In chapter 2 of Imperial Encore: The Cultural Project of the Late British Empire, Caroline Ritter quotes the writer Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o's reflection on his education in colonial Kenya: “before I knew the names of any other towns in Kenya, I already knew about a town called Oxford” (65). As Ritter explains, Ngũgĩ's early familiarity with a British city located more than six thousand miles from his home was the result of the Oxford English Course, a set of textbooks and teaching manuals for English-language instruction that Oxford University Press began marketing in 1933, and that soon became ubiquitous throughout the empire. In her perceptive and well-researched study of three British institutions—the British Council, the publishing industry, and the BBC—Ritter exposes the economic, political, and ideological structures that enabled the persistence of British cultural dominance in Africa long after the formal end of imperial rule. In a fascinating insight, she argues that British agents’ savvy response to the neocolonial critique mounted by African intellectuals such as Ngũgĩ ultimately strengthened, rather than undercut, British cultural authority in the region. In the wake of decolonization, Ritter contends, Britain's imperial cultural project emerged profoundly changed but no less powerful than it had been during the years when Ngũgĩ had first learned English by way of the city of dreaming spires.
Ritter structures her account in two parts. The first traces the building of British cultural influence in Africa from the 1930s through the early 1960s, a period when a strong sense of cultural self-confidence, twinned with a long-standing propensity to condescend toward nonelite Africans permeated each of the institutions at the heart of the study. The British Council, for instance, sponsored a series of British theater companies on extended tours of East Africa, where they performed Shakespeare's plays to crowds of schoolchildren. The assumption was that works such as Macbeth or Twelfth Night would serve as an uplifting “universal language,” although the tendency of audiences to laugh or applaud at odd moments raised the question of whether the programs were accomplishing their lofty ambitions (45). Similarly, while the Second World War led the BBC to expand its Empire Service and begin broadcasting in languages besides English, producers studiously ignored the perspectives of nonelite African listeners well into 1950s. Until 1957, the only sub-Saharan language that the service broadcast in was Afrikaans, and its programming focused on educational content, such as the role of West African exports in the war effort. Unsurprisingly, these programs failed to attract much of an audience, with some African listeners writing in to complain, “we are being instructed instead of entertained!” (85).
The cultural battles of the Cold War, combined with the growing realization of the inevitability of decolonization, led British cultural agents to “discover” the importance of Africa in the 1960s, a sea change that Ritter details in the second part of Imperial Encore. Having suddenly lost their monopoly of the airwaves, bookshelves, and theaters, British institutions were forced to reinvent themselves to stay relevant to postcolonial African societies. The BBC attempted to do so by recruiting scores of African trainees to London to produce fresh content for mass audiences (a move denounced as poaching by postcolonial governments seeking to Africanize their own, nascent broadcasting industries). It also began marketing its news service more in terms of professionalism and disinterestedness, rather than any shared heritage of “Britishness.” Officials within the British Council, meanwhile, shifted toward English-language teaching and consultation and administration services. The move stemmed from a recognition that postcolonial states were more likely to find the utility in these services than in arts promotion. It also did not hurt that the change better placed the council to receive the development aid that was pouring into the continent at the time. Finally, publishers such as Heinemann, Longmans, and Oxford University Press embarked on a “scramble for African literature,” with each firm competing to uncover and market the next big African novelist or playwright (142). African writers loudly decried a system in which Britons retained the power to determine which authors and works—always written in English—represented “authentic” African literature. Given British publishers’ access to capital and international copyright, though, these objections were often stymied from the start. Indeed, by publishing the work of artists who explicitly criticized imperialism, such as Ngũgĩ or Chinua Achebe, the firms were eventually able to shake off the stain of their colonial-era roots. The structures that supported British cultural and economic dominance in the arts, however, remained firmly in place.
Such insights have important implications for the ongoing, intellectual project to decolonize the curriculum. In Imperial Encore, Ritter illustrates persuasively that simply bringing more African content to Western audiences—adding African authors to syllabi, for instance—is insufficient to truly challenge neocolonialism. Rather, it is necessary to reveal the strategic choices, shaped by history, economics, and politics, that have determined which artists and works have risen to prominence and why and how they have been invested with cultural authority. Relying on extensive research in the archives of each of these British institutions, as well as British and Kenyan governmental records, Ritter charts these behind-the-scenes machinations expertly. Throughout, her focus remains firmly on the institutions, networks, and the people—mainly British men—who built them. She devotes less attention to the cultural content that these institutions produced, including only cursory descriptions of, for instance, the paperback covers of Heinemann's African Writer's Series, or the plots of the plays produced on the BBC program African Theatre. This choice does not detract from the force of her analysis, but it does leave open the opportunity for further research that could explore the impact, from pitch to final product, of these institutional structures on the cultural forms they produced.
In sum, Imperial Encore is an important contribution to the growing scholarship on the afterlives of empire, a field that examines how the ideologies and power structures of imperialism have remained embedded within postcolonial institutions and identities. In lucid prose and with an eye to compelling detail, Ritter has revealed how Britain's cultural ambitions and institutional power did not simply survive the upheavals of the decolonization era, but thrived in its wake.
