In contrast to the well-established tradition of using newspapers as primary sources to study historical processes of change, the intent of this collection is to examine the production and consumption of newspapers in their material and historical contexts. In spite of the title, the chapters do not generalise across the entire continent; rather, they provide detailed case studies, most of which consider single titles or individual editors and journalists from Anglophone West and East Africa. There is a single chapter on South Africa, but Francophone and Lusophone regions are not included. The bulk of the chapters consider the pre-independence or ‘late colonial’ period, a time when newspaper publication on the continent flourished and before the era of independence, which often brought with it a stifling of press freedoms.
The contributors to this volume write from a variety of disciplinary and methodological backgrounds, but their shared focus on processes of newspaper publication and circulation ensures continuity. The chapters are divided into four sections, with considerable thematic overlap among them. The first section explores local interactions with international news and transnational networks, although it overlaps considerably with the third section, on readership and communities. The consumers of newspapers were an educated and literate elite who self-identified as a ‘reading public’. As case studies in each of these sections show, the relationship of publics to newspapers is complex, eclectic, and varied — these readerships certainly did not constitute a homogenous national imagined community. The newspapers furthermore functioned as sites of civic culture; in the absence of formal government representation, newspapers offered a means for the educated population to enter the public sphere. But even though the reach of newspapers was extended by practices of sharing and reading aloud, the literate elite who constituted their core readership was relatively small, which allowed for an unexpected degree of intimacy between the newspapers and their readers, even across broad geographical areas.
The consideration of audiences is balanced by chapters that focus on editors and writers. While in some newspaper histories production is seen as a collective, even anonymous, enterprise, such is not the case in this collection. These case studies describe the editors and proprietors, men like Jomo Kenyatta, Herbert Macaulay, and Nnamdi Azikiwe, who created and sustained newspapers to promote their political agendas and to instruct their readers on cultural and moral issues. The contributors to this volume do not delve into the relationship between editors and writers, so it is not always clear if the much-discussed re-use of articles was a deliberate strategy on the part of the editor or an attempt to fill blank space. But contributors do highlight the economic and logistical demands of producing a newspaper, as when Uta Reuster-Jahn describes the recurring problems of finance and distribution in socialist independent Tanzania — indeed, these issues remain key obstacles to the broader circulation of print even today.
The second section explores the intertextuality between newspapers and other publications — photoplays, magazines, and books. Discussing experiments with genre, Karin Barber speaks of ‘porosity’ in the different media, an ‘open web of textual interaction’ allowing for different genres to influence each other (157). She provides examples of overlaps between Yoruba novels and newspaper articles as well as the use of popular songs and oral genres, while Kelly Askew examines the printing of poetry in Swahili newspapers. In this section, newspapers are portrayed as an inherently polyvocal and dialogic form. The final section, on ‘Afterlives’, again focuses on writers and perhaps surprisingly on their relationship with posterity and memorials. Stephanie Newell, for instance, describes the re-use of obituaries over time, problematising our understanding of newspapers as an ephemeral, time-bound medium. In these sections, there is a broader sense of a ‘media system’ — a publishing industry producing books, magazines, and other printed products — but overall there is a tendency to use the newspaper medium to stand for all print culture. Perhaps as a result, some of the claims for newspapers seem overstated.
This collection reveals the various attitudes, political stances, and loyalties at work among political elites in different regions of the continent. This attention to historical specificity and complexity is the collection's strength. For instance, some editors and journalists examined in this collection sometimes take subversive stands and resist censorship, but in other cases they use print to help shore up the authority of the state. These analyses of print culture also reveal how elites manipulated the trappings of modernity to serve their own agendas. These practices of modernity exist alongside, and are interwoven with, a dynamic traditional culture. As Emma Hunter and Toyin Oduntan show, newspapers like Komkya in Tanzania and Osumare Egba in Nigeria aimed to preserve distinctive local cultural practices, but they also intervened in and shaped these practices. Herbert Macaulay, according to Wale Adebanwi's account, used his newspaper as a platform to support traditional rulers in Nigeria, but in a way that was also critically attentive to the promise of modernity in a British colonial context.
Notably, the contributors do not only address publications produced in official colonial languages, particularly English, they also address the circulation of writings in many local languages. Several chapters thus deal with the politics of language and debates around standardisation, but they also scrutinise the interface of oral and written forms. This analysis shows that there is not a linear progression from oral culture to a print one. To the contrary, the volume offers multiple examples of the productive and ongoing relationship of written and spoken modes of communication, such as when people read printed texts aloud and transcribe oral genres for printing and distribution. In Kenya, people still take part in discussion circles — referred to as ‘the people's parliament’ — to make sense of and debate newspaper articles, as Duncan Omanga shows in his chapter on the city of Eldoret.
The collection thus makes clear that new media do not necessarily supersede older ways of communicating. This volume further demonstrates that the interactions of Africans with print are longstanding and sophisticated, and that this topic deserves further historical attention.
