From the 1890s until his retirement in 1947, Albert Cartwright edited a series of semi-renowned journals concerned with British Africa, most importantly the magazine West Africa. Financed by British trading firms, the London-based West Africa (1917–2003) reported on business, colonial policy, officialdom, and education, and in turn served as a platform for African writers to express their views on the region's major political and economic transformations. As Jonathan Derrick notes in Africa, Empire and Fleet Street, West Africa's intended audience was “the British ‘Coaster’, official or business or missionary, to read on the deck of the steamer, or aboard a long distance train in Nigeria, or in the Club at his station, or in his home or office in Africa” (4). Derrick, himself a former writer for West Africa in the late 1960s, intends for this book to accomplish three principal tasks—to offer a biography of Cartwright, to provide a history of West Africa during its first thirty years of publication, and to contextualize both of them through potted historical surveys of British Africa. Yet Derrick is uninterested in interpretive frameworks or suggestive literatures that question how a publication like West Africa might constitute or reveal something larger than the magazine itself. The result is a largely empirical pursuit of biographical details, publication details, and basic historical context that, while rich in particularities, results a jagged procession of portraits rather than an integrated narrative of a person, paper, and place.

The body of the book begins with its second chapter, “Victorian Papers for Africa,” which covers the major newspapers, publishers, and editors of nineteenth-century West and South Africa. Important print figures like Martin Delany and Africanus Horton appear alongside white British counterparts in a broad survey of Britain's engagement with the continent, as expressed through the trajectories of newspapers like the African Colonizer and African Times. Though informative and always interesting, this is historical survey for survey's sake, as there is little explanation or argument for how the context of nineteenth-century print culture shaped the career of Albert Cartwright, the topic of the book's third chapter, who indeed led a fascinating life from which historians of African print culture will profitably learn. Cartwright was born in Lancashire in 1868 and moved to Cape Colony in 1889, where he quickly ascended the journalist ranks to become editor of the South African News. He fell afoul with local authorities through criticism of British policies during the South African War and was imprisoned for a year for publishing false information (it was not false) about Britain's take-no-prisoner policy toward Boer combatants. Several years of increasingly desultory journalistic work in South Africa followed until Cartwright returned to Britain in 1911. Yet just as the book begins to build narrative momentum, its fourth chapter, “West Coast, Liverpool and E. D. Morel,” returns to survey the career of Morel, his humanitarian work against King Leopold's Congo, and his monthly West Africa, which in fact is not related to Cartwright's West Africa. Still other periodicals and historical context of early twentieth-century British Africa are introduced, without interpretive guidance.

The second half of the book, organized in two long chapters, at last provides a history of West Africa from its founding in 1917 until Cartwright's retirement in 1947. Derrick's method, here as elsewhere, is to chronicle the newspaper, the editor, and the wider context through a series of rough juxtapositions. The newspaper's success was often hostage to the region's economic fluctuations—Cartwright and other employees for a time had to buy out the paper from its owner, Elder Dempster Lines, during the early 1930s. Cartwright's editorial policy was broadly tolerant of political perspectives, though never directly anticolonialist. West Africa furnished space for African writers, based mainly in Nigeria, Gold Coast, Sierra Leone, and Britain, to voice criticisms of indirect rule and color bars. Cartwright's own politics were idiosyncratic—a consistent critic of indirect rule and defender of the principle of Western education for Africans, he was also oddly supine toward Italy's annexure of Ethiopia and the prospect of reinstating (Nazi) German rule in Africa. What comes through most clearly is Cartwright's own personal enthusiasm for the region and its people—an enthusiasm that produced strong positive impressions among those who met him, including journalists like Obafemi Awolowo, whose newspapers eclipsed West Africa by the late 1940s.

The book succeeds in its stated primary purpose, to secure Cartwright's memory. Yet Derrick's steady disinterest in more interpretive questions, such as the meaning and production of print cultures in a colonial context, limits the book's academic value to its empirical finds. These findings are several and rich, derived mainly from a close systematic reading of newspapers themselves, which are presumably held by the British Library—Derrick, rather maddeningly, never states where the newspapers are located—and from accessing Cartwright's personal papers. The result is more chronicle than history, but one that will nonetheless be of some interest to historians of journalism and print culture in British colonial Africa.