”—that is, the majority of the population with no direct connection to the colonial state through work or education—as vulnerable to exploitation by “dishonest demagogues” who used the authority of print to convince people of the validity of their pronouncements on local political crises.Footnote 27 Nigeria “is wanting what is known in civilised countries as public opinion,” Ajasa stated in a condemnation of his rival, the Lagos Weekly Record, which had been praising home rule in India, identifying with pan-imperial anti-colonial networks, and stirring up the “mob” at home.Footnote 28 Similarly, in June 1924, the Nigerian Spectator, edited by Dr. Savage, voiced the extreme opinion that “the voice of the majority is sometimes the voice of the devil itself.”Footnote 29
Whatever their political persuasion, local newspapermen generated an “unofficial sphere” with their printing presses and created a field of influence to complement—if not rival—official efforts to produce governable colonial subjects. While they may not have created a public sphere in the Habermasian sense, editors flattened political hierarchies by juxtaposing documents from the official sphere with the contributions of ordinary correspondents and non-expert commentators. As Rachel Leow shows in her examples from British-controlled Malaya, while the state asserted a “monopoly of public articulation” through the installation of “speaking officials” as expert commentators on news and public affairs, local newspapers published the state-sanctioned statements side by side with their own correspondents’ material, reducing the hierarchy to a set of dialogues and critiques.Footnote 30 In form as much as content, therefore, newspapers could flatten official discourse into a relationship of equivalence simply by juxtaposing contributions on the printed page.
From the 1860s onward, colonial governments created legislation alongside “softer” strategies to limit the influence of indigenous newspapers. Throughout the colonial world, newspaper ordinances were passed into law in spite of vociferous opposition in the local press.Footnote 31 Regimes developed strategies ranging from the persuasive to the punitive in a bid to control people's media consumption and to extend European influence beyond the established elites. In British Africa, these strategies included, from the mid-1920s, an expansion in the provision of primary and secondary education and, by the mid-1930s, legislation to compel editors to disclose the identity of pseudonymous correspondents in court cases for libel or sedition.Footnote 32
Literate locals’ access to print opened a Pandora's box in imperial spaces and, as the twentieth century progressed, officially-sponsored media became increasingly sophisticated in the effort to counter anti-colonial printed materials. Whether in northern India in the 1860s and 1870s or Kenya in the 1950s, the “official sphere” responded with mass media of its own to undermine critics’ claims. Throughout the British empire in the 1920s and 1930s, for example, alongside the banning of “seditious” and leftist publications such as Marcus Garvey's Negro World and the censorship of films (and film posters) deemed inappropriate for colonial audiences, governments countered “unwholesome” journals and films with their own media—journals, films, newsreels and, finally, radio—produced especially for the colonies.Footnote 33 Nigeria's longest-standing daily, the Daily Times, was established in 1926 as a government-backed moderate newspaper with African and European contributors to intervene in public debates, to rebuff the anti-colonial press, and to provide readers with information and explanations about government policy in the face of an increasingly nationalist press that, by the mid-1920s, attracted large popular readerships.Footnote 34 As Frederiksen suggests, however, official efforts to censor local print cultures paradoxically often risked producing “a wealth of communication” rather than its cessation. In Kenya during the Mau Mau rebellion in the 1950s, for example, state clampdowns on the press generated “protests, international solidarity messages, two-tongued messages, [and] secret organising” among the censored.Footnote 35
From Texts to Publics
The rise of educated local elites as owners, producers, and consumers of newspapers was central to the circulation of print media in the colonies. But people did not have to hold a text in their hands in order to belong to a reading public. In some circumstances, publics with no literacy skills at all were able to discuss and interpret texts that were yet to circulate in printed forms in their societies. In her influential study of the colonial-era circuits of transmission of John Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress in Africa, Isabel Hofmeyr shows that people did not require newspapers or books in order to be aware of printed texts as mediums to generate public opinion. She shows how the characters and plot of Bunyan's canonical story entered public discussion via sermons, hearsay, proverbs, and other oral modes of transmission well ahead of the physical arrival of versions of the text in a community.Footnote 36 Where colonial subjects’ writings for the press placed them directly in the line of vision of the state, exposing them to what Frederiksen describes as the “extreme attentiveness” of the state through surveillance, censorship, legislation, and prosecution for material considered libellous or seditious, Hofmeyr's important work illustrates a field of literary activity at the opposite end of the spectrum, allowing for the existence of the non-paradox of readers without books.Footnote 37
If some colonial reading publics did not require access to printed texts in order to interpret printed materials, other readers could amass printed materials while remaining under the radar of colonial surveillance. Lachy Paterson shows how Māori readers in the late 1850s and early 1860s “possessed just a few of the materials associated with reading and writing: paper, pens, and limited printed literature, but no printing press of their own.”Footnote 38 But their many letters to the white-owned Te Karere o Poneke showed they “were no mere sycophants. They commented keenly on their new world, and critiqued aspects of colonisation they did not agree with.”Footnote 39 Cristina Soriano also shows how “the lack of printing presses in Venezuela . . . did not prevent the Venezuelan public from exchanging ideas and participating in an incipient yet dynamic public sphere during the intellectually agitated period of the Age of Revolutions.”Footnote 40 The white elite of Venezuela belonged to an “emergent yet vibrant public sphere that . . . seemed unnoticeable to colonial agents.”Footnote 41 Denied permission by the Spanish authorities to establish a printing press in Caracas in 1800, residents took part in public readings and performances of songs, and turned venues such as barbershops, military barracks, taverns, and street markets into potent spaces for the exchange of information and debates about ideas. In these spaces, locals read foreign pamphlets, newspapers, and hand-copied books aloud to one another, translating from English and French into Spanish where necessary.Footnote 42 Precisely because these public spaces were not available for colonial surveillance in the manner of the Kenyan newspapers described by Frederiksen, or the North Indian newspapers described by Denault, they existed on the periphery of colonial control while generating vibrant public commentaries on the official sphere.
Local Newspapers, Global Affiliations
With its attention to the production, circulation, and consumption of newspapers, this special issue focuses on one particular variety of print in colonial societies. As such, Putnam's comment that “there is something about newspapers” lingers over many of the articles published here.Footnote 43 In Putnam's view, newspapers demand to be seen through the lens of equivalence because the “universalism of the form” is so striking.Footnote 44 Sharing a genre in which mastheads, columns, editorials, adverts, bylines, and correspondence appeared in the same way, regardless of alphabet, newspapers invited recognition and understanding across reading communities worldwide.
With readerships as different from one another as the culturally and linguistically plural contexts in which newspapers circulated, however, such universalism of form does not translate into uniformity of publics. Colonial reading publics did not simply exist, independent and ready-made, awaiting the arrival of texts; nor did they emerge organically out of local oral cultures. The fact that so much editorial labour and commentary were involved in encouraging the activity of newspaper-reading, especially in the early days of a newspaper's production, demonstrates the weakness of thinking in the passive tense about how new forms of addressivity arose out of print. Readerships had to be produced and renewed on a continuous basis, and attracted to presses with promises of connectivity and news.
The multicultural locals who consumed printed mass media in the colonial period were anything but singular entities with interpretive codes gleaned from shared cultural influences and common educational backgrounds. “Print takes all kinds of different formations in different cultural settings,” Warner remarks, and we must be careful “to describe not just a one-size-fits-all semifluid public where every opinion is different from every other opinion in exactly the same way.”Footnote 45 From this perspective, any “colonial public sphere” we might wish to identify arising from the “universal” features of newspapers should be visualised as jagged and plural rather than firmly marking the space between state and society.
A critical emphasis on the unevenness and plurality of publics should not, however, erase colonial-era newspapermen's shared belief in the capacity of print to carry messages across an accessible, flattened world. The newspapers represented in this volume described themselves as arenas for a form of networking that operated across differences while articulating the specificity of local concerns. In adopting a global frame of reference to think about the freedom of movement conferred by newsprint, colonially situated writers were thinking beyond colonial constructions of themselves as products of their locales. They created that “motion outward towards strangers” identified by Warner as the key discursive gesture through which publics are produced.Footnote 46 In thinking beyond their location within specific histories and places, and asserting connections that were as aspirational as they were achievable, colonial-era newspapermen postulated what Edward Said described, in his reflections on “travelling theory,” as “intellectual, and perhaps moral, community of a remarkable kind, affiliation in the deepest and most interesting sense of the word.”Footnote 47 Their gesture of global affiliation was properly postcolonial: newsprint modelled a cosmopolitan vision for a disembodied and non-colonised writing that had an ability to move transnationally through space while remaining inextricable from the experiences of writers in colonial locations. This, perhaps, is the “something” to which Putnam refers. Such notions of print, in which the empirical and the visionary combine side by side, and where neither the global nor the local constitute the starting-point, offer historians of empire fresh ways to think about intellectual networks in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
